Controlled Death - 2022 - Death Synth Box 5xCD

 

Urashima – USHI 017  1.26GB FLAC

Death Synth Box does not ask for five uninterrupted hours of anybody’s life. It takes them. Maso Yamazaki’s massive Controlled Death set arrives inside a painted and engraved wooden container, five CDs stacked like tablets recovered from a sealed room. The edition was limited to 199 hand-numbered copies and accompanied by an insert and poster, but its physical extravagance is not decorative luxury. The box feels designed to contain something unstable. It resembles a reliquary, laboratory case, burial object and homemade instrument of confinement at once. The title states the method with brutal economy: synthesizers subjected to death, or death itself made to speak through synthesizers.
Controlled Death began in 2018 as Yamazaki’s darker, slower counterweight to Masonna. Masonna’s classic recordings and performances converted the human body into a detonation switch. Yamazaki screamed, convulsed and attacked primitive electronics with such speed that entire performances could pass like electrical accidents. Controlled Death retains the danger but removes the immediate explosion. Instead of throwing the listener across the room, it closes the door, lowers the temperature and allows dread to accumulate. The difference is not simply loud versus quiet or fast versus slow. Masonna is the moment of impact. Controlled Death studies what remains in the building afterward.
Across five discs and more than five hours, Death Synth Box pushes that distinction to an almost unreasonable extreme. Each disc contains a single hour-long composition titled “Now The Painful Notes Begin,” numbered from one through five. There are no miniature episodes, conventional tracks or convenient landmarks. Once a disc begins, Yamazaki leaves the listener inside a continuous electronic environment whose changes can occur so gradually that they are recognized only after the entire atmosphere has already transformed. This is not background drone. It demands attention by slowly poisoning the conditions under which attention operates.
The crucial detail is the absence of Yamazaki’s voice. Controlled Death frequently uses his groans, screams and strangled invocations as another damaged component within the circuitry, but Death Synth Box relies entirely upon synthesizers, effects and analog processing. Removing the voice eliminates the most obvious evidence of a human victim or aggressor. What remains sounds autonomous, as though the machines have continued their ceremony after everyone else has left. The cries, sighs and muttered shapes heard within the noise are electronic illusions, unstable frequencies crossing until they resemble speech trapped behind a wall.
That ambiguity gives the set much of its power. At low volume, these pieces can register as distant industrial ambience: ventilation systems, buried generators, failing refrigeration units or electrical current passing through an abandoned institution. Increased volume reveals a more violent internal world. Frequencies grind together, upper tones squeal under pressure and deep oscillations create the sensation of enormous objects moving below the floor. Yamazaki rarely produces the clean, luxurious drones associated with modern ambient synthesis. His sounds are cracked, damp and contaminated. They seem recorded onto surfaces already carrying dust, corrosion and previous hauntings.
The Korg MS-20 has long been central to Controlled Death’s vocabulary. Its filters can scream, buckle and self-oscillate, producing a physical instability that perfectly suits Yamazaki’s death-industrial concerns. Yet Death Synth Box is not a demonstration of vintage equipment. The identity of the machine matters less than what Yamazaki forces it to impersonate. At various points the synthesizer becomes wind traveling through stone passages, bubbles rising through heated pitch, metal dragged beneath earth, an animal calling from impossible depth or a crowd heard through layers of concrete. None of these images remain stable. Every recognizable shape dissolves back into voltage.
Five hours might suggest endless repetition, but the box works through differences in pressure, density and distance. One disc feels close and airless, its low frequencies occupying nearly every available space. Another opens into a huge black chamber where thin tones move across an apparently limitless background. Some passages crawl forward in thick, continuous layers; others nearly empty themselves, leaving isolated pulses and electrical residues hanging in near silence. The music does not travel toward a climax. It expands and contracts like an environment breathing without lungs.
That lack of destination is essential. A shorter Controlled Death release can resemble a journey through a corpse, crypt or ritual site, but Death Synth Box gradually destroys the idea that the listener is traveling anywhere. After enough time, the setting becomes permanent. The piece is no longer describing a room. It has replaced the room. Normal measurements of musical progress begin to fail, and small changes acquire disproportionate force. A frequency entering after twenty minutes can feel like a figure appearing at the end of a corridor. A sudden reduction in bass can produce the sensation of the floor disappearing.
The box therefore depends upon duration not as a stunt but as its main compositional material. Yamazaki understands that fear changes when it is denied release. A sudden blast creates shock; an hour of sustained uncertainty alters the nervous system. Across five discs, uncertainty becomes exhaustion, exhaustion becomes surrender, and surrender opens the music’s strangest spaces. The listener begins hearing patterns that may not exist: distant choirs, buried speech, animal noises, bells or human breathing. The machinery becomes a psychological mirror, generating apparitions from the ear’s need to organize chaos.
The presentation intensifies that process. Urashima has repeatedly given Controlled Death’s work the appearance of forbidden evidence, using black boxes, pathology imagery, bones, graves and ritual objects to extend the sound into the listener’s hands. Here the engraved wooden container turns five ordinary compact discs into a private archive of terminal signals. The contrast is effective. CDs are clean, standardized digital objects, but the box makes them resemble contaminated specimens. Opening it feels less like selecting an album than removing one sealed layer from a larger burial apparatus.
Death Synth Box also marks how far Yamazaki traveled from the public image that first made him notorious. Masonna was frequently described through spectacle: impossible volume, shattered equipment, microscopic performance lengths and a body apparently operating beyond self-preservation. Controlled Death reveals the disciplined ear beneath that spectacle. Five hours of slowly evolving synthesis require patience, control and an unusually precise understanding of texture. The violence remains, but it is compositional rather than athletic. Yamazaki no longer needs to hurl himself across the stage because he has learned how to make a single frequency feel physically threatening.
The result is monumental without becoming grandiose. Death Synth Box contains no heroic melodies, cinematic percussion or theatrical declarations. Its scale emerges from accumulation: five black expanses, each pursuing the same impossible goal of making cold circuitry reproduce suffering without using a human voice. By the end, the synthesizers no longer sound like instruments, and death no longer feels like a subject being illustrated. The box becomes its own enclosed weather system, mechanically grieving in an empty world. These are not songs about the end. They are the painful notes that begin once the end has already occurred.

Evenings - 2015 - Grey Days I Have Not Yet Seen

 

Alien Passengers – N°33  161.14MB FLAC

The cover of Grey Days I Have Not Yet Seen looks less like a landscape than a damaged memory of one. A nearly empty road disappears beneath a pale sky, its edges swallowed by blur, glare and winter color. There is no dramatic storm, no visible catastrophe, nothing announcing that the world has ended. The unease comes from the opposite direction. Everything appears ordinary, yet the image has been drained of the details that might make it inhabitable. The road is available, but it does not promise arrival. Evenings builds the record inside that same uncertainty, using loops, degraded electronics, distant melodic fragments and pressure-heavy ambience to describe a future already remembered as loss.
Evenings is a Michigan project whose catalog has steadily occupied the disputed ground between ambient music, industrial sound, tape manipulation and minimal electronics. The name suggests the portion of the day when objects begin losing their hard outlines, but this is not sunset music in any comforting sense. Across releases titled Growing Isolation, I Hate Myself & Want to Die, Descending Coma and Dark Therapy, Evenings has treated atmosphere as psychological architecture. The pieces do not merely express sadness. They construct rooms in which sadness changes the behavior of sound.
Grey Days I Have Not Yet Seen was issued by Alien Passengers in August 2015 as a vinyl edition of only one hundred copies. Its six pieces fill a little over half an hour, short enough to retain a concentrated shape but long enough for the record’s environment to become convincing. This is not an enormous drone monument asking the listener to surrender an afternoon. It functions more like an interrupted sleep cycle. Familiar elements return in altered positions, and the record seems to awaken several times without completely escaping the same dream.
The opening material establishes breath as both evidence of life and a form of confinement. Air appears to move through narrow electronic spaces while loops scrape against one another with the irregular texture of worn tape. Evenings does not polish these sounds into a seamless atmospheric surface. Their damage remains audible. Hiss gathers around the edges, tones wobble slightly out of alignment, and repeating figures seem weakened each time they return. The music feels preserved rather than freshly performed, as though it has already survived years inside an improperly sealed container.
That sense of deterioration separates Grey Days from ambient records built around clear horizons and slow emotional release. Even at its most spacious, the album refuses openness. Reverb creates distance, but the distance does not lead outside. It extends deeper into sealed interiors. A faint melodic shape may appear beyond the static, yet it resembles music overheard through several walls rather than an invitation to follow. The listener is always near something without being granted full access to it.
“Ivory Chamber,” the record’s longest piece, provides its central room. The title suggests cleanliness, luxury and enclosure, but ivory carries the history of a living body converted into an object. That contradiction sits at the heart of the album. Its sounds can be beautiful, sometimes almost tender, but their beauty has been separated from comfort. Long tones hang in the air with the faded elegance of abandoned furniture. Subtle movement accumulates beneath them, turning apparent stillness into nervous suspension. The chamber is not empty. It is occupied by residue.
Elsewhere, the album’s titles introduce social spaces warped by imbalance and distance. “Servant’s Quarters” implies a room defined by whoever is allowed to live elsewhere. “Constricted Eye Contact” reduces human exchange to a brief, uncomfortable failure. “Love of Distance” transforms separation from an obstacle into a condition someone has learned to require. These phrases never become a literal story, but together they suggest a world organized around avoidance: bodies confined to assigned areas, eyes refusing one another, intimacy maintained only while nobody comes too close.
The record’s minimalism makes these implications stronger. Evenings does not crowd the music with spoken narratives, cinematic samples or obvious emotional instructions. Instead, a few repeating textures are allowed to stain the entire space. Low industrial vibration sits beneath thinner, more fragile tones. Small pulses appear without becoming beats. Melodic fragments circle without developing into songs. The restraint produces a peculiar tension because every element sounds capable of revealing more than it eventually does.
The return of “Tortured Breath” as a reprise gives the record a circular structure without restoring its opening moment intact. A reprise normally offers recognition, a melody welcomed back after a journey. Here recognition feels closer to relapse. The same condition returns because it was never resolved. Time has passed, but the room has not changed enough to prove that escape occurred. The repetition makes the title Grey Days I Have Not Yet Seen feel less poetic than predictive. These are future days approaching with the familiarity of something already endured.
This backward-facing future is one of the album’s most effective qualities. The music sounds nostalgic, yet it is unclear what has been lost. There are no obvious samples from childhood records, broadcasts or domestic life to establish a specific past. Evenings creates nostalgia without an object. The listener receives the ache of remembrance before being given anything to remember. It is emotional déjà vu, a shadow cast by an event that has not happened.
The production remains deliberately difficult to date. Tape-like decay and analog murk connect the record to older industrial and cassette culture, while its patience belongs to a later generation of dark ambient artists who understood that volume was not the only route toward physical force. Grey Days can be quiet, but it is not weightless. Its low frequencies and compressed interiors give silence a measurable pressure. Played loudly, the record fills a room. Played softly, it seems to come from somewhere inside the room that cannot be located.
The vinyl edition suits this music because the surface is never entirely silent. Needle noise, dust and mechanical rotation join the existing hiss, extending the record’s weather beyond the recorded material. The format also divides the album into two forced interruptions. Each side eventually runs out, requiring the listener to stand, lift the record and turn it over. That ordinary action briefly restores the physical world before the grey interior resumes. On an album concerned with distance and confinement, even this small interruption matters.
Grey Days I Have Not Yet Seen does not dramatize depression as spectacular collapse. It concentrates on the quieter stage when dread has become routine, when the future is not imagined as disaster but as a sequence of nearly identical rooms. Its roads lead forward without offering destinations. Its chambers preserve beauty after warmth has been removed. Its breath continues, damaged but stubborn, through every constricted space.
The final effect is not hopelessness so much as suspended expectation. Evenings leaves the listener facing days that have not arrived, already carrying their atmosphere. The album cannot tell us what will happen inside them. It only recognizes their color from a distance: the exhausted grey of weather, memory, concrete, old tape and morning light entering a room where nobody slept.

Fumio Kosakai - 2025 - Earth Calling

 

Helicopter – HEL 81010  127.92MB FLAC

Earth Calling arrives from 2025 carrying a signal first transmitted in 1987. Helicopter’s CD is not a new Fumio Kosakai recording but the first compact-disc edition of his debut solo cassette, originally released through his own deliberately misspelled Anciant Records imprint. That distinction changes the way the album should be heard. These are not retrospective space drones created by an established veteran of Incapacitants, C.C.C.C. and Hijokaidan. They are early transmissions from a young Japanese underground musician working before those associations had fully defined his public identity, reaching beyond the industrial basement toward a much larger and stranger sky.
The stark black-and-white presentation immediately establishes that sense of private communication. Helicopter faithfully reproduces the original artwork through white ink on black paper, using risograph printing to preserve the rough handmade character of the cassette. Nothing about it resembles a glossy science-fiction product. The images and lettering feel closer to photocopied evidence from an amateur observatory, a secret cosmology assembled with whatever equipment happened to be available. Earth is not pictured as a familiar blue home seen from orbit. It becomes a distant transmitter, calling through static to anyone capable of receiving its damaged message.
The album contains two long pieces stretching across roughly forty-four minutes. Their duration matters because Kosakai is not arranging short demonstrations of equipment. He is constructing environments and allowing them enough time to become psychologically real. Sounds rise slowly, remain suspended, then disappear into layers that initially seemed empty. There is no beat, conventional melody or human voice guiding the listener through the material. The movement comes from changing density, unstable harmonics and the gradual discovery that what first appeared to be a single drone contains dozens of competing currents.
“Absent Water/Drive to Universe” opens in a state of desolation. Its title joins terrestrial lack with cosmic motion: an Earth without water, followed by an attempt to escape it. The sound has the grain of early electronic experimentation rather than later digital ambience. Tones do not float with perfect clarity. They scrape, flicker and carry a faint electrical dirt around their edges. Kosakai builds a low foundation that feels both mechanical and geological, then introduces thinner signals that sweep through the field like radar searching an unresponsive horizon.
The piece creates outer space without relying on the familiar language of synthesizer grandeur. There are no heroic chords, no sequenced propulsion and no cinematic revelation of stars. Space is presented as distance, isolation and imperfect communication. The electronics resemble transmissions traveling farther than they were designed to reach. Some frequencies appear to buckle under the journey. Others arrive so faintly that the listener begins questioning whether they are part of the recording or products of the ear attempting to organize the noise.
That uncertainty places Earth Calling near the imaginative center of underground cassette culture. Cheap duplication, limited equipment and home recording were not merely economic compromises. They gave the music a physical atmosphere. Tape hiss became weather. Slight distortion suggested enormous forces pressing against a fragile medium. A privately issued cassette could feel less like a commercial album than an object exchanged between isolated researchers. Kosakai used that intimacy to make a cosmic record whose vastness remained inseparable from the small room in which it was created.
The transition implied within “Absent Water/Drive to Universe” does not produce a clean launch. Instead, the music seems to leave the planet by slowly losing contact with recognizable surfaces. The lower drone thins, unfamiliar vibrations enter and the original environment becomes difficult to locate. Kosakai’s universe is not empty silence. It is saturated with energies that human senses cannot properly decode. The synthesizer becomes both spacecraft and receiver, moving through a field while simultaneously translating it.
“Look to the Light” sounds more radiant, but it never becomes reassuring. Light here is not warmth or salvation. It is an unknown source observed across tremendous distance. High tones burn through darker layers, sometimes steady and sometimes wavering as though obstructed by interference. The piece feels devotional without adopting any religious vocabulary. Kosakai simply directs attention upward and allows sustained sound to create its own form of concentration.
What is striking is the patience already present in this early work. Kosakai would later become associated with some of the most physically overwhelming noise produced in Japan. As a member of Incapacitants, he helped transform feedback and electronic overload into an ecstatic mass where individual sounds collide faster than they can be identified. His involvement with C.C.C.C. placed him within an equally immense but more psychedelic approach to noise, while his participation in Hijokaidan connected him to one of the foundational names of the Japanese scene. Earth Calling reveals another side of the same ear. Before the avalanche, there was the ability to remain inside a single tone and listen to its internal movement.
The album therefore complicates the standard history of Japanese noise. That history is often reduced to speed, volume, bodily extremity and walls of distortion. Kosakai’s debut shows that the same underground also contained drone, private-press electronics, cosmic minimalism and meditative sound construction. The distance between Earth Calling and Incapacitants is enormous on the surface, yet both rely upon total immersion. One overwhelms by filling every available space. The other opens a space so wide that the listener feels physically diminished inside it.
Kosakai’s electronics occasionally suggest the influence of 1970s progressive synthesis, German kosmische music and early industrial experimentation, but the record never settles comfortably into any of those traditions. It lacks the rhythmic certainty of classic Berlin-school electronics, the polished drift of new age music and the aggressive symbolism of industrial culture. Earth Calling occupies a private orbit around them. Its equipment may be modest, but its scale is enormous. The music behaves as if the limits of the home studio are only technical, never imaginative.
The 2025 CD edition also gives the album a revealing new physical life. The cassette was an unstable object, vulnerable to stretching, duplication loss and mechanical failure. Compact disc presents the recording with greater consistency, yet Helicopter avoids making it look newly sanitized. The rough white-on-black risograph artwork preserves the sense of an artifact retrieved from the pre-internet underground. The sound is clearer, but the mystery remains intact.
Nearly four decades after its original appearance, Earth Calling no longer sounds like a primitive sketch for Kosakai’s later career. It sounds like a fully formed alternate path running beneath it. The two pieces do not predict the violence of Incapacitants or the psychedelic density of C.C.C.C. They reveal the solitary listener who made those later eruptions possible: someone fascinated by electricity as living matter, by duration as altered consciousness, and by noise as evidence of worlds beyond ordinary perception.
The Earth in this recording is both home and distant object. It calls outward, but there is no guarantee that anything answers. Kosakai leaves the signal traveling through darkness, sustained by unstable machines and stubborn attention. The album’s deepest beauty lies in that unresolved transmission. Earth Calling does not document contact. It documents the desire to reach beyond the room, the cassette, the body and the known atmosphere, sending forty-four minutes of fragile voltage into the universe and listening carefully for what might return.

Grunt / Gelsomina - 2025 - ST 2xCD

 

Freak Animal Records – FA-CD-173  728.54MB FLAC

The first disc of Grunt / Gelsomina sounds like two people discovering how much violence can be packed into a shared room. The second sounds like that room being reopened twenty years later and filled with the accumulated debris of an entire noise culture. This self-titled double CD is therefore more than a reissue with bonus material. It is a before-and-after study of collaboration itself: one disc preserving Mikko Aspa and Pekka Perä-Takala’s original 2005 encounter, the other returning to the same partnership through contributions from twenty artists in 2025. The gap between them is long enough for equipment, methods and reputations to change, but the central attraction remains primitive and immediate. Grunt and Gelsomina make noise that feels handled, struck, dragged and forced into shape rather than merely switched on.

The cover establishes that physical vocabulary without resorting to the customary parade of atrocity photographs, medical damage or political provocation. Its black-and-white images show rough forest ground, broken branches, exposed roots, stones and a severed or fallen trunk. The lettering is small enough to look almost stamped onto the photograph. Nothing announces itself with theatrical grandeur. The land appears dense, wet and difficult to cross. It is nature stripped of pastoral calm, reduced to bark, dirt, splinters and irregular surfaces. The photograph has nearly the same visual behavior as the music: too much texture, too little open space, and no clean route through the material.

Grunt began in Finland in 1993 and gradually developed from harsh noise into a broader language containing power electronics, industrial construction, field recordings, acoustic sound and unusually deliberate editing. Mikko Aspa’s work has rarely treated noise as one undifferentiated block. Even at its most overloaded, Grunt depends upon contrasts: dry scrape against swollen distortion, an isolated object against a full electronic surge, documentary fragments against apparently abstract sound. Gelsomina, the project of Pekka Perä-Takala, belongs to the same Finnish tradition but has always carried its own feverish character. Releases such as Disease With a Purpose, issued by Freak Animal in 2004, and Cronenberg / Dead Music Live demonstrated a style in which harsh electronics could feel simultaneously crude, obsessive and strangely mobile.

Their 2005 collaboration appeared at precisely the point when Finnish harsh noise was becoming impossible to reduce to a few notorious names or a single recognizable sound. The scene had accumulated its own labels, live circuits, private methods and internal arguments. Freak Animal was central to that development, not merely documenting Finnish noise but helping define its physical and conceptual standards. Small editions, severe presentation and uncompromising material were expected, but sameness was not. The strongest recordings had to prove that familiar ingredients could still be arranged with individual pressure and purpose.

The original Grunt / Gelsomina LP did exactly that. It did not attempt to combine two projects by politely preserving each artist’s signature in alternating sections. There is little sense of one participant standing back while the other demonstrates a technique. The recording behaves as a collision in which ownership becomes difficult to assign. Feedback, contact microphones, metal, broken signals and dense electronic movement enter a shared system. Sounds are not introduced as recognizable instruments and then processed. They often arrive already damaged, as though the recording began after the equipment had been dropped, overloaded or contaminated.

Its force comes from constant internal friction. Harsh noise can become strangely restful when saturation is too uniform. Once every frequency has been filled, the ear accepts the mass and begins treating it as weather. Grunt and Gelsomina avoid that condition by refusing to let the surface stabilize. The first disc repeatedly alters its grain. Thick distortion breaks apart into sharper fragments. Lower mechanical pressure is invaded by high electronic squeal. Scraping textures appear close enough to suggest direct contact with a microphone, then disappear beneath broader surges. The noise remains severe, but severity is never confused with standing still.

There is a workshop quality to much of the material, although “workshop” sounds too orderly for the environment being created. Objects seem to be tested for their capacity to resist. Metal complains under pressure. Surfaces are rubbed until their texture becomes rhythm. Short impacts puncture longer electronic layers without settling into a beat. Cables and connections appear to function at the edge of failure, producing bursts that feel less like composed gestures than systems violently correcting themselves. Yet the apparent disorder is shaped with care. The artists know when to crowd the recording and when to remove enough material for one damaged sound to become enormous.

The distinction between noise and power electronics is useful here only up to a point. Grunt has long worked within both fields, while Gelsomina has frequently carried the hostile concentration associated with power electronics even when vocals and explicit narrative are absent. The 2005 collaboration does not require shouted slogans to create confrontation. Its aggression is embedded in the treatment of sound. Frequencies are forced against each other. Dynamics change without warning. Repetition offers no comfort because repeated actions continue accumulating abrasion. The listener is not addressed by a human voice, but the music still feels directed rather than impersonal.

That sense of intention separates the disc from casual improvisation. Grunt and Gelsomina may use unstable processes, but they do not simply document whatever happened when the machines were activated. Sections possess distinct densities and shapes. Material returns in altered form. A sound that initially functions as background may later become the central pressure point. Harsh passages are made harsher by the spaces carved around them. The editing preserves spontaneity while refusing to surrender judgment. What sounds uncontrolled has been selected because its particular loss of control matters.

Twenty years later, recreating that original encounter would have been the least interesting option. Both artists had already changed, and the scene surrounding them had multiplied into several generations of Finnish noise. The second disc answers that problem by changing the structure of the collaboration. Instead of asking Grunt and Gelsomina to imitate their younger selves, it brings twenty additional artists into the process. The old two-person collision becomes a distributed organism. Sources pass through different hands, accumulating techniques, equipment and sensibilities that did not occupy the original recording in the same way.

This could easily have produced a compilation disguised as a collaboration, with each participant arriving long enough to leave a recognizable calling card. Instead, the second disc is most compelling when identities dissolve. A source may carry the blunt physicality associated with object-based industrial noise, then be swallowed by feedback, granular damage or an engulfing low-frequency mass. Handmade electronics coexist with more complex processing without creating a sterile divide between “old” and “new” technology. The methods differ, but everything is drawn toward the same rough center.

The twenty-year concept is not presented as a museum anniversary. There is no attempt to polish the 2005 material into respectable historical importance or prove that the original LP secretly predicted every later development. The new disc behaves more like uncontrolled regrowth over an abandoned site. Different forms have appeared, but the ground underneath remains recognizable. Finnish noise still values crude materials, physical action, unstable machinery and the individual character of damaged sound. What has expanded is the number of ways those values can be organized.

The contrast between the discs reveals how the meaning of “harsh” has changed. On the original recording, harshness often comes from direct conflict between a relatively limited number of elements. One scrape, one frequency or one overloaded signal can dominate the field. The 2025 material is more likely to produce harshness through multiplication. Layers enter from multiple sources, carrying different acoustic fingerprints and recording spaces. The violence becomes social. It is the sound of many private practices being compressed until they create one public pressure.

Despite that expansion, the second disc avoids becoming a smooth digital collage. Its seams remain useful. Changes in resolution, room tone and saturation expose the fact that the material traveled. One contribution may sound close, dry and physical; the next may open into wider electronic depth. Rather than correcting these differences, the construction uses them as movement. The recording keeps changing rooms while maintaining the sensation that every room belongs to the same damaged building.

The strongest moments occur when the listener can no longer determine whether a sound began as an object, an instrument or electronic interference. A metallic vibration stretches until it resembles synthesis. Feedback develops a granular surface that could be stone dragged across concrete. Low oscillation shakes loose a series of smaller impacts. What initially resembles wind may be friction, faulty amplification or heavily processed field material. This uncertainty is not a decorative mystery. It places attention back on the sound’s behavior. Origin matters less than pressure, duration, texture and the way one element deforms another.

Grunt’s long experience with composition becomes especially important across such a crowded project. Aspa has often worked against the assumption that harsh noise should be captured as one spontaneous blast. His recordings can be painstakingly assembled from live action, acoustic sources, electronics and material collected over long periods. The second disc benefits from that architectural sense. Its mass is not merely stacked. Sounds are given different depths. Some appear immediately against the listener’s face; others remain buried, exerting force without fully revealing themselves. The mix becomes a vertical excavation through layers of accumulated damage.

Gelsomina supplies another kind of instability. Perä-Takala’s work has often possessed a nervous, corrosive energy, with sounds that appear to chew through their own structures. The project’s name, borrowed from the central character of Federico Fellini’s La Strada, creates an odd contrast with the music. Fellini’s Gelsomina is vulnerable, expressive and trapped inside a brutal world. The noise project offers no literal adaptation of that character, yet its best work also joins fragility to punishment. Thin frequencies bend without disappearing. Small gestures survive inside overwhelming systems. Sensitivity is not the opposite of violence here. It is what makes violence register.

The forest imagery begins to feel more precise as the double album unfolds. A forest floor is not a clean natural system viewed from a scenic distance. It is decomposition in continuous operation. Fallen material becomes habitat. Roots break through older remains. Moisture, rot and growth occupy the same surfaces. The two discs function similarly. The 2005 recording does not sit beneath glass as a completed historical object. It becomes the ground from which the 2025 collaboration grows, while the newer material remains full of the earlier record’s broken textures.

There is also something distinctly Finnish in the refusal to make the anniversary sentimental. Twenty years could invite testimonials, congratulatory language or a ceremonial restatement of past achievement. Grunt / Gelsomina answers with more abrasion. The tribute to endurance is not a speech about endurance. It is evidence that the work can still be activated, complicated and made dangerous. The participating artists do not gather to praise an untouchable classic. They enter the material and leave marks on it.

The double-CD format gives this relationship room to remain legible. Combining both eras onto one disc would have turned the original recording into a preface. Separating them allows the 2005 collaboration to retain its own scale and atmosphere before the larger anniversary construction begins. The listener can hear the first disc as a complete statement, pause, and then encounter the second as an answer produced under entirely different conditions. The package becomes a hinged object: two panels connected by names, methods and history, but opening toward different forms of pressure.

Compact disc also suits the project’s density. Vinyl gave the original collaboration an appropriate physical presence, but CD permits the roughest frequency combinations to arrive without the compromises imposed by groove width and side length. The material can sustain extended low pressure, sharp upper-range activity and abrupt transitions without turning the object into an oversized box. The digipak preserves the black-and-white severity of the original visual world while housing a project that has effectively doubled its historical reach.

What finally holds the set together is not nostalgia, nationality or even extremity. It is a shared belief that noise remains meaningful when every sound has a specific physical consequence. Grunt and Gelsomina do not treat distortion as a ready-made genre surface. They treat it as material that must be pushed, divided, crowded, starved and reshaped. The twenty collaborators extend that labor without cleaning it up. Across both discs, sound retains the resistance of matter.

The 2005 recording captures two artists meeting through impact. The 2025 disc demonstrates what happens when that impact is allowed to echo through a community for two decades. One is concentrated and combative; the other is sprawling, layered and collective. Neither cancels the other. Together they show continuity without repetition, history without embalming, and collaboration without polite compromise.

The fallen tree on the cover is therefore not simply dead scenery. It is a structure returning to the ground while other systems form around it. Grunt / Gelsomina works the same way. The original LP remains intact, but it is no longer isolated. Twenty years of Finnish noise have grown across its surface, entered its fractures and carried its methods elsewhere. When the second disc ends, the project does not feel concluded. It feels scattered again: metal, feedback, broken glass, machines and private obsessions thrown back into the forest, waiting for somebody to disturb them.

Owl - 2012 - Tapes 97-99

 

Freak Animal Records – cd-068  296.89MB FLAC

Owl’s Tapes 97–99 preserves the moment before noise becomes a genre somebody knows how to perform correctly. Recorded by Finnish artist John Helola using crude boomboxes, a single multi-effects unit and tape saturation pushed far beyond sensible limits, these five pieces were made before he understood that an established noise underground existed around him. That isolation is the album’s defining strength. Helola was not trying to resemble Merzbow, Incapacitants, Macronympha or the growing network of Finnish harsh-noise artists. He was simply pursuing ugly sound with inadequate machinery, inventing procedures because nobody had yet handed him a rulebook.
Freak Animal and Arkisto released the recordings on CD in 2012, gathering material originally made between 1997 and 1999. By then, Finnish noise had developed a formidable international identity, with artists such as Grunt, Bizarre Uproar, Pain Nail, Gelsomina and Government Alpha-related networks turning limited tapes and records into a dense parallel culture. Heard within that later context, Owl sounds both primitive and oddly independent. Its limitations are audible everywhere, but those limitations prevent the music from settling into the standardized gestures that harsh noise would eventually accumulate.
The five titles, “ALS,” “MS,” “RSV,” “PCOS” and “CRPS,” reduce serious medical conditions to hard clusters of initials. The abbreviations look cold and administrative, the language of files, charts and diagnostic codes rather than lived suffering. Owl’s sound operates through a similar reduction. There are no lyrics, explanatory samples or emotional narratives. Everything has been compressed into pressure, squeal, interference and malfunction. The titles point toward bodies losing control while the recordings capture technology undergoing a parallel breakdown.
“ALS” begins with an abrasive, almost liquid electronic movement. The noise does not arrive as a perfectly squared wall. It writhes, buckles and spits, with distorted currents moving across one another at unstable speeds. A persistent upper-frequency scream runs through the piece, but the material underneath remains active, producing a sensation closer to machinery drowning than machinery operating. The boombox recording gives every sound a narrow, overdriven edge. Frequencies seem trapped inside a medium too small to contain them, forcing them to smear against the boundaries of the tape.
This is where the supposed poverty of the equipment becomes compositional. Modern harsh noise can generate enormous frequency ranges with relative ease, but Owl’s restricted setup creates a cramped and hostile sound. Low frequencies cannot develop into clean sub-bass. High frequencies arrive as thin electrical needles. Midrange distortion crowds the center until individual textures become difficult to separate. Instead of presenting a vast field, the recording resembles a fistful of damaged wires pressed directly against the ear.
“MS” moves with greater restraint, though restraint here should not be confused with calm. The material drags rather than erupts. Sounds blur into one another with a drunken, unstable pace, as though the tape mechanism itself is struggling to maintain speed. The thinner production exposes details that would disappear inside a denser recording: small pulses, uneven cycles, sudden changes in pressure and electronic tones that seem to sag beneath their own weight. Owl’s lack of formal noise training becomes particularly valuable here. Helola does not rush to fill every empty area. He allows the recording’s weakness to remain visible.
That vulnerability gives Tapes 97–99 a character missing from more polished archival noise releases. The music is severe, but it is not invincible. The equipment sounds breakable. The signal occasionally feels close to vanishing. Saturation produces aggression while also revealing the fragile cassette beneath it. Every overload carries the possibility that the recording will collapse into blank tape, motor noise or silence.
“RSV” returns to greater density, with irregular bursts pressing through a bed of coarse distortion. The piece does not develop according to a conventional crescendo. It accumulates accidents. One texture catches, another enters at the wrong angle, and the entire mass briefly surges before falling back into a rougher pattern. The movements feel instinctive but not random. Helola may not have possessed a scene-approved vocabulary, yet he clearly understood that noise requires changing friction. He continually disturbs the surface before the ear can become comfortable inside it.
“PCOS” is the frailest and strangest recording of the set. Its thin electronic chatter resembles a failing modem, damaged radio equipment or a cheap machine attempting communication through a corroded line. The lack of weight becomes its main weapon. Rather than crushing the listener with bass, the piece irritates through brittleness. Signals blink, scrape and stutter in a narrow band, producing the maddening sensation of receiving information that remains permanently unreadable.
The track demonstrates how much atmosphere can emerge from technical inadequacy. With cleaner equipment, these signals might sound deliberate, futuristic or elegantly minimal. Captured through the boombox, they become sickly and domestic. The sound does not belong to a laboratory or spacecraft. It comes from a bedroom floor covered with cables, cheap plastic devices and cassettes recorded over too many times. Owl’s noise is not industrial because it evokes factories. It is industrial because ordinary consumer electronics have been forced to behave like failing production machinery.
“CRPS” closes the collection by returning to sustained abrasion, gathering many of the album’s methods into one final damaged system. Distorted layers rub against high-frequency activity while the recording continually threatens to flatten into pure saturation. Yet it never becomes a seamless wall. Small ruptures remain visible throughout, preventing the listener from hearing the track as a single static object. There is always another weak connection, another frequency breaking loose, another piece of tape damage becoming temporarily dominant.
The physicality of the recording is therefore inseparable from cassette technology. Tape saturation does not merely make the music louder or dirtier. It softens impacts, smears transients and welds unrelated sounds together. Each generation of recording removes information while adding another layer of distortion. Owl uses this decay almost accidentally as a mixing process. The cassette decides which frequencies survive. The boombox becomes collaborator, filter and destructive editor.
Tapes 97–99 also offers a useful correction to the mythology surrounding underground noise. Histories of the form often emphasize influence chains, specialist mail-order networks and carefully exchanged limited editions. Owl emerged through a different process. Helola apparently reached noise through private necessity before discovering the culture that could name it. His recordings prove that harsh noise can be reinvented independently because its basic impulse is so elemental: find a machine, push it beyond its intended function and listen to the failure.
That does not make Owl innocent or magically untouched by culture. These recordings still belong to the late 1990s, an era saturated with cheap cassette decks, consumer effects, home duplication and decaying analog media. But their isolation allowed those conditions to produce unusual structures. Helola did not yet know which sounds were considered powerful, which methods were customary or how a Finnish noise artist was supposed to present himself. He followed malfunction rather than precedent.
The 2012 CD does not transform these tapes into lost masterpieces through restoration and historical prestige. Their appeal depends upon remaining crude. They sound small, oversaturated and occasionally flimsy, yet they contain a genuine exploratory pressure. Each piece documents somebody discovering that ugly sound can be shaped, prolonged and examined without becoming conventional music. The results are not sketches for a cleaner future. Their technical damage is the finished form.
Tapes 97–99 captures noise before self-consciousness enters the room. It is the sound of a boombox being treated as both studio and victim, of tape pushed until distortion becomes substance, and of one person discovering an underground language before learning that thousands of others already spoke it. Owl did not need the scene to locate noise. He found it waiting inside cheap electronics, trapped beneath the normal functions of record, play and rewind.

Monde Bruits - 2022 - Tapes 1991-1994 5xCD Boxset

 

Industrial Recollections – none  1.46GB FLAC

Tapes 1991–1994 does not sound like five albums arranged neatly inside a box. It sounds like somebody opened a storage room and found four years of machinery still running. The five CDs gather Monde Bruits’ earliest cassette releases, live recordings, compilation appearances and previously unreleased material into a single archive, preserving Shohei Iwasaki’s work during the period when his project was developing at terrifying speed. The collection moves from blunt industrial collision to dense electronic turbulence, musique concrète, free improvisation and near-static fields of distortion. It does not reveal a straight line toward refinement. It documents an artist repeatedly dismantling whatever method had just begun to work.
The box begins with Irresponsibility, originally issued as a C46 cassette by Steeple & Globe in 1991. Even the title rejects the idea that experimental music should arrive with a respectable explanation attached. Iwasaki’s early sound is physical, volatile and rough around every edge. Metal appears to be struck, scraped or dragged beneath layers of electronic pressure. Feedback rises without warning and then buckles into lower mechanical movement. There are moments when the recording resembles industrial equipment operating inside a collapsing structure, but Monde Bruits never settles into simple factory imitation. The machinery is too unstable and the acoustic perspective changes too quickly. One moment the listener is pressed against the source; the next, the same activity seems to be occurring several rooms away.
“Irresponsibility” establishes a central quality that runs throughout the set: noise as movement rather than mass. Iwasaki could produce overwhelming density, but he rarely allowed saturation to become featureless. His harshest passages continually split into smaller actions. A high frequency tears loose from the larger block. A dull impact interrupts a sustained electronic scream. A scrape exposes a pocket of room tone before another layer covers it. Even when the recording appears close to complete overload, something keeps changing position inside it.
The second piece, “No Prejudice / Three Views of a Secret,” expands that unstable construction. “Three Views of a Secret” was made with Dislocation, and the collaboration adds another degree of unpredictability. Instead of two artists carefully taking turns, the performance feels crowded by competing decisions. Electronics, objects and acoustic residue enter from several directions, producing an environment that seems to rearrange itself faster than the ear can map it. The music has the freedom of improvisation without the polite conversational quality the word can imply. These sounds do not listen respectfully to one another. They interfere, block, provoke and deform.
Portuguese Man-of-War, also released in 1991, deepens the project’s interest in danger that appears shapeless until contact is made. The sea creature named in the title is not a single animal but a colony of specialized organisms functioning together, and Monde Bruits’ noise behaves in much the same way. The recording presents itself as one large, drifting body, yet close listening reveals many separate systems inside it. High electronic filaments hover above thicker pulses. Metallic sounds surface briefly and disappear. Distorted currents expand and contract without revealing a fixed center.
There is something aquatic in the piece, but not in the peaceful manner associated with field recordings of waves or underwater ambience. The sound suggests pressure, poison and translucent forms moving beneath an unreadable surface. Frequencies seem to float until they suddenly sting. The cassette medium contributes its own current. Hiss moves continuously around the stronger material, while saturation softens certain attacks and welds unrelated textures into temporary organisms. The tape does not simply preserve the piece. It helps produce the creature.
Iwasaki’s ability to work between harsh noise and environmental abstraction becomes increasingly clear here. Monde Bruits could be brutally loud, yet the project was never limited to blunt confrontation. There are passages where very little happens in conventional terms, but the apparent emptiness remains tense because every faint vibration could develop into another surge. Silence is not relief. It is exposed territory. The listener waits for something to enter it.
Purgatory, originally released in 1992 through Akifumi Nakajima’s G.R.O.S.S. label, occupies the center of the box and feels like one of Monde Bruits’ most fully realized early statements. Nakajima, better known as Aube, built G.R.O.S.S. into an important outlet for Japanese experimental sound, and the label’s severe handmade presentation matched Iwasaki’s increasingly focused work. “Purgatory” and “Out of Purgatory” form a passage through sustained punishment, suspension and uncertain release.
The first half builds slowly enough for the listener to become aware of the recording’s architecture. Lower tones establish an enclosed depth while sharper signals move across the upper range. Metallic friction and distant impacts give the electronics a physical location, but that location never remains stable. Walls seem to shift. Openings appear and close. The music does not charge directly toward maximum volume. It tightens. Each added layer reduces the available air until the recording becomes difficult to inhabit.
“Out of Purgatory” does not provide a clean exit. Its title suggests release, but the sound carries damage from the earlier section. Frequencies remain scorched and unsteady. Movement becomes more pronounced, yet it feels like motion through wreckage rather than escape into open space. This refusal of resolution is essential to Monde Bruits. Iwasaki’s pieces often seem to begin after some unknown event and end before its consequences have finished unfolding. They do not explain the disaster. They preserve its active conditions.
Psychosomatic Performance, dating from 1993, pushes the body closer to the center of the work. The title identifies a feedback loop between mental pressure and physical response, and the recordings repeatedly blur the boundary between electronic behavior and bodily distress. Thin tones resemble nerves firing. Low oscillations create chest pressure. Abrupt movements feel less like musical accents than involuntary reactions. The noise does not represent illness from a safe distance. It creates conditions under which the listener becomes newly aware of breathing, muscle tension and the body’s defensive response to sound.
The word “performance” also matters. Monde Bruits was not merely constructing private studio objects. Iwasaki was part of the live infrastructure that allowed Japanese noise to develop as a physical culture. He organized Masami Akita’s first Merzbow performance in Osaka and participated in several collaborative projects, including ABM, Sian and MXM. His importance was therefore larger than his solo discography. He helped create situations in which noise could happen, circulate and collide with other practices.
That social role complicates the image of the isolated noise artist operating alone behind a wall of equipment. Monde Bruits was Iwasaki’s personal project, but it existed within a thick network of tape labels, mail exchanges, concerts and collaborations. The recordings in this box capture both sides of that reality. Some pieces feel intensely private, almost sealed away from ordinary communication. Others clearly depend upon the unpredictable energy of shared space, where equipment, performers and audience pressure alter one another.
The live and unreleased material on the fifth disc is particularly valuable because it exposes this instability. Studio noise can be layered, edited and balanced until every rupture occurs exactly where intended. Live Monde Bruits has to negotiate accidents in real time. Signals overload unexpectedly. Objects do not produce the anticipated resonance. Feedback changes according to the room. The performer’s task is not to prevent these failures but to recognize which ones can be turned into structure.
Iwasaki was exceptionally good at allowing rough processes to remain rough without abandoning composition. His noise can initially seem chaotic, yet prolonged listening reveals a strong instinct for scale. He understands when a small sound needs empty space around it and when that space should be crushed beneath a larger event. He knows how long a scraping texture can continue before it becomes inert. He can move from acoustic detail to electronic saturation without making the transition feel like a switch between techniques. Everything belongs to the same damaged ecology.
The box also shows how rapidly Monde Bruits’ vocabulary expanded between 1991 and 1994. The earliest material often derives its energy from immediate collision: metal, distortion, feedback and overdriven tape fighting for limited space. Later recordings become more patient and spatially complex. Sounds are allowed to remain at different distances. Dense passages coexist with extended stretches of suspension. The electronics become less identifiable as effects and more like environments with their own weather, gravity and internal life.
This development did not make the music cleaner. If anything, the later work becomes stranger because Iwasaki learned how to preserve dirt while increasing precision. Noise accumulates in layers without losing its splintered surface. Field-like sounds coexist with violent electronic interruptions. The recordings can feel carefully designed and on the verge of collapse at the same time. That contradiction is one reason Monde Bruits still resists easy placement within the history of Japanese noise.
The project is often mentioned beside Merzbow, Hijokaidan and Incapacitants, which is understandable but incomplete. Monde Bruits shares their commitment to overwhelming sound, yet Iwasaki’s work frequently carries a stronger musique concrète and free-improvisational impulse. He is interested in the identity of individual materials, even when those materials are eventually buried. Metal is not merely used to create aggression. Its weight, resonance and resistance matter. A room is not only a neutral container. Its reflections become part of the composition. Tape damage is not an unfortunate limitation. It changes the texture and time of the event.
There are moments across Tapes 1991–1994 that approach what would later be called harsh noise wall, particularly when dense distortion settles into a nearly continuous field. But Iwasaki rarely treats immobility as the final destination. His walls contain cracks, moving pressures and sudden holes. The surface appears solid until a hidden component shifts. Monde Bruits is less interested in staring at an unchanging wall than in hearing what happens when a wall is placed under stress.
The cassette origins of this material are inseparable from its character. These recordings were created for a format that encouraged directness, small editions and rapid circulation. A cassette could be assembled, copied and mailed without waiting for a conventional label to recognize its value. It could also deteriorate, stretch and gather mechanical imperfections. Every copy carried the possibility of becoming slightly different from the master.
Industrial Recollections and Audio Dissection preserve that history without pretending the source tapes were pristine studio documents. The five CDs were faithfully transferred from original tapes, including a metal master for Irresponsibility, and the box contains a twenty-page booklet of rare photographs and previously unseen graphics. The presentation gives the work historical weight, but it does not embalm it. Hiss, saturation and uneven recording quality remain part of the experience. The archive is cleaned enough to be heard, not scrubbed until its original surfaces disappear.
That distinction is crucial. Tapes 1991–1994 would lose much of its meaning if remastered into modern digital perfection. The unstable fidelity tells us how the music moved through the world. It reminds us that these sounds were once contained in small plastic shells, copied by physical contact and received through mail rather than instantly accessed. The box does not merely collect compositions. It preserves a method of underground existence.
The booklet and poster extend that existence into visual form. Photographs and graphics do more than supply nostalgia for early-1990s noise culture. They show the handmade infrastructure around the sound: photocopied layouts, performance spaces, equipment and bodies operating outside professional music systems. Monde Bruits was not waiting to be discovered by a larger industry. The project already possessed the means needed to exist.
Iwasaki’s death in a motorcycle accident in 2005 inevitably gives the collection a posthumous gravity, but the recordings do not sound like memorial objects. They remain too active, abrasive and unpredictable. Nothing here asks to be approached respectfully from a distance. The work still pushes outward. It still interferes with the room in which it is played.
The five-disc scale is justified because no single Monde Bruits cassette tells the whole story. Irresponsibility captures the early project’s blunt physical attack. Portuguese Man-of-War reveals its drifting, poisonous complexity. Purgatory demonstrates Iwasaki’s command of duration and psychological enclosure. Psychosomatic Performance draws the listener’s body into the system. The final disc restores the unstable public and fragmentary edges: live actions, compilation pieces and unreleased work that refuse to fit neatly into the main sequence.
Together they form a portrait of an artist discovering that noise could be built from almost any relationship between matter and electricity. A struck object could become rhythm without repeating. Feedback could behave like weather. Distortion could create space rather than merely fill it. Improvisation could remain violent without becoming shapeless. The cassette itself could function as instrument, editor and slowly decaying memory.
Tapes 1991–1994 is therefore not simply a large reissue for collectors who missed a group of impossibly scarce tapes. It restores the first architecture of Monde Bruits. Across five discs, Shohei Iwasaki repeatedly enters raw sound, tests its resistance and leaves before the results can settle into doctrine. The box captures Japanese noise while its vocabulary was still expanding through private experiments, live collisions and packages moving between distant addresses.
By the end, the word “archive” feels too quiet. This material has been stored, but it has not been neutralized. The machines are still running, the metal continues to shift, and the tape hiss keeps the air electrically charged. Opening the box does not feel like looking backward. It feels like discovering that a room sealed in 1994 has remained pressurized ever since.

Ramleh - 2000 - Too Many Miles: (Complete Singles 90-95)

 

Dirter Promotions – dpromcd 48  459.60MB FLAC

Too Many Miles catches Ramleh during the decade when the band became almost impossible to explain with a single sentence. The group that had emerged from Britain’s early power-electronics underground was now making records driven by guitar, bass and drums, but calling this material “rock” only relocates the confusion. These twelve tracks, originally scattered across limited singles released between 1990 and 1995, treat rock music as another damaged electrical system. Riffs appear, rhythms take hold and songs assume recognizable shapes, yet everything remains corroded by repetition, distortion and the sense that the band is pushing ordinary amplification toward some less stable state.
The CD was issued by Dirter Promotions in 2000, several years after Ramleh’s second dissolution, and its seventy-three-minute running time makes it far more than a stack of stray B-sides. Heard together, the singles reveal one of the strongest periods in the group’s catalog. Albums such as Blowhole, Shooters Hill, Homeless and Be Careful What You Wish For documented Ramleh’s larger movements during the 1990s, but the seven-inch format caught the band in concentrated form. These pieces have no room for explanatory transitions or carefully managed album pacing. Each one has to establish its pressure quickly, hold it, and leave behind a burn mark.
“Eightball Corner Pocket” opens with the swagger of a band that has discovered rhythm without agreeing to behave. The guitar is thick and scraped raw, the bass pushes from beneath it, and the drums provide enough forward motion to make the distortion feel mobile rather than piled in place. Ramleh’s rock material is often described through psychedelia, but this is not psychedelic music built from ornate studio effects or graceful expansion. The altered state comes from force. A basic pattern is repeated until its proportions change, the riff becoming less like a musical phrase than an object rotating under extreme heat.
“Slammers” stretches that method past seven minutes. Its central movement is heavy, blunt and almost perversely patient. Ramleh does not race toward a payoff because the repetition is the payoff. Gary Mundy’s guitar keeps widening the track’s surface while the rhythm section maintains a severe, bodily pulse. The song feels both primitive and carefully controlled, with every return of the riff producing another layer of accumulated pressure. It belongs to the lineage of garage rock, heavy psych and industrial noise at once, but it kneels before none of them.
“Pristine Womankind” introduces a more poisoned atmosphere. The title suggests purity while the recording supplies contamination. Vocals emerge through the instrumental density without becoming a clean narrative center, and the guitar appears to smear itself across the rhythm rather than sitting neatly above it. Ramleh’s songs from this period often possess hooks, but the hooks are buried inside abrasive surfaces. Recognition comes slowly. A melodic shape may be present from the beginning, yet it takes several repetitions for the ear to extract it from the distortion.
“Trapped Aircraft” is shorter and more immediately pressurized. Its title is perfect for Ramleh’s 1990s sound: machinery built for movement, held in place while its engines continue running. The rhythm drives, but the song never seems to reach open air. Guitar noise crowds the available space, creating the sensation of acceleration without escape. It is rock music stripped of the promise that momentum will lead anywhere.
“Welcome” turns hospitality into menace. The track advances with a loose, narcotic confidence, but nothing about its atmosphere feels safe. Ramleh’s relationship with psychedelic rock was always darker than revivalism. The band did not reproduce the colored lights and cosmic optimism of the late 1960s. It used repetition, volume and tonal blur to expose the threatening underside of surrender. To enter the music is to give up control of scale and duration. The door opens, but the room behind it has no reliable dimensions.
“Tracers,” one of the collection’s longest pieces, allows that room to expand. Guitar lines burn across a sustained rhythmic field, leaving trails behind them like light caught during a long photographic exposure. The piece moves between propulsion and suspension, never fully deciding whether it is a song, a jam or a noise environment. That indecision is productive. Ramleh’s strongest rock recordings do not alternate between riffs and abstraction. The riffs generate the abstraction by being repeated, overloaded and allowed to bleed beyond their apparent boundaries.
“Night Hair Child” carries a strange, nocturnal beauty. The distortion remains substantial, yet the song’s emotional temperature is different from the blunt attack of “Slammers” or “Trapped Aircraft.” Ramleh had always possessed a capacity for damaged beauty, even during the early Broken Flag years, when shrieking electronics could suddenly open into bleak drone. The 1990s lineup translated that quality into amplified rock. A guitar could be both abrasive surface and melancholy atmosphere, with no need to choose between them.
The personnel shifts of the period helped create this expanded vocabulary. Gary Mundy remained the central force, but Philip Best’s presence connected the material to Ramleh’s confrontational electronic history, while Anthony di Franco and Stuart Dennison brought the immense physical grounding also heard in Skullflower. The result was not a conventional band with noise added on top. Rhythm, amplification and electronic abrasion were fused at the structural level. The bass and drums did not tidy the chaos. They gave it a skeleton large enough to walk.
“Slack Jaw” turns that skeleton into something cumbersome and ugly. The music lurches with deliberate heaviness, its riff carrying the physical stupidity implied by the title. Yet the performance is never careless. Ramleh understood exactly how much looseness a groove could withstand before collapsing, and the band repeatedly works near that edge. The song drags itself forward with its mouth hanging open, but its eyes remain fixed.
The remaining tracks continue to test the border between compact song form and extended dissolution. “Loser Patrol” has the sneering momentum of underground rock viewed through cracked glass, while “Say Fuck” reduces language to blunt impact. The phrase becomes less a statement than a rhythmic device, another hard object inside the mix. Ramleh’s provocations rarely depend upon elaborate ideology here. The hostility is carried by tone, repetition and delivery.
“Dicey Opera” suggests grand drama performed under unstable conditions. Nothing stays elevated for long. Any sense of ceremony is pulled back toward dirt, feedback and bodily rhythm. This collision between inflated form and crude material is central to Ramleh. The band can sound enormous without becoming majestic. Its music offers transcendence with grease on its hands.
The collection ends with “Too Many Miles,” a title that gains weight after more than an hour of accumulated travel. These singles cover only five years, but the distance between them feels larger. Ramleh moved through power electronics, industrial noise, psychedelic rock, heavy improvisation and diseased garage music without treating any phase as a clean break from the last. The early electronic violence remained embedded in the guitar sound, while the rock structures revealed rhythmic and emotional qualities that had always existed inside the noise.
That is what the “complete singles” format makes especially clear. Too Many Miles is not a collection of Ramleh becoming accessible. It documents the band discovering that conventional instruments could be made every bit as destabilizing as primitive electronics. Guitar, bass and drums did not domesticate Ramleh. Ramleh infected them.
These tracks remain unusually alive because they never sound like historical demonstrations of “noise rock.” Their grooves are too stubborn, their distortion too physical and their structures too uncertain. The singles do not point neatly toward one finished version of the band. They preserve Ramleh in motion, traveling too far to return to the beginning and refusing to settle wherever they arrive.

Haare - 2016 - Regression

 

Freak Animal Records – Freak Animal CD 084  258.56MB FLAC

Regression sounds like Haare dragging its own psychedelic body backward through a machine built to erase it. Ilkka Vekka’s project had already developed a recognizable language by 2016: guitar and electronics stretched into long, hallucinatory fields where harsh noise, drone, ritual music and damaged psychedelia bled into one another. This album does not abandon that language, but it subjects it to a harsher environment. The spaciousness remains, yet the air has become dirty. Drones are interrupted by electrical splinters, vocals lie buried beneath distortion, and every surface crackles as though the recording itself is decomposing while it plays.
The title can suggest retreat, relapse or a return to an earlier condition, but Regression does not sound nostalgic. It does not recreate Haare’s beginnings as a thick wall of fuzz inspired by Incapacitants and Hijokaidan. Instead, it strips away some of the cosmic breadth associated with Vekka’s more meditative recordings and replaces it with industrial confinement. The six pieces still drift, but they drift through poisoned rooms. What once might have opened toward an enormous psychedelic sky now presses against rusted walls, damaged wiring and unreliable machinery.
“Do What Thou Wilt” begins with a title carrying the weight of occult self-determination, but the music offers no clean declaration of freedom. Its slow electronic movement feels obstructed from the beginning. Low tones spread beneath a field of corrosion while sharper frequencies push forward and retreat. Distorted vocals appear within the mass, but they are too deeply submerged to function as ordinary speech. The voice becomes evidence of a person trapped inside the recording rather than a narrator standing above it.
This treatment of vocals is central to Regression. Vekka does not use language to explain the atmosphere or provide a sequence of commands. Words are fed into the same system as the guitar, feedback and electronics, losing their authority as they become texture. A human presence remains audible, but its meaning has been broken apart. The result is more disturbing than a clearly shouted slogan. The listener hears somebody attempting communication while the machinery continually swallows the message.
“Tuhoa Kaikki,” Finnish for “destroy everything,” pushes further into this damaged industrial vocabulary. The phrase might promise an eruption, yet Haare’s destruction is rarely instantaneous. Vekka works through gradual contamination. A sustained sound acquires grit, then distortion, then an unstable halo of feedback. Another layer enters and presses against it until neither source can be heard clearly. Destruction occurs as a process of making boundaries disappear. Guitar becomes electronic waste, voice becomes interference, and drone becomes the residue left after repeated overload.
The album’s lo-fi character is not a costume placed over otherwise clean compositions. Crackles, uneven levels and rough distortion determine how the pieces move. Sounds sometimes appear to tear at the recording medium, creating the impression that the album was assembled from damaged transmissions rather than performed in a stable studio. The technical imperfections become active participants. They interrupt smooth development, roughen sustained tones and prevent the music from settling into polished dark ambience.
That roughness separates Regression from records that use drone as an invitation to disappear peacefully inside sound. Haare offers immersion, but not safety. The longer tones produce concentration while feedback keeps cutting across them, creating a constant conflict between surrender and alarm. Just as the listener begins adjusting to one layer, another frequency enters at an uncomfortable angle. The album repeatedly establishes a hypnotic state and then contaminates it before hypnosis can become comfort.
Vekka has described Haare as psychedelic noise, a phrase that fits because his work treats psychedelia as an alteration of perception rather than a collection of familiar 1960s decorations. There are no cheerful backward guitars or colorful studio tricks here. Psychedelia emerges through blurred scale, unstable repetition and the inability to distinguish foreground from background. A small crackle can suddenly feel enormous. A distant drone can move close enough to become physically oppressive. The music changes the apparent dimensions of the room without ever announcing that the change has happened.
Regression’s industrial qualities are equally psychological. The pieces evoke machinery, metal, electrical systems and abandoned infrastructure, but they do not provide a cinematic tour of a factory. The machines are internal. Repetition behaves like compulsive thought, returning without solving anything. Distortion resembles memory subjected to pressure until details collapse. Feedback becomes a nervous signal that cannot be switched off. The industrial setting is less a location than a model of the mind caught inside recurring damage.
This gives the title another possible meaning. Psychological regression describes a movement toward an earlier stage when present conditions become impossible to manage. Haare’s album does not illustrate that concept literally, but its structure often feels caught between forward motion and involuntary return. Sounds drift, transform and accumulate, yet familiar pressures keep resurfacing. A voice enters only to be buried again. A thin signal escapes the lower mass before distortion pulls it back. Progress occurs, but every advance carries the shape of relapse.
The six-track format helps the album avoid becoming one long undifferentiated fog. Each piece opens a different section of the same contaminated environment. Some emphasize low mechanical drift, while others expose more piercing feedback, vocal damage or brittle surface noise. The changes are not dramatic enough to break the album’s atmosphere, but they alter the listener’s position within it. One track feels like standing beside a failing machine; another resembles hearing the same failure through concrete walls.
Haare began in 1999 from a desire to make pure harsh noise, using turntables, radio, metal junk, tape and a DOD fuzz pedal pushed deeply into overload. Vekka gradually expanded that setup to include guitar, E-bow, synthesizers, gongs, organ pipes, flutes and other acoustic materials. Regression is compelling because it does not display this expanded vocabulary as a collection of instruments. Everything has been forced through one diseased nervous system. Sources lose their names and become pressure, vibration and abrasion.
The guitar is particularly difficult to isolate. It rarely behaves as a conventional lead instrument, and there are no riffs placed cleanly at the front of the mix. Instead, it feeds sustained tones, harmonic smears and distorted currents into the larger construction. At times its physical origin can be sensed in the way a sound bends or blooms, but any recognizable string attack is quickly dissolved. The instrument functions as a generator of unstable matter rather than a vehicle for performance.
Freak Animal was an ideal home for the album. The Finnish label has long favored recordings where noise retains dirt, danger and physical resistance, and Regression refuses the polished spaciousness that could have made Haare’s drone elements easier to consume. The CD sounds deliberately crude, full of buried information and unpleasant frequency relationships. Its power comes not from technical perfection but from the conviction with which imperfection has been shaped.
Regression therefore marks neither a simple return nor a decline. It is Haare moving sideways into a narrower, more suffocating version of its own world. The project’s ritual and psychedelic instincts remain present, but enlightenment has been replaced by psychic excavation. Meditation becomes fixation. Expansion becomes enclosure. The inner journey does not lead toward clarity; it reaches a basement where damaged machines continue repeating thoughts that should have ended years ago.
By the final piece, the album has not resolved its pressure so much as taught the listener how to inhabit it. The crackles no longer register as flaws, the distorted voices no longer demand translation, and the drifting industrial waste begins to feel almost organic. Regression succeeds because it makes decay sound active. Nothing here is peacefully disappearing. Every broken signal continues working, every buried voice continues pushing upward, and every layer of distortion preserves the violence that damaged it.

Lasse Marhaug - 2024 - Provoke

 

Smalltown Supersound – STSLJN432LP  205.89MB FLAC

Provoke opens with metal, but not with the simple crash and punishment that word might imply. “Plates” introduces a field of hard surfaces whose identities keep shifting. A struck object rings, scrapes and trembles until it stops behaving like an object and becomes part of the surrounding space. Low electronic pressure moves beneath the brighter impacts, while smaller clicks and fragments appear at different depths. The piece sounds carefully built but never sealed. Air remains between the sounds, giving each one enough room to cast a long shadow. Lasse Marhaug’s noise has often been associated with overload, yet Provoke begins by demonstrating how much force can be created through separation.
The album was Marhaug’s first solo recording after moving back to northern Norway, where he had grown up. That return did not produce a sentimental portrait of home. Provoke contains no obvious folk references, nostalgic melodies or scenic field recordings offered as proof of location. The landscape enters structurally. Sounds appear far apart, surrounded by an unusual clarity. Sudden events feel larger because so much space has been preserved around them. The album’s electronics suggest broad distances, severe weather and changing light without becoming a musical postcard from the Arctic.
Marhaug recorded the album over a year and mixed it during the two-month polar night, when the sun remains below the horizon. That condition seems to shape the record’s sense of illumination. Provoke is dark, but it is not uniformly black. Fine metallic sounds, narrow electronic tones and almost melodic pulses continually emerge from the larger shadows. They resemble light reflected from ice or briefly exposed along the edge of an object. Darkness becomes a background against which tiny differences can be heard more clearly.
“Good Days Quiet” brings rhythm closer to the surface. The title sounds almost domestic, but the piece never settles into peace. A pulse repeats with slight changes while small electronic movements gather around it. Marhaug does not build a beat in the conventional sense. He creates a structure that repeatedly hints at one, allowing mechanical activity to organize the space without converting the track into dance music. The rhythm feels discovered inside the material rather than imposed from outside.
This increased attention to pulse is one of the clearest differences between Provoke and the thicker fog of earlier solo work. Marhaug still uses distortion, drone and abrasive texture, but he arranges them with striking precision. Layers no longer pile up simply to create mass. They intersect like planes inside a three-dimensional model. One sound may move horizontally across the piece while another drops through it vertically. A third remains fixed in the distance. The listener is not merely surrounded. The listener is given a position within a changing architecture.
“Ears and Things That Are Not Ears” turns listening itself into an unstable subject. The title suggests receivers, organs and objects that might somehow behave like organs. Its sounds seem designed to test how quickly the ear invents causes. A brittle rattle resembles seeds, loose machinery or ice moving across stone. A stretched electronic tone could be wind, friction or feedback held just below eruption. Marhaug refuses to clarify these sources. He allows recognition to begin and then removes the evidence needed to complete it.
That uncertainty connects Provoke to Marhaug’s background as a visual artist. He has said that he does not primarily consider himself a musician, but a visual artist diverted into sound. The album often behaves like a sequence of images assembled through contrast, scale and framing. A dense low frequency can function like a black area across a photograph. A thin tone resembles a line cutting through it. Silence is not empty time. It is negative space that determines the apparent size and weight of everything placed inside it.
The title Provoke also refers to the influential Japanese photography magazine published around 1968 and 1969. The magazine’s photographers pursued grain, blur and unstable framing as alternatives to clean documentary language. Marhaug does not imitate their images in sound, but he shares their suspicion of clarity as simple truth. Provoke is exceptionally detailed, yet its detail does not make the world easier to identify. Increased resolution produces further ambiguity. The closer the listener moves toward a texture, the less certain its origin becomes.
“New Topographics” carries another photographic reference, recalling the movement that presented altered landscapes with an apparently neutral gaze. Marhaug’s piece feels similarly resistant to dramatic interpretation. It places sounds in relation to one another and lets their proportions create tension. Repetition develops slowly. Mechanical gestures recur without announcing whether they are natural, industrial or electronically constructed. The track does not describe a landscape untouched by humans. It suggests a world where geography, machinery and recording technology have become impossible to separate.
“Kvitbrygga,” named for the White Wharf in Marhaug’s hometown of Sortland, is the album’s briefest piece. Its short duration gives it the quality of a concentrated observation. Small sounds knock, rustle and resonate inside a limited space. Compared with the longer constructions around it, the track feels almost like standing beside a particular building and listening to how its surfaces respond to wind, cold and nearby movement. It does not become a literal field recording, but the physical world seems unusually close.
“Monochrome Head” occupies the album’s center of gravity. At more than ten minutes, it has enough room to develop from sparse signals into a much deeper electronic environment. The title joins visual reduction with bodily enclosure. A monochrome image eliminates color while preserving form; the piece similarly limits its apparent palette while revealing countless differences inside a narrow range. Low tones swell, rhythmic details surface and metallic fragments catch the available light. Marhaug does not move toward a spectacular climax. He continually changes the pressure within the same dark structure.
The result is immersive without becoming smooth. Drone music can sometimes remove friction until sound feels endless and unresisting. “Monochrome Head” keeps its surfaces rough. Pulses strike against sustained tones, bright frequencies interrupt the lower mass, and apparent stability is repeatedly disturbed. The piece rewards concentration because its largest events may occur through small changes in balance. A sound moving closer in the mix can alter the architecture as dramatically as a sudden blast.
“Minus 14” brings the outdoor winter material into the foreground. The title gives a temperature rather than an emotion, but the cold becomes physical through the recording. Wind-like pressure, brittle contact sounds and electronic layers create an environment where everything appears contracted. At minus fourteen degrees, surfaces harden, breath becomes visible and ordinary movement requires greater effort. The track captures this not by illustrating snowfall but by making each sound seem affected by resistance.
Field recordings and electronics are integrated so completely that the border between them becomes useless. Outdoor sound does not sit behind the composition as atmosphere. It enters the same system as the synthesized tones, shaping rhythm and density. Electronics sometimes resemble weather while environmental recordings behave like abstraction. This exchange gives the closing piece its power. Nature is not presented as pure or separate from technology. Microphones, processing and human attention are already inside the landscape.
Across seven tracks, Provoke demonstrates how far Marhaug has moved from the common image of noise as maximum volume. His history in Norwegian noise, improvisation, metal and free music remains audible in the record’s physical confidence, but the album rarely relies upon brute force. Its provocation is formal. It asks whether noise can still disturb when it is carefully spaced, tonal, luminous and occasionally close to beautiful.
The answer comes through the album’s refusal to separate beauty from instability. Provoke contains moments of genuine calm, but each is built from materials capable of turning abrasive. Its rhythms provide orientation without security. Its clarity reveals depth while withholding explanation. Marhaug has not abandoned noise. He has widened the field in which noise can operate, allowing metal, winter air, pulse, silence and reflected light to carry equal weight.
By the end of “Minus 14,” the record has described northern Norway without reducing it to scenery. The Arctic appears as a method of attention: long darkness, sharp contrasts, exposed distances and tiny changes magnified by surrounding silence. Provoke is not a retreat from Marhaug’s harsher work. It is noise reorganized after decades of experience, stripped of unnecessary fog and placed under cold, exact light.