Devil's Witches - 2017 - Velvet Magic

 

Self-released – none

Velvet Magic has a cover that understands the quickest route into this record is not through darkness, but through extremely suspicious softness. A blonde woman reclines barefoot on a cream floor beside an enormous white goat. She wears a fuzzy pale sweater slipping from one shoulder, her legs stretched casually across the foreground as though this were a fashion advertisement for satanic loungewear. The goat stands beside her with magnificent spiraling horns, staring forward with the calm self-possession of the true owner of the room.
Nothing on the cover is black except the upper border. There are no graveyards, burning churches, robed figures, or blood-soaked ritual tools. Branca Studio builds the image from warm orange, ivory, beige, faded photography, and thick retro typography. It resembles a forgotten private-press lounge album, an occult paperback, and a soft-focus men’s magazine compressed into one square.
That visual contradiction contains Devil’s Witches’ entire debut. Velvet Magic is heavy, but its heaviness is wrapped in velvet. The guitars are saturated with fuzz rather than sharpened into metal. Vocals drift through reverb like smoke crossing a projector beam. Doom riffs share space with surf guitar, psychedelic pop, exploitation-film atmosphere, and melodies that feel sun-warmed even when the lyrics move toward war, witchcraft, addiction, and death.
“Apache Snow” opens with battlefield sound and a guitar figure whose slow movement establishes the album’s strange geography. Vietnam, the American West, occult fantasy, and late-1960s counterculture overlap until historical accuracy becomes less important than feverish association. The song moves like a damaged war film playing inside somebody’s narcotic dream.
That collision continues throughout Velvet Magic. The album is partly a concept record about a soldier caught within the Vietnam War, but Devil’s Witches does not narrate the story in neat chapters. Images appear through fragments: helicopters, snow, Native American imagery, motorcycles, drugs, soldiers, women, devils, and ceremonial landscapes. The record feels remembered rather than reported.
“Motorpsycho” condenses this world into three minutes of charging fuzz. The title joins machinery, speed, and mental disturbance, turning the motorcycle into both transport and altered state. The riff is blunt enough for doom but moves with garage-rock impatience, proving that heaviness does not require standing still.
The production is deliberately aged without sounding weak. Guitars occupy a thick middle range, drums remain slightly recessed, and vocals seem embedded within the instrumental fog rather than placed cleanly above it. The sound imitates the wear of an old record discovered after decades in a humid basement, but the riffs retain enough physical force to prevent the atmosphere from becoming costume.
“Black Cauldron” brings the occult imagery forward. The central riff circles with the heavy patience of early doom, while the voice treats the cauldron less as a theatrical prop than a container where separate histories can be boiled together. War trauma, erotic fantasy, folk magic, and psychedelic escape enter the same vessel.
That is also what the cover’s goat represents. Goats have accumulated centuries of religious suspicion, fertility symbolism, pastoral innocence, and satanic association. Here the animal is clean, pale, and almost luxurious. Its horns provide the only overtly threatening shape in the image, but even they curl with decorative elegance.
The woman does not appear frightened. She is not being sacrificed, pursued, or dominated by the animal. She rests beside it as an equal participant in the scene. This transforms the familiar occult image. The goat is not an intruder entering domestic space. The room has already been arranged for it.
The cover’s eroticism works the same way. The woman’s bare legs and slipping sweater quote pinup photography, but the image is too odd to function as ordinary seduction. The goat interrupts the expected exchange between model and viewer. Its direct stare breaks the fantasy, as though it knows exactly why the photograph has been staged and finds the viewer’s response predictable.
“Pornodelic Opium Dreams” turns that interruption into music. The title sounds like a lost European exploitation film whose poster promised far more corruption than the budget could deliver. Psychedelia, pornography, and narcotics are fused into one invented genre, and the song drifts accordingly.
A slow groove supports soft vocals and liquid guitar, creating an atmosphere that is erotic without becoming energetic. Desire has been sedated. Everything feels warm, but the warmth carries the heaviness of a room from which fresh air has been excluded.
The album repeatedly treats intoxication as both liberation and enclosure. Psychedelic sound opens visual space, but the riffs keep the body pinned beneath it. Opium dreams may provide escape from war, history, and identity, yet the dream remains dependent upon chemical repetition.
“Voodoo Woman” uses another familiar exploitation-era figure, but Devil’s Witches approaches her through groove rather than horror. The guitar line has a ritual circularity, while the vocal remains distant and devotional. She is not described with psychological realism. She appears as an image powerful enough to reorganize the song around itself.
The risk is obvious. Velvet Magic gathers Native American, Haitian, Asian, and occult references with the freedom of vintage pulp culture, where any spiritual tradition could become exotic fuel for a Western fantasy. The album does not seriously investigate those cultures. It uses their images as parts of its psychedelic mythology.
That limitation is inseparable from the record’s aesthetic. Devil’s Witches is rebuilding the cultural debris of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the period’s fascination with war footage, imported religion, drugs, sexual liberation, and cheap occult cinema. Velvet Magic recreates not only the era’s creative freedom but also its careless appetite.
“Mountain of the Devil’s Witch” gives the project its name and one of the album’s strongest compositions. The song begins in a broad psychedelic space before the riff grows heavier, making the mountain feel less like a physical location than a magnetic force.
The Devil’s Witch is both resident and landscape. She occupies the mountain while also becoming the reason the mountain appears threatening. Guitars rise around her in repeated waves, their fuzz thick enough to blur the boundary between riff and atmosphere.
The cover may be showing this witch outside the mountain’s expected setting. She has left the cave, forest, or stone altar and entered a photography studio. The goat has followed. Evil has discovered interior decorating.
“Jupiter Kush” expands the drug imagery beyond Earth. Kush identifies cannabis and a mountain region, while Jupiter supplies planetary scale, storms, and astrological authority. The title alone summarizes Devil’s Witches’ method: two suggestive words joined until they produce an entire imagined film.
The track is hazier and less aggressive, with guitar effects creating the sensation of drifting beyond the album’s military landscape. Yet the bass and drums retain enough weight to keep the voyage physical. Space is not clean or futuristic. It is sticky, orange, and filled with amplifier smoke.
The title track gathers the record’s aesthetic into one phrase. Velvet suggests luxury, softness, touch, theater curtains, and darkness that absorbs light. Magic suggests transformation without visible mechanism. Together they describe fuzz guitar perfectly. The notes remain recognizable, but their edges have been covered in warm distortion.
“Velvet Magic” moves slowly enough for every guitar tone to linger. The voice seems to emerge from behind the instruments, less a narrator than somebody already trapped inside the spell. The song does not climax through dramatic acceleration. It deepens the same atmosphere until the listener has forgotten where the room began.
“Requiem Pour Un Vampire” closes the album by invoking Jean Rollin’s 1971 film, one of the great monuments of European erotic horror. Rollin’s work used castles, cemeteries, beaches, ruined architecture, blood, and dreamlike female figures to build stories that often operated through visual mood more than conventional logic.
Devil’s Witches shares that method. Velvet Magic does not need every lyrical image to connect through a stable plot. A goat, soldier, motorcycle, witch, opium pipe, vampire, and distant planet can occupy the same emotional continuity because the album treats atmosphere as narrative.
The closing piece is appropriately mournful and cinematic. Guitar moves through a slow procession while the album’s erotic warmth begins cooling into death. The vampire receives a requiem, but the ceremony also feels directed toward the entire fantasy world the record has created.
The cover remains the album’s perfect visual portal because it never chooses between parody and devotion. The orange border and “Psychic Stereo Recording” text imitate the commercial language of vintage hi-fi products, promising an enhanced listening experience while the central image quietly destroys normality.
The typography is thick and curved, recalling psychedelic posters and inexpensive records marketed through instantly recognizable style. The design appears friendly from across the room. Only when the image is examined closely does the horned animal begin taking control.
Velvet Magic belongs to the post-Electric Wizard world of occult heavy rock, where exploitation films, vintage pornography, fuzz pedals, and satanic imagery became a complete visual language. Devil’s Witches could easily have produced an album of competent imitation.
Instead, the debut succeeds because its imagery and sound are unusually unified. The riffs feel the same color as the cover. The vocals possess the softness of the sweater, the guitars carry the goat’s coarse hair, and the drums move with the calm certainty of its stare.
The album’s greatest trick is making menace comfortable. Velvet covers the furniture. Orange light warms the walls. The woman reclines without concern. The goat waits beside her, horns spiraling upward like antennae receiving instructions from Jupiter.
Nothing appears wrong until the listener notices that the door is no longer visible.

Melvins - 2013 - A Tribute to Throbbing Gristle

 

Amphetamine Reptile Records – Scale 142

“Heathen Earth” does not sound like the Melvins dragging a Throbbing Gristle song into the rehearsal room and covering it with distorted guitar. There was no single composition called “Heathen Earth” to reproduce. The title belonged to Throbbing Gristle’s 1980 live album, recorded before a small invited audience and built from primitive electronics, rhythm boxes, cornet, processed voices and the sensation of witnessing machinery discover an appetite. The Melvins tribute approaches that entire environment as raw material.
Buzz Osborne reportedly performed the piece alone, removing the familiar Melvins machinery of Dale Crover’s drums and the band’s enormous bass weight. That absence is immediately important. Anyone expecting sludge receives a damaged electronic room instead. Pulses flicker without becoming a dependable beat. Low tones spread like heat from old equipment. Buzz’s voice appears less as a frontman than as another object caught inside the circuit.
The Melvins have always shared more territory with Throbbing Gristle than their guitar sound initially suggests. Both bands understand repetition as pressure. Both use humor without allowing humor to make the work harmless. Both can take one ugly sound, continue it beyond good manners and discover that duration changes annoyance into hypnosis.
“Heathen Earth” concentrates that relationship into four minutes. It does not imitate TG’s exact equipment or reconstruct the original live session. Instead, it asks what Throbbing Gristle’s method might sound like after passing through Buzz’s sense of timing. Small electronic figures return with the stubbornness of riffs, even when no guitar is present. Noise accumulates in blocks, pauses and resumes from a slightly altered angle.
The result is restrained by Melvins standards, but never calm. Its emptiness feels monitored. Every scrape, pulse and vocal fragment seems to have been left in a dark room with a tape recorder running, waiting to see which one moves first.
The single-sided 7-inch is an ideal format for this little experiment. One brief track occupies the playable surface while the reverse offers no answering song, no conventional B-side and no attempt to turn the object into a balanced miniature album. It behaves more like a test pressing from an alternate Melvins history, where the band formed around mail-order electronics rather than Kiss records and Black Sabbath riffs.
That physical incompleteness also suits Throbbing Gristle. Industrial Records releases often treated format, packaging and playback as part of the action rather than neutral delivery systems. Amphetamine Reptile’s limited tribute series follows the same principle. The object is excessive in scarcity and modest in duration, a collectible artifact carrying four minutes of deliberately anti-spectacular sound.
As a tribute, “Heathen Earth” succeeds because it avoids dressing up as its subject. Buzz does not perform Genesis P-Orridge’s voice or force recognizable TG samples into a sludge-metal arrangement. He studies the permission Throbbing Gristle created: the permission to treat discomfort, amateur electronics, dead space and crude repetition as a complete musical language.
The piece is too short to become oppressive in the way TG could be oppressive. It resembles a door opened briefly onto that world, then slammed before the listener can determine the room’s dimensions. Yet the residue remains. The Melvins’ heaviness is revealed as something larger than amplifiers. Remove the riffs and drums, and the same fascination with weight, irritation and unstable comedy survives inside the electronics.
“Heathen Earth” does not make the Melvins sound like Throbbing Gristle. It makes clear that the infection had already been there for decades.

Melvins - 2015 - A Tribute to the Jam

 

Amphetamine Reptile Records – Scale 137

The Melvins’ tribute to The Jam begins by removing nearly everything polite, stylish, and sharply tailored from “Art School.” Paul Weller’s original was a compact declaration of independence, driven by youthful impatience and the belief that creativity mattered more than institutional approval. The Melvins retain the song’s sneer but replace its clean mod velocity with distorted mass. Buzz Osborne’s guitar does not slash through the arrangement so much as occupy the entire room, turning a two-minute punk challenge into something heavier, slower, and more sarcastic.
The choice makes sense because The Jam and the Melvins share more than their sounds initially reveal. Both bands understood that a short song could carry aggression without becoming shapeless. Both distrusted fashionable scenes even while becoming central to them. Weller attacked empty art-school posturing from inside punk’s first wave; Buzz spent decades treating underground orthodoxy as something to mock, bend, or flatten beneath a riff.
“Art School” therefore survives the transformation because its central irritation remains intact. The Melvins do not reproduce The Jam’s crisp guitar or youthful urgency. They make the song sound older, heavier, and less convinced that rebellion will produce a useful future. The complaint remains, but the optimism hidden inside the original has been bruised.
“The Modern World” receives a similarly thickened treatment. The Jam’s version moved quickly, announcing the present tense with the confidence of a young band demanding recognition. In the Melvins’ hands, modernity sounds less exciting than stupidly persistent. The riff drags its weight behind it, while the vocal delivery emphasizes contempt over celebration.
HAZE XXL’s involvement makes the single feel inseparable from Amphetamine Reptile rather than merely another Melvins covers exercise. His voice and guitar add a rough communal edge, turning the performances into a collision between British punk history and the abrasive American underground that AmRep helped cultivate. Dale Crover keeps the songs moving without cleaning them up, hitting with enough snap to preserve the originals’ compact structures beneath the distortion.
Then comes “Batman,” the tiny curveball that prevents the tribute from becoming overly respectful. Neal Hefti’s famous television theme has been covered endlessly, but the Melvins understand its primitive perfection: one riff, one word, repetition, impact. It is practically a garage-rock blueprint and therefore fits naturally beside early Jam material.
The band treats it as blunt comic relief without making it disposable. “Batman” becomes a reminder that punk, surf music, television themes, novelty records, and heavy riffs have always shared secret tunnels. The Melvins have spent their career crawling through those tunnels with a flashlight and a damaged amplifier.
The seven-inch format keeps everything properly concentrated. Three quick songs, splattered vinyl, clown artwork by HAZE XXL and Mackie Osborne, and no attempt to present the tribute as an authoritative interpretation of The Jam. This is affection expressed through vandalism.
The Melvins do not dress like mods, reproduce Weller’s tone, or pretend to recover 1977. They take the songs’ impatience, hooks, and refusal of approval, then force them through their own machinery. The suits are gone. The scooters are gone. The melodies remain underneath several tons of fuzz.

Melvins - 2013 - A Tribute to Venom

 

Amphetamine Reptile Records – Scale 143

The Melvins’ tribute to Venom works because nobody involved mistakes primitive music for simple music. “Warhead” and “In League with Satan” were never technically elaborate songs, but Venom’s power came from how rhythm, distortion, arrogance, and bad intentions were forced into one unstable object. The Melvins preserve that instability while making both tracks feel substantially heavier, slower, and more physically dangerous.
“Warhead” opens with the original song’s unmistakable martial riff, but Buzz Osborne gives every chord more mass. Venom’s 1984 version moved like a homemade armored vehicle bouncing down a damaged road, fast enough to feel threatening and crude enough to suggest that pieces might fly off. The Melvins version turns the same vehicle into a tank attempting to crawl through wet concrete.
Dale Crover’s drums are central to that transformation. He does not treat the song as a historical speed-metal exercise or imitate Abaddon’s loose attack. His playing gives the riff a broader, harder impact, emphasizing the spaces between strikes and allowing each repetition to gather weight. “Warhead” becomes less a warning shouted from the horizon than the sound of the weapon already parked outside.
Scott Kelly is an inspired choice for vocals. His rough, commanding voice possesses none of Cronos’ gleeful theatrical sneer, but replacing that personality with Kelly’s exhausted severity reveals another possibility inside the song. The chorus no longer sounds like delinquent celebration. It sounds like an order issued by somebody who has watched the world repeatedly choose destruction.
“In League with Satan” is even more important because it contains so much of Venom’s legacy in miniature. The backward opening voice, filthy central riff, crude satanic declaration, and complete refusal of tasteful presentation provided an early blueprint for black metal before the genre had established its borders.
The Melvins do not polish that blueprint. They enlarge its ugliness. Buzz’s guitar and bass make the riff feel swollen and diseased, while Crover turns the rhythm into a slow ceremonial stomp. Kelly’s vocal removes the adolescent thrill from the lyric and replaces it with something older and grimmer. Being “in league with Satan” no longer resembles a shocking slogan painted on a school desk. It sounds like a contract whose terms have finally become visible.
The pairing also reveals the deep connection between Venom and the Melvins. Both bands understand that repetition becomes heavier when played past the point of politeness. Both use humor without weakening the force of the music. Both have survived partly because they never depended upon technical perfection or one approved genre identity.
Venom gave extreme metal permission to be dirty, loud, ridiculous, and completely convinced of itself. The Melvins took that permission into slower territory, discovering that one damaged riff could become an entire environment if the band remained inside it long enough.
The seven-inch format keeps the tribute properly blunt. Two songs, one splattered piece of vinyl, clown artwork, and no attempt to explain Venom’s historical importance through reverent packaging. The respect is audible in the refusal to make the songs respectable.
The Melvins do not restore Venom. They place the old machine under heavier pressure and listen as the bolts begin pulling through the metal.

Melvins - 2013 - A Tribute to Roxy Music

 

Amphetamine Reptile Records – Scale 141

“In Every Dream Home a Heartache” was already one of Roxy Music’s strangest songs before the Melvins touched it. Bryan Ferry delivers the original like a luxury-home salesman slowly revealing that the immaculate property has become a spiritual prison. Penthouse perfection, modern appliances, and expensive surfaces surround a narrator whose closest emotional relationship is with an inflatable doll. Consumer desire has furnished every room and left nobody alive inside it.
The Melvins do not coat that idea in ordinary sludge. They preserve the song’s slow theatrical entrance, then stretch its discomfort until the dream home begins resembling a bunker. Buzz Osborne’s guitar hangs back during the opening, allowing bass, Stylophone, and small electronic textures to create an artificial domestic calm. Everything feels arranged, wiped clean, and slightly airless.
Jello Biafra is the perfect replacement for Ferry because he does not attempt Ferry’s smooth, aristocratic detachment. His voice sounds pinched, fascinated, and deeply suspicious. He delivers the lyrics like a narrator giving a guided tour while privately expecting the walls to start bleeding.
That performance changes the song’s social character. Ferry sounds trapped by cultivated luxury. Biafra sounds like someone investigating luxury as evidence of a crime. Every phrase about disposable beauty and manufactured companionship acquires a sharp political sneer, but he never flattens the song into a lecture. The absurdity remains seductive.
Kevin Rutmanis gives the track its crawling center. His bass does not merely support the arrangement. It moves through the dream home like faulty plumbing inside the walls, a dark pressure beneath the immaculate décor. Dale Crover plays with remarkable restraint, refusing to announce the inevitable explosion too early.
When the full riff finally arrives, the Melvins make the original climax feel less like release than structural failure. Buzz’s guitar expands into enormous distorted chords while Crover begins striking with the force withheld during the opening minutes. The luxurious apartment is no longer a sealed showroom. Every appliance has switched on simultaneously, the electrical system is melting, and the inflatable companion is watching from the sofa.
The extended ending is where the tribute becomes completely Melvins. Roxy Music’s version also erupts, but the Melvins remain inside the riff until repetition turns it into architecture. They understand that heaviness is not simply volume. It is the refusal to leave after a sound has become uncomfortable.
The single-sided 7-inch strengthens the joke. One long song occupies the entire playable side, with no B-side restoring balance or offering a quick second interpretation. The object is excessive and incomplete at once, a tiny luxury product containing a bloated meditation on luxury products.
HAZE XXL and Mackie Osborne’s clown-series artwork keeps the tribute from becoming reverent museum work. Roxy Music’s sleeves were famously elegant, erotic, and meticulously styled. The Melvins answer with crude collectible grotesquery, replacing high-fashion sophistication with Amphetamine Reptile’s handmade visual abrasion.
Yet the performance shows genuine affection. The Melvins recognize that Roxy Music was never merely glamorous pop. Beneath the polish were alienation, electronics, art-school provocation, and songs willing to become genuinely unpleasant.
“In Every Dream Home a Heartache” already contained a Melvins song hidden inside it: one ugly idea, one patient build, and one riff repeated until the room can no longer support its weight.
The Melvins simply remove the tasteful furniture and let the ceiling come down.

Melvins - 2014 - A Tribute to Queen

Amphetamine Reptile Records – Scale 140

The Melvins’ tribute to Queen begins with one of the least likely songs imaginable. “You’re My Best Friend” is a glowing John Deacon composition built from electric piano, soft harmony, and the uncomplicated joy of finding another person who makes ordinary life bearable. The Melvins approach it without treating sincerity as something requiring mockery. They thicken the song, slow its bounce, and allow its sweetness to survive beneath enough distorted weight to flatten a small automobile.
Caleb Benjamin takes the lead vocal, avoiding any disastrous attempt to impersonate Freddie Mercury. His delivery is straightforward and slightly battered, which changes the song from polished romantic devotion into affection expressed by somebody standing in a garage surrounded by damaged amplifiers. The melody remains recognizable, but its elegance has been replaced by warmth of a rougher kind.
Buzz Osborne’s guitar turns the original’s gentle harmonic movement into broad slabs while Jared Warren’s bass supplies the low-end shove expected from the Big Business-era lineup. Dale Crover and Coady Willis create the double-drum mass, but they do not bury the tune beneath percussion. Their playing enlarges the pulse while preserving the strange buoyancy hidden inside the heavier arrangement.
Toshi Kasai’s keyboards are essential because they keep a faint connection to Queen’s original color. The electric-piano character has not vanished completely. It has simply been forced to share the room with fuzz, two drummers, and a band constitutionally incapable of leaving clean surfaces untouched.
“Now I’m Here” is much closer to what anyone might expect from a Queen tribute by the Melvins. Brian May’s original already contains a stomping riff, theatrical pauses, stacked voices, and enough hard-rock muscle to survive aggressive reinterpretation. The Melvins do not need to rebuild it. They only make it heavier and slightly less civilized.
The riff becomes less of an arena entrance and more of a machine repeatedly striking the stage floor. Buzz understands May’s gift for constructing guitar parts that feel monumental without becoming complicated. He preserves the central shape, then increases its physical density until the title sounds like a warning.
Queen’s performance announces arrival through glamour and confidence. The Melvins version announces that something large has appeared and may not fit through the doorway. Crover and Willis make every stop feel dangerous, while Warren’s bass turns the spaces between chords into additional impact.
The pairing is what makes the seven-inch work. One side takes Queen’s tenderness seriously enough to damage it carefully. The other recognizes that Queen’s theatrical hard rock already contained the architecture required for Melvins heaviness.
HAZE XXL and Mackie Osborne’s clown artwork removes any possibility of respectful museum presentation. Queen’s visual world involved crowns, heraldry, stage lights, and immaculate design. Amphetamine Reptile answers with grotesque faces and splattered vinyl.
Yet the music is affectionate. The Melvins do not reduce Queen to camp or treat technical brilliance as an excuse for parody. They hear the durable songwriting beneath the grandeur.
The crown has been dropped into the mud, but the songs keep shining through it.

 

Melvins - 2013 - A Tribute to Pop-O-Pies

 

Amphetamine Reptile Records – Scale 139

“Timothy Leary Lives” is exactly the kind of song the Melvins should cover: repetitive, aggravating, historically peculiar and balanced somewhere between a joke and a legitimate experiment in endurance. Pop-O-Pies emerged from the early San Francisco punk underground with a method that treated limited material as a creative advantage. Their first years became notorious for stretching a punk version of the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” across entire performances, testing how much identity could be built from one song repeated beyond reasonable limits.
The Melvins understand that impulse completely. Their version of “Timothy Leary Lives” does not attempt to transform Pop-O-Pies into something more respectable or technically impressive. Buzz Osborne grips the song’s primitive central movement and allows repetition to perform the work. Each return becomes heavier, stranger and slightly funnier because the band refuses to behave as though a more sophisticated destination is required.
Trevor Dunn’s double bass gives the track a wonderfully awkward physical foundation. Instead of a familiar electric-bass grind, the strings thump and scrape beneath Buzz’s guitar, making the song sound handmade and slightly unstable. Dale Crover keeps the rhythm blunt enough to preserve the original punk simplicity while adding the unmistakable weight of the Melvins.
The title carries its own period mythology. Timothy Leary became a portable symbol for psychedelic liberation, irresponsible drug evangelism, countercultural optimism and the moment when altered consciousness became public spectacle. Declaring that Leary lives turns the man into an idea capable of surviving every attempt to ridicule or institutionalize it.
The Melvins do not treat that survival reverently. Their performance sounds like a chant overheard from a basement whose occupants have repeated the phrase long enough to forget whether they believe it. Psychedelic revolution has become a stubborn riff, still alive partly because nobody bothered to switch off the amplifier.
“Romance,” originally by Sacramento’s Tales of Terror, carries a different kind of Bay Area damage. Tales of Terror played punk with the recklessness of a band treating the stage as a temporary accident zone. Their music was fast, filthy and funny, but never controlled enough to become tidy hardcore.
The Melvins slow that recklessness just enough to reveal the ugliness inside the song. “Romance” does not bloom into tenderness. The title becomes sarcastic, a label attached to damaged affection and impulsive behavior. Buzz’s guitar gives the track more density while Crover pounds beneath it with the force of somebody dismantling the room around the relationship.
Dunn’s vocal contribution adds another unstable personality rather than smoothing the performance into one recognizable Melvins voice. The tribute feels communal, connecting musicians whose histories run through punk, experimental music, jazz and the wider underground without turning those connections into a solemn family tree.
Pairing Pop-O-Pies and Tales of Terror is inspired because both bands represented versions of punk that resisted clean historical packaging. Pop-O-Pies used conceptual repetition, parody and musical limitation. Tales of Terror used speed, chaos and self-destructive humor. Neither fits comfortably inside the simplified story of hardcore becoming faster, stricter and increasingly serious.
The Melvins inherited both freedoms. They learned that one riff could become an entire world and that punk could remain ridiculous without becoming harmless. Their heaviness was never built from metal alone. It grew from underground bands willing to repeat bad ideas until they became great ones.
The seven-inch preserves that lineage without embalming it. Two songs, red-splattered vinyl, grotesque clown artwork and no lecture about historical importance. The Melvins pay respect in the most appropriate way possible: they grab the songs, increase the weight and leave fingerprints all over them.
Timothy Leary still lives. Romance remains dead on arrival. Somewhere between them, Bay Area punk continues laughing at its own funeral.

Melvins - 2013 - A Tribute to the Kinks

 

Amphetamine Reptile Records – Scale 138

The Melvins’ tribute to The Kinks begins with “Attitude,” a late-period Ray Davies song that already sounds irritated enough to belong in Buzz Osborne’s hands. The original appeared on Low Budget in 1979, when The Kinks had moved far from the brittle English pop of their earliest records and into louder, heavier American arena rock. The Melvins do not need to excavate a hidden metal song from beneath delicate production. “Attitude” arrives carrying its own clenched jaw.

Buzz strips away Ray Davies’ theatrical social observation and makes the complaint feel more physical. The central riff becomes broader and uglier, with Jared Warren’s bass pushing beneath it while Dale Crover and Coady Willis add the massive rhythmic footprint associated with the Big Business-era Melvins. Clem Burke’s presence adds another unexpected connection to late-1970s rock, linking The Kinks’ arena period, Blondie’s precision, and the Melvins’ habit of turning respectable songcraft into damaged machinery.

The lyric’s repeated accusation survives because Buzz has spent his entire career sounding suspicious of anybody whose posture exceeds their usefulness. “Attitude” becomes less a character sketch than a blunt confrontation. The Melvins do not polish the sarcasm. They repeat it until the word itself starts feeling like something heavy being dropped down a stairwell.

“Victoria” reaches much deeper into The Kinks’ history. Originally released in 1969, it opens Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), Ray Davies’ ambitious examination of imperial nostalgia, suburban life, war, migration, and the strange comfort people take in national mythology.

The original song sounds jubilant while quietly undermining the empire it appears to celebrate. Its bright guitar, charging rhythm, and shouted name create the feeling of patriotic excitement, but Davies fills the verses with conquest, class, and geographical possession. The anthem keeps smiling while its teeth become visible.

The Melvins are perfectly suited to that contradiction. They preserve the song’s forward drive but replace its crisp British rock attack with fuzz and percussion dense enough to make the empire sound physically unstable. Buzz does not imitate Davies’ clipped delivery. He sings like somebody reading an official proclamation after discovering termites inside the podium.

The enlarged rhythm section turns “Victoria” into a parade whose participants have lost control of the route. Drums pound beneath the familiar melody while Warren’s bass gives the chorus a heavy, rolling foundation. The song remains catchy, but its triumph now carries the sound of masonry beginning to crack.

Pairing “Attitude” and “Victoria” gives the single a useful historical spread. One comes from The Kinks’ muscular late-1970s phase, the other from the elaborate conceptual songwriting of their late-1960s peak. The Melvins flatten neither period into generic fuzz rock. They recognize the riffs, hooks, humor, and concealed hostility already present in Davies’ writing.

The clown artwork and splattered-vinyl format prevent the tribute from behaving like heritage-rock worship. The Kinks have been canonized as clever English observers, but the Melvins return the songs to the garage, where sarcasm, repetition, and one rude guitar sound can still do most of the work.

Victoria keeps ruling. The attitude remains terrible. The empire now has three drummers hammering on its foundations.

Melvins - 2013 - A Tribute to the Scientists

 

Amphetamine Reptile Records – Scale 135

The Melvins’ tribute to The Scientists begins in exactly the correct place: “Swampland,” a song that already sounded waterlogged, diseased and half buried before Buzz Osborne added another ton of mud. The Scientists’ original replaced punk’s straight-line velocity with something slower and more poisonous. Kim Salmon’s guitar scraped against a rhythm that seemed to stagger through humidity, while the song’s repeated descent created an entire landscape from a handful of notes.
The Melvins do not radically redesign that landscape because their own music grew from similar ground. Buzz makes the riff broader and heavier, but he preserves its skeletal shape. Each chord hangs in the air before dropping into the next, giving the song the sensation of something large moving beneath dark water.
Dale Crover’s drumming is restrained by Melvins standards. He does not bury the track beneath fills or turn the swamp into a demolition site. His beat remains blunt and deliberate, providing just enough motion to keep the music crawling forward.
Mark Arm is the perfect vocalist because The Scientists formed part of the genetic material from which Mudhoney emerged. His voice carries punk irritation, garage-rock damage and the cracked enthusiasm of someone who has spent decades understanding that ugliness can be enormously catchy. He does not imitate Kim Salmon. He sounds like a Northwest singer acknowledging one of the Australian bands that helped show his generation where punk could go after speed stopped being the only destination.
“Swampland” becomes less ghostly in the Melvins’ hands, but considerably more physical. The original appears from mist. This version arrives with mud attached to its boots.
“Set It on Fire” moves faster and brings The Scientists’ garage-punk skeleton closer to the surface. Its riff has the primitive force of early rock and roll pushed through damaged amplifiers, while the title turns destruction into the simplest possible instruction.
The Melvins preserve that economy. Buzz does not add an elaborate bridge or slow the song into a ten-minute crawl. He recognizes that the track works because its riff, command and momentum all point in the same direction.
Arm attacks the refrain with considerably more excitement than menace. The result sounds celebratory, as though burning the structure might be the fastest way to improve the party. Crover gives the rhythm extra weight without reducing its snap, and the performance ends before repetition can become a full Melvins endurance test.
The two songs show different sides of The Scientists. “Swampland” captures the narcotic crawl, sexual threat and diseased blues that defined their classic Sydney period. “Set It on Fire” retains the ragged punk impulse beneath that later atmosphere.
They also reveal why The Scientists mattered so much to the American underground. The band proved punk could slow down, become primitive again and find new violence inside blues repetition. Their influence traveled through Mudhoney, grunge, noise rock and the entire swampy underside of alternative music.
The seven-inch returns that influence through the people who absorbed it. Mark Arm supplies the direct historical connection, while the Melvins reveal how close their own heavy repetition had always been to The Scientists’ poisoned groove.
The clown artwork and splattered vinyl keep the tribute from becoming respectful museum culture. The Scientists do not need polishing or preservation beneath glass. Their songs need to be played by people willing to get them dirty again.
The swamp was already deep. The Melvins simply step into it wearing heavier boots.

Melvins - 2014 - A Tribute to David Bowie

 

Amphetamine Reptile Records – Scale 136

The Melvins’ tribute to David Bowie begins with the train already moving. “Station to Station” was one of Bowie’s great machines, a long, cold procession joining soul music, European electronics, cocaine paranoia, occult imagery, and the arrival of the Thin White Duke. The Melvins preserve its forward motion but replace Bowie’s glacial elegance with something heavier, dirtier, and more physically unstable.
Buzz Osborne’s guitar does not imitate Carlos Alomar’s clipped funk or attempt to reproduce the original’s polished architecture. He treats the song’s central progression as a massive repeating structure, increasing its weight until every return feels like another railcar joining the train. Dale Crover keeps the rhythm deliberate, understanding that the song’s power comes from momentum rather than speed.
J.G. Thirlwell is the crucial choice. He does not impersonate Bowie’s distant aristocratic delivery. His voice is harsher, more theatrical, and faintly unhinged, making the Thin White Duke sound less like an immaculate fascist mannequin and more like a master of ceremonies shouting from inside an industrial furnace.
Thirlwell has spent his own career combining orchestration, noise, repetition, grotesque humor, and authoritarian performance. “Station to Station” already contained all of those possibilities. The Melvins simply pull them closer to the surface.
The Stylophone and keyboards preserve a trace of Bowie’s synthetic chill while the rhythm section keeps dragging the song back toward the body. Electronics flicker around the riff like warning lights inside a tunnel. The train is luxurious, but something is burning beneath the dining car.
“Breaking Glass” is a much shorter and more violent object. Bowie’s original from Low lasts less than two minutes, a fragment built from clipped guitar, fractured rhythm, and lyrics suggesting domestic cruelty without explaining it. The song ends before its scene can become a complete narrative.
The Melvins understand that incompleteness. They do not expand “Breaking Glass” into a long sludge exercise or force it to support more meaning than it can carry. Buzz makes the guitar thicker, Crover hits with greater weight, and Thirlwell delivers the words with the delighted menace of someone admitting damage while refusing remorse.
The title itself is perfect Melvins material. Breaking glass is brief, loud, irreversible, and followed by dangerous fragments. It creates an event whose consequences remain scattered across the floor after the sound has stopped.
The pairing captures two opposite sides of Bowie. “Station to Station” is monumental, controlled, and mythological. “Breaking Glass” is tiny, nervous, and brutally domestic. The Melvins make both songs sound like products of the same damaged machinery.
The Amphetamine Reptile clown artwork prevents the record from becoming tasteful Bowie worship. Bowie’s sleeves constructed identities through fashion, photography, typography, and immaculate control. HAZE XXL and Mackie Osborne answer with grotesque collectible faces and splattered vinyl.
Yet the performances are deeply respectful. The Melvins recognize that Bowie’s music was already strange, heavy, repetitive, and willing to place beauty beside ugliness without explaining the relationship.
The train crosses the European night. Glass breaks somewhere inside it. Thirlwell keeps announcing the next station while Buzz makes the engine heavier than the tracks were designed to hold.

Alberich - 2013 - Machine Gun Nest Cassette Works, Vol. 0

 

Hospital Productions – HOS-394  219.12MB FLAC

Machine Gun Nest opens with “Gold,” which is exactly the wrong material for the world Alberich constructs. Gold suggests wealth, permanence, ornament and ceremonial value. The track offers none of those comforts. A low synthesizer figure hangs inside a dim electronic room while sharper tones pulse around it, creating the sensation of light being generated by equipment that has outlived its operators. The sound is beautiful, but its beauty belongs to an emergency system blinking inside an evacuated building.
That opening immediately complicates the title. A machine-gun nest is a fortified position designed to control territory through concentrated fire. It implies repetition, limited visibility, mechanical discipline and a body placed behind a weapon whose rhythm can exceed ordinary human action. Alberich’s music shares those qualities, but Machine Gun Nest is not simply thirty-five minutes of rapid electronic attack. The record alternates between firing positions, ruined interiors and stretches of suspended aftermath.
The album gathers cassette-era work into a sequence that reveals how many distinct forms Kris Lapke could force through Alberich’s military-industrial vocabulary. Power electronics, synth-punk, noise, minimal techno, martial rhythm and cold synthesizer atmosphere sit beside one another without forming a polite survey. Everything feels connected by pressure, repetition and the sense that technology has been given an emotional task it cannot complete cleanly.
“Snow Is Falling in the Ruins of Stalingrad” turns one of the twentieth century’s most catastrophic battlefields into a frozen electronic image. The title is cinematic enough to risk historical kitsch, but the music does not attempt to reenact combat through gunfire samples or shouted orders. It works through accumulation.
A blunt rhythmic structure advances beneath distortion while the surrounding frequencies resemble wind passing through broken masonry. The snow does not purify the ruins. It covers evidence, softens outlines and creates the appearance of stillness where unimaginable violence has occurred.
Alberich repeatedly uses military imagery this way. The titles establish geography, hierarchy or conflict, but the electronics refuse straightforward illustration. A track may suggest machinery, troop movement or institutional space without resolving into soundtrack realism. The listener receives the psychological weather of militarization rather than a sequence of dramatic effects.
The Stalingrad title also exposes the unease built into this entire aesthetic. Industrial and power-electronics culture has often treated uniforms, warfare and authoritarian language as materials capable of producing immediate severity. Historical catastrophe can become visual shorthand for seriousness.
Machine Gun Nest is strongest when the sound exceeds that shorthand. “Snow Is Falling” matters not because Stalingrad automatically makes music profound, but because its rhythm and frozen texture create a convincing tension between ongoing mechanical force and a landscape that appears motionless.
“Open Warfare” strips away even that distance. Its title announces conflict without specifying sides, goals or territory. The track moves with the ugly confidence of synth-punk, built around a repeating electronic pattern whose momentum is closer to a diseased club track than conventional power electronics.
The beat is not clean enough to offer release. Distortion clings to every impact, and the vocal material appears damaged by processing until command and panic become difficult to separate. The track can move a body, but the movement feels compulsory. Dancing becomes another drill performed inside the fortified position.
That rhythmic intelligence separates Alberich from projects that treat sheer volume as sufficient evidence of power. Lapke understands that repetition becomes more oppressive when it is organized. A distorted pulse returning at exact intervals can create more dread than a continuous wall because it teaches the nervous system when to expect the next impact.
“Rumbala” pushes that idea into a more direct power-electronics attack. Harsh frequencies pile around a central rhythmic force while the vocal is treated as another damaged transmission. The track feels packed tightly enough that every element rubs against the next, producing heat rather than space.
Yet the arrangement remains legible. Noise does not erase structure. A listener can hear the track tightening, opening slightly, then returning to compression. Alberich’s engineering is central to the effect. He does not simply overload the recording and hope distortion creates intensity. He shapes overload into architecture.
The title itself sounds unstable, perhaps a name, place or corrupted command. That ambiguity suits a record filled with language that appears authoritative before meaning has been confirmed. Military systems rely upon codes, acronyms, coordinates and phrases whose clarity belongs only to those operating inside them. Everyone else hears an instruction without possessing the key.
“No Mistake” is the album’s emotional center because it withdraws from obvious attack. A slow synthesizer movement rolls through gray space, carrying the exhausted calm that follows prolonged tension. The title sounds absolute, perhaps a declaration that an action was deliberate and cannot be excused as error.
The music does not share that certainty. Its tones drift, overlap and seem to lose their edges, producing a field where decisions have already been made but their consequences continue spreading. The track feels less like confidence than somebody repeating “no mistake” because doubt has become unbearable.
This is where Alberich’s melodic ability becomes impossible to dismiss. Beneath the project’s uniforms, weapons and industrial discipline is a strong instinct for mournful electronic harmony. Lapke can make one simple synthesizer progression carry more emotional weight than a wall of screamed accusation.
That contrast gives Machine Gun Nest unusual depth. The harsher pieces establish force, but the quieter tracks reveal the emptiness force leaves behind. Military power can seize ground, destroy structures and issue statements. It cannot create meaning from the resulting silence.
“Image of Progress” returns to rhythm through one of the record’s strongest industrial-techno structures. The title treats progress as an image rather than a reality, something staged, circulated and accepted because it looks persuasive from the correct angle.
The beat moves with mechanical efficiency, but haunted tones hover around it like information the official image has excluded. Progress may mean faster machinery, expanded infrastructure or greater control, yet the track sounds increasingly enclosed as its system becomes more efficient.
This is Alberich’s techno at its most effective. The pulse has enough depth for physical movement, but every surrounding texture argues against uncomplicated pleasure. The dance floor becomes a testing chamber where obedience and release temporarily resemble one another.
“Panerial” is sleazier and more compact. Its distorted electronic pattern has the snapped posture of synth-punk, while the vocal material seems to crawl through the rhythm rather than stand above it. The track feels urban, sexual and unpleasantly close.
Where the military titles create distance through historical or institutional scale, “Panerial” contracts the project into an overheated room. Technology is no longer a weapon system or industrial network. It is a crude private machine built to repeat one impulse until desire becomes indistinguishable from malfunction.
Alberich has always connected authority with damaged intimacy. Commands, uniforms and punishment do not remain abstract political subjects. They enter the body, reshape desire and turn personal relationships into smaller versions of institutional control.
“Virgins” closes the album with its most monumental piece. A slow, powerful pulse advances beneath rising synthesizer pressure, creating the sense of an enormous structure becoming visible through smoke. The track does not rush toward climax. It accumulates.
High tones flare above the rhythm while the lower frequencies continue striking with almost ceremonial patience. The title introduces purity into an environment that has spent the entire album corroding every clean surface. Whatever innocence the word once promised is placed inside machinery and forced to march.
The track grows until the synthesizers resemble a wall of heated metal, yet the central pulse remains steady. That stability makes the surrounding escalation feel even larger. The machine does not panic when the atmosphere catches fire. It continues performing its assigned cycle.
As a closer, “Virgins” gathers the album’s central contradictions into one severe image. Violence can be beautiful. Discipline can produce ecstasy. Repetition can become hypnotic enough that coercion feels temporarily like transcendence.
Machine Gun Nest works because it never allows those contradictions to settle comfortably. The record is physically exciting, and Alberich understands the allure of militarized imagery too well to pretend otherwise. The beats command attention. The synthesizers make ruined spaces look magnificent. The project’s visual and verbal language gives anonymous electronic systems the glamour of secret operations.
But the music repeatedly exposes the vacancy beneath that glamour. “Gold” glows in an empty room. Snow covers a dead city. “No Mistake” drifts through consequences that certainty cannot contain. The image of progress becomes another enclosed mechanism.
The cassette origins matter because this music was initially distributed as fragments, small objects carrying limited runs of highly concentrated material. A cassette is portable, vulnerable and easily copied, but it also imposes duration through physical tape moving past a head. Alberich’s repetitions belong to that material process. The machine advances whether the listener feels prepared or not.
Collected into one album, the pieces reveal a project already capable of much more than uniform aggression. Lapke moves between punishment and melancholy, club rhythm and power electronics, crude pulse and careful synthesis without losing the project’s identity.
The identity is not simply military. It is the emotional condition produced when human longing has been reorganized by systems designed for control.
The fortified position remains occupied. Ammunition, wires and cold equipment surround the body inside it. Outside, snow settles across the ruins. Inside, the synthesizer keeps glowing gold.

Alberich - 2013 - Guard Tower: Cassette Works, Vol. 1

 

Hospital Productions – HOS354  356.81MB FLAC

Guard Tower begins before the guard has identified what he is watching. “Untitled 1” opens through a dense electrical haze, low pressure moving beneath sharper frequencies while distorted rhythm struggles to become visible. There is no named battlefield, military operation or psychological condition offered as a guide. Alberich establishes the position first: elevated, enclosed, armed with technology and separated from whatever may be approaching.
A guard tower is built to increase vision while reducing physical contact. The person inside can observe a large territory, issue warnings and direct force without standing on the same ground as the people below. It is architecture designed to transform distance into control.
Kris Lapke’s music repeatedly works through the same conversion. Synthesizers, sequencers, distortion and amplification create a position from which sound can be organized into zones of pressure. Rhythms patrol boundaries. Noise obscures movement. A voice may appear like a command transmitted from somewhere whose exact location remains hidden.
The two untitled tracks function as the tower’s interior before the landscape comes into focus. “Untitled 1” is comparatively suspended, its pulse half-buried beneath static and synthetic weight. The track does not attack directly. It establishes a state of readiness in which every sound might signal movement outside the walls.
“Untitled 2” is more exposed and abrasive. High frequencies scrape across a low industrial body while rough rhythmic forms appear and disappear. The track resembles equipment being tested after a long period of disuse, each circuit activated to determine whether the system can still respond.
Leaving these pieces unnamed prevents them from being converted too quickly into narrative. Alberich’s military language often gives tracks a severe conceptual frame, but the untitled opening reminds the listener that the project’s real force begins in sound. Distortion, repetition and pressure do not require a uniform to become oppressive.
“Rumbala” introduces a stronger rhythmic structure. The beat is thick, damaged and packed tightly beneath layers of noise, but it remains clear enough to seize the body. Alberich’s industrial rhythm does not provide the clean agreement expected from functional dance music. It offers movement under coercive conditions.
Every impact seems accompanied by debris. The kick lands, distortion spreads outward and smaller electronic fragments scatter around it. Instead of supporting the rhythm, noise makes the rhythm appear to fight for every repetition.
The title remains obscure, possibly a corrupted name, place or invented signal. That uncertainty suits the track’s atmosphere. Military and bureaucratic systems fill language with codes understood only by those inside the structure. To everyone else, the word carries authority without explanation.
“Paneriai” gives that authority a historical location. Paneriai, outside Vilnius, became the site of mass murder during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, where tens of thousands of people, most of them Jews, were killed in prepared pits. Alberich does not approach that history through documentary samples or mournful cinematic scoring. The track is blunt, clogged and relentlessly physical.
Its repeated industrial pulse suggests process rather than battle. That distinction is essential. Mass killing on such a scale required organization, transport, guarding, record keeping and the conversion of murder into routine labor. The track’s rhythm becomes frightening because it sounds procedural.
Yet the use of historical atrocity within industrial music remains ethically unstable. Naming Paneriai gives the recording immediate gravity, but gravity can become aesthetic currency when actual suffering is compressed into a severe title and hostile sound. Alberich does not solve that problem.
What prevents the track from becoming completely hollow is its refusal of spectacle. There are no sampled screams, speeches or gunshots arranged for dramatic climax. The sound stays ugly, repetitive and closed, offering no heroic observer’s position from which history can be consumed safely.
“Penis” abruptly relocates power from military history into anatomy. The title is almost stupidly direct, stripping away the coded seriousness surrounding the previous tracks. Its music is equally blunt, with a dense rhythmic structure grinding beneath abrasive electronic layers.
The body part becomes less an erotic object than a crude symbol of command, aggression, exposure and humiliation. Alberich’s work often connects institutional power with damaged masculinity, suggesting that military discipline and sexual compulsion may be different uniforms worn by the same desire for control.
The track’s repetition becomes intentionally graceless. There is no seduction, sensual pacing or release. The body has been reduced to mechanism, another instrument programmed to repeat an impulse after meaning has disappeared.
“Womb” answers that mechanism with one of the album’s most striking changes in atmosphere. Dark synthesizers spread around a heavily processed voice, and the rhythm loosens enough for melody to appear. The title introduces enclosure of another kind: not the fortified lookout position, but the first interior any body occupies.
A womb protects, nourishes and contains, but it can also become a symbol onto which fantasies of purity, dependency and return are projected. Alberich’s sound makes the space feel less maternal than technological. The voice seems suspended inside artificial fluid, wrapped in frequencies rather than flesh.
The relationship between “Penis” and “Womb” is deliberately crude, but the sequencing gives it force. One track reduces sexuality to aggressive repetition. The next imagines origin as enclosed darkness. Together they turn reproduction into another system of power, vulnerability and mechanical compulsion.
“Moist Nature” is the album’s longest piece and perhaps its most physically unpleasant title. Moisture suggests organic life, humidity, sweat, decay and surfaces that have not been allowed to dry. Nature here is not an open landscape beyond military architecture. It is something damp pressing against the structure from outside.
The track develops slowly through low-frequency pressure and unstable layers of electronic grain. A rhythm forms without fully hardening, leaving the piece between dark ambient suspension and industrial propulsion. Sounds accumulate like condensation on metal.
This is Guard Tower’s most atmospheric section, but it never becomes peaceful. The environment appears alive in a way the tower cannot completely monitor. Circuits can detect movement, lights can sweep the ground and weapons can cover the perimeter, yet moisture enters through seams.
The title undermines the fantasy of complete technological control. Nature does not need to attack the fortification directly. It corrodes, leaks, grows and alters the materials from which control has been built.
“Voice of Fire” gives the elemental force a language. A processed vocal moves through rising electronics while rhythmic pressure repeatedly tightens underneath. Fire is both weapon and signal, capable of destroying a structure or announcing danger across distance.
Calling it a voice suggests that destruction communicates more clearly than the people attempting to manage it. The sound does not resemble a human speaker calmly delivering information. It flares, distorts and consumes the space around it.
Alberich’s vocals rarely function as transparent storytelling. Words are pushed through saturation until command, confession and malfunction become inseparable. The voice carries authority while sounding damaged by the equipment granting that authority.
“To Be the Strongest” exposes the childish fantasy beneath so much militarized power. The title could belong to a soldier, athlete, bully, nation or frightened child who has learned to treat vulnerability as failure. Strength becomes valuable only because somebody else must be weaker.
The music is comparatively concise and forceful, built around an insistent pulse whose certainty begins sounding insecure through repetition. The phrase “to be the strongest” contains no natural ending. There will always be another challenge, rival or imagined threat requiring further proof.
That endless test is one of Guard Tower’s central psychological structures. The tower exists because danger may approach. Its continued existence requires danger to remain imaginable. A perfectly safe landscape would make the guard unnecessary.
“Open Warfare” closes the album by removing the final pretense of surveillance as prevention. The conflict is no longer hidden, anticipated or managed through distance. War has become explicit.
The track appeared in another form on Machine Gun Nest, but its placement here gives it a different meaning. On the earlier collection, the title functioned as direct assault. At the end of Guard Tower, it sounds like the failure built into the entire system.
The tower watched, classified, prepared and maintained readiness. None of those actions prevented warfare. They may have helped create the conditions under which warfare became the only imaginable conclusion.
Musically, “Open Warfare” carries a damaged synth-punk momentum, its rhythm direct enough to move a body while noise repeatedly contaminates the beat. The track is almost exhilarating, and that exhilaration is uncomfortable.
Alberich understands the seduction of force. Military imagery, distorted rhythm and authoritarian vocal performance can produce genuine physical excitement. Guard Tower does not stand outside that attraction and condemn it. The record uses the attraction, then reveals the isolation, sexual anxiety and permanent suspicion underneath it.
Compared with Machine Gun Nest, this collection feels less like concentrated fire and more like the infrastructure surrounding it. The earlier album moved between attack and aftermath. Guard Tower spends more time examining readiness, observation and the internal systems required to keep violence available.
Its long runtime matters. Nearly an hour inside these rhythms gradually changes aggression into environment. The listener stops hearing each impact as an event and begins inhabiting the logic that produces it.
Cassette origins remain audible in the collection’s rough surfaces. Tracks feel retrieved from different operations rather than polished into one seamless studio campaign. Distortion changes character, voices occupy different depths and the rhythmic machinery shifts from crude to highly organized.
That unevenness strengthens the album. A guard tower is not a perfect futuristic object. It contains cables, worn equipment, human fatigue and narrow windows through which the world must be interpreted.
The artwork and title reduce that structure to a symbol, but the sound fills it with an unstable body. The guard is not a neutral eye. He sweats, desires, fears and repeatedly tests the machinery because silence outside the tower has begun to feel threatening.
By the end of “Open Warfare,” the distinction between observation and participation has disappeared. The tower no longer watches the conflict. It has become one of the weapons sustaining it.
The searchlights continue moving across the ground. Moisture gathers inside the walls. A voice crackles through the radio and demands greater strength.
Nothing visible approaches, but the system fires anyway.

Alberich - 2013 - Fortification: Cassette Works, Vol. 2

 

Hospital Productions – HOS355  480.09MB FLAC

Fortification begins inside the body rather than behind a wall. “Body, Pt. 1” takes more than twelve minutes to establish a dense, low-frequency pressure through which corroded rhythm, electrical grit and suspended synthesizer tones slowly become visible. There is no dramatic command to advance and no obvious enemy approaching the perimeter. Alberich treats the body itself as the first defensive structure, a vulnerable enclosure hardened through tension until protection and imprisonment begin using the same materials.
A fortification is built because the surrounding world has been interpreted as hostile. Walls, trenches, bunkers and reinforced positions convert fear into architecture. They promise security by controlling movement, restricting vision and deciding which bodies may enter. Kris Lapke’s electronics perform a similar operation. Sound is divided into pressure zones, narrow passages and sealed chambers. Rhythm does not simply move forward. It establishes boundaries.
The three “Body” pieces originate from a 2005 cassette and occupy more than half an hour. Their scale immediately distinguishes Fortification from the compact strikes gathered on Machine Gun Nest. Alberich is not firing one concentrated burst and withdrawing. He remains inside one structure long enough for every vibration to become part of its internal climate.
“Body, Pt. 1” builds through gradual compression. Low tones accumulate until the recording feels physically crowded, while sharper frequencies scrape across them like metal dragged along reinforced concrete. The piece possesses rhythm without offering a dependable beat. Pulses appear, become partially obscured and return carrying additional distortion.
This instability makes the body feel less like an organic refuge than a damaged industrial chamber. Breath, heartbeat and nervous response have been translated into electrical functions whose reliability cannot be assumed. A low oscillation resembles circulation until another sound interrupts it. Repetition resembles heartbeat until its timing becomes too exact or too slow to remain human.
“Body, Pt. 2” is shorter and more exposed. The surrounding mass opens enough for individual electronic strikes to become visible, but that clarity does not create relief. The piece resembles inspection under hard light. Surfaces are examined for weakness while the person occupying them remains unable to leave.
Alberich’s interest in anatomy is never comfortably sensual. Earlier pieces such as “Penis” and “Womb” reduced sexuality and reproduction to systems of pressure, repetition and control. The “Body” sequence broadens that discomfort. The entire organism becomes contested territory.
A body can be trained, disciplined, starved, armored, punished and used as evidence of strength. Military institutions depend upon transforming individual bodies into standardized units capable of repeated action. Fortification hears that transformation from inside the flesh being reorganized.
“Body, Pt. 3” stretches past sixteen minutes and becomes the collection’s longest piece. Its duration allows the earlier pressure to evolve into something almost atmospheric, though Alberich’s atmosphere remains too abrasive for passive immersion. Layers move slowly, but they never settle.
The piece feels like inhabiting an enormous bunker whose ventilation system has begun developing its own intelligence. Bass travels through walls. Thin electronic signals flare at uncertain distances. Distortion accumulates around every opening, suggesting that whatever keeps the structure alive may also be contaminating it.
The title “Body” begins changing meaning through this duration. At first it identifies human anatomy. Gradually it can also describe a body of sound, a military body, a body politic or the physical mass of the fortification itself. Concrete and flesh exchange qualities until the listener can no longer determine which surface is vibrating.
“Heat Death, Pt. 1” moves from anatomy toward cosmology. Heat death describes a theoretical condition in which the universe has reached maximum entropy, leaving no usable energy available to perform work. Stars have exhausted themselves, temperature differences have disappeared and meaningful activity can no longer continue.
Alberich approaches that terminal concept through music built almost entirely from continued activity. Noise moves, rhythms pulse and frequencies collide. The title places every event beneath the knowledge that movement will eventually become impossible.
This creates a strange tension. Industrial music often celebrates energy, machinery and repetitive force. Heat death imagines the final failure of every machine because no difference remains from which force can be extracted. The beat continues only because the terminal condition has not yet arrived.
“Heat Death, Pt. 1” uses rough electronic surges and heavy low-end movement to suggest energy dispersing through a system too large to contain it. The sounds do not explode outward spectacularly. They leak, grind and slowly lose definition.
“Heat Death, Pt. 2” is more rhythmic, with a pulse strong enough to produce bodily movement beneath layers of abrasion. Yet the track’s momentum feels temporary, one remaining engine operating while the larger structure cools around it.
This is one of Alberich’s most effective contradictions. A listener may experience the rhythm as energizing even while the title insists that all energy is being exhausted. Dance becomes denial performed at the edge of thermodynamic silence.
“Heat Death, Pt. 3” takes nearly fifteen minutes to complete the sequence. Its electronics feel more suspended and remote, as though the machinery heard earlier has moved beyond visible infrastructure. Long tones spread across the field while rougher details flare briefly and disappear.
The piece avoids the obvious temptation to represent cosmic death through quiet ambient drift. Alberich’s universe remains violent nearly until the end. Entropy is not gentle. Structures fail, energy disperses and organization collapses through processes whose scale exceeds human imagination.
Fortification connects this cosmic exhaustion to permanent defense. Every wall requires energy to build, occupy and maintain. Every guard system depends upon electricity, labor and continuing belief in the threat outside. Heat death is the ultimate defeat of fortification because no boundary can preserve usable difference forever.
The seven parts of “Heat Death 2” fragment the concept into smaller units. Where the first sequence consists of three substantial movements, the sequel advances through pieces ranging from two to nearly six minutes. The great terminal process has been converted into incidents, signals and failing subsystems.
“Heat Death 2, Pt. 1” begins with concentrated abrasion, a short burst that resembles equipment abruptly activated after years of dormancy. The track stops before the system can stabilize.
“Pt. 2” introduces a clearer pulse, but it is thin and brittle, less a confident industrial rhythm than the remains of one. Each impact seems to remove something from the structure producing it.
“Pt. 3” contracts even further. High-frequency pressure and small rhythmic fragments create the impression of data surviving after the larger mechanism has disappeared. The fortification is no longer a visible building. It persists as instruction.
This fragmentation changes how the collection handles time. The long “Body” pieces encouraged immersion inside one fortified state. The later tracks repeatedly interrupt that state. A system begins, fails or is abandoned, and another takes its place.
“Heat Death 2, Pt. 4” has a heavier physical center. Bass and distortion form a slow moving mass, while sharper events strike against it without penetrating. The track sounds like impact absorbed by material designed specifically not to break.
Yet every successful absorption transfers force somewhere. Walls crack internally, bodies bruise beneath armor and systems accumulate stress that remains invisible until collapse. Alberich’s sound focuses upon that hidden transfer.
“Pt. 5” is more openly rhythmic and almost approaches industrial techno, but its beat is covered in enough corrosion to prevent the body from trusting it. The pulse commands movement while surrounding noise suggests that movement may be occurring inside a sealed room with diminishing air.
This ability to make rhythm both pleasurable and coercive remains central to Alberich. The beat provides orientation, but orientation can become obedience. Repetition teaches the body what to expect, then uses expectation to control it.
“Pt. 6” withdraws toward a colder electronic field. Signals pass through low pressure like communications sent between abandoned defensive positions. Nobody answers, but transmission continues because the system has not been informed that its purpose has ended.
“Heat Death 2, Pt. 7” closes the collection with nearly six minutes of accumulating electronic weight. It does not offer a dramatic final detonation. The piece feels closer to gradual shutdown, though enough activity remains to make shutdown uncertain.
This is the appropriate ending for Fortification. Defensive structures rarely conclude through one clean moment. They are occupied, abandoned, repurposed, buried or left standing after the political system that required them has vanished. Concrete survives commands.
The cassette sources give the compilation additional physical meaning. Magnetic tape stores sound through organized particles, preserving information while remaining vulnerable to heat, friction, stretching and gradual loss. A recording of heat death exists on a medium whose own material will slowly degrade.
The ninety-one-minute sequence is therefore not a permanent monument. It is another temporary fortification against disappearance, one body of sound copied from fragile bodies of tape into a later digital archive.
Compared with Machine Gun Nest and Guard Tower, Fortification is less immediately narrative. There are no named battlefields, watch positions or declarations of open warfare. Its vocabulary has been reduced to body and entropy, two conditions that contain every conflict without identifying one.
That reduction makes it the most severe of the three collections. Machine Gun Nest revealed Alberich’s range through concise pieces. Guard Tower explored surveillance, readiness and the psychology of distance. Fortification seals the listener inside the structure and removes the external landscape almost entirely.
What remains is pressure moving through matter. The body hardens because it is afraid of being entered. The bunker thickens because it is afraid of being destroyed. The universe expands until no usable difference survives.
Alberich does not ask whether the walls will hold. He remains inside them long enough to reveal that holding is another form of exhaustion.
The defenses stay active. The body listens to its own machinery. Far beyond the walls, every star is slowly spending the energy required to keep the darkness divided.

AMK - 2005 - Resurrected Hum

 

Troniks – TRO-201  204.56MB FLAC

Resurrected Hum begins with a sound that seems to have survived the destruction of whatever originally produced it. “Part 1” does not present a clean drone emerging from silence. It feels retrieved from beneath layers of wear, dust, damaged media, and environmental residue. A low continuous presence holds the piece together while smaller noises scrape, pulse, and briefly surface around it. The hum has been resurrected, but nothing suggests it has returned intact.
AMK is the project of Los Angeles sound artist Anthony Michael King, active since the mid-1980s and closely associated with turntable manipulation, flexi-disc collage, field recording, and the Banned Productions label. His work often begins with materials already carrying damage or cultural residue: disposable records, cheaply manufactured sound sheets, discarded recordings, room noise, radio fragments, and objects whose original purpose has become less important than the accidents produced through handling them.
Resurrected Hum was originally released by Troniks in 2005 as a four-part CDr. Its title describes both an action and a contradiction. To resurrect something implies that it once possessed life, died, and has now been returned. A hum, however, rarely seems fully alive in the first place. It is background vibration, electrical leakage, appliance noise, mechanical continuity, or the sound a room makes when no event has been declared important.
AMK treats that overlooked continuity as material worth recovering. The album listens to what remains after attention has moved elsewhere.
“Part 1” lasts less than five minutes, but it establishes the record’s scale immediately. The central tone feels larger than the individual noises crossing it, creating the impression of a building, electrical network, or distant machine continuing to operate behind the foreground. Small fragments appear like evidence carried through ventilation: friction, surface noise, muffled impact, and tones whose source cannot be stabilized.
The collage does not behave like rapid montage. AMK is not flipping through dozens of recognizable samples to display the size of a record collection. He allows sources to blur together until origin becomes secondary. A flexi-disc may become a sustained scrape. A field recording may be reduced to air pressure. Turntable movement may resemble machinery heard through a wall.
This ambiguity gives the record its physical depth. The listener can imagine objects, but the objects never remain obedient to one image. A sound initially resembling metal may become tape drag, wind, traffic, or a damaged speaker once another layer enters beside it.
“Part 2” extends the process to nearly six minutes and feels more unsettled. The hum is still present, but its continuity is threatened by interruptions and changes in surface density. The piece seems to move between rooms without providing a doorway.
AMK’s use of turntables has little to do with virtuosic scratching or beat construction. The record player becomes a machine for exposing repetition, friction, tracking error, and the physical limitations of recorded media. A stylus does not merely reproduce sound stored in a groove. It makes contact with a surface and converts that contact into electricity.
Every record therefore contains two recordings at once: the intended material and the history of the object carrying it. Dust, scratches, warping, fingerprints, manufacturing defects, and stylus wear all enter playback. AMK works inside that second history.
The flexi-disc is especially suited to this approach. Thin, unstable, and cheaply produced, flexis bend, wobble, skip, and deteriorate more easily than conventional vinyl. They were often distributed as promotional novelties, magazine inserts, spoken advertisements, or disposable musical objects. Their physical weakness makes every playback slightly precarious.
Resurrected Hum treats precarious playback as composition. Sound is not protected from failure. Failure becomes the means through which buried textures are revealed.
“Part 3” lasts more than seventeen minutes and forms the album’s central body. The earlier pieces feel like entrances or preliminary disturbances beside it. Here AMK allows the hum to become an environment rather than a passing effect.
Long duration changes the listener’s relationship with low-level sound. At first, attention searches for events: a sudden change, recognizable sample, rhythmic pattern, or dramatic increase in volume. As the piece continues, that search becomes less useful. The ear begins following pressure, grain, and slight movement inside apparently stable material.
The hum proves not to be one tone. It contains shifts in frequency, internal vibration, distant fragments, and sections where the background appears to lean closer. What seemed motionless becomes active once the listener has remained inside it long enough.
This is not ambient music in the comforting sense. Resurrected Hum does not soften a room or provide a neutral atmosphere for another activity. Its quietness is investigative. It makes the listener suspicious of everything occupying the edge of audibility.
A small noise may have been present for several minutes before it becomes noticeable. Once heard, it cannot be removed from the surrounding field. Attention has resurrected it.
The title can therefore refer to listening itself. AMK may recover sounds through recording and playback, but the listener performs another resurrection by separating details from the mass. Every act of attention temporarily gives one fragment a new life.
“Part 3” also exposes the unstable border between recorded sound and the room in which the album is played. Heating systems, computer fans, traffic, plumbing, and electrical noise can merge easily with AMK’s collage. The record leaks into the listener’s environment because both contain the same supposedly insignificant materials.
This leakage is central to field recording. A microphone never captures only the intended subject. It also captures distance, weather, room dimensions, handling noise, and whatever else happened to occupy the space. Recording creates a hierarchy by pointing toward something, but the world continually refuses to stay outside the frame.
AMK weakens that hierarchy. Background becomes foreground, while intended sources lose their names inside accumulation.
The word “resurrected” may also describe the use of discarded media. Old recordings carry voices, music, announcements, and private histories that may have outlived the people or institutions responsible for them. Playing such material returns it temporarily to the present, but the return is incomplete.
A voice on an old flexi-disc does not reenter the world as a living person. It returns as vibration constrained by groove, plastic, stylus, amplifier, and damage. The recording preserves presence while proving absence.
Resurrected Hum does not sentimentalize that condition. There is no clear archival narrative explaining whose sounds have been saved or why they matter. The album treats resurrection as a material process rather than emotional restoration.
The dead sound comes back altered.
“Part 4” lasts just over three minutes and behaves like a final compression of the album’s method. After the long central section, its brevity feels abrupt. Textures appear, gather, and stop before the listener can settle into another extended state.
The piece does not resolve the hum or reveal its source. It simply removes access. The underlying system may still be operating after the recording ends, but the microphone, turntable, or playback mechanism has been disconnected.
That ending suits the CDr format. Recordable compact discs promised inexpensive digital clarity and easy small-run production, yet they were also visibly provisional. Printed at home or assembled by hand, they occupied a space between private document and manufactured release.
Troniks was an ideal label for such an object, issuing noise that treated limited formats as part of the work rather than an embarrassment to be overcome. Resurrected Hum does not require a prestigious physical edition. Its subject is already bound to unstable carriers, copied signals, and sounds that remain alive only while equipment continues reading them.
The album’s four-part division provides structure without supplying titles that would narrow interpretation. “Part 1” through “Part 4” indicate sequence and nothing more. AMK does not tell the listener which sound is a flexi-disc, which is environmental, or which resulted from turntable friction.
That refusal preserves uncertainty. Once a sound is named, listening often stops at recognition. An unidentified scrape remains active because the mind keeps testing possible sources against it.
AMK’s collage is therefore not built from spectacle. No sample arrives to deliver a punch line or cultural reference. The drama lies in the transition between hearing an object and hearing only sound.
A rotating disc becomes a pulse. A damaged groove becomes texture. Room tone becomes drone. Mechanical error becomes rhythm.
Resurrected Hum is modest in length and deliberately resistant to grand climax, but its title reaches toward one of recorded sound’s deepest promises. Every recording claims it can return an absent event. Press play, and the dead voice speaks again. The vanished room reappears. A machine that stopped years ago resumes its vibration.
AMK makes that promise sound less comforting. Resurrection does not restore the original world. It produces a ghost shaped by physical media, playback equipment, deterioration, and the listener’s imagination.
The hum survives because it was never important enough to be mourned. It remained beneath speech, music, machinery, and daily life, waiting inside the recording after everything else had been discarded.
AMK lowers the stylus. The surface turns. Something without a name begins breathing again.