Korova Scumhaters does not behave like a conventional collaboration in which two established identities politely alternate contributions. Streicher and Smell & Quim are thrown together under the temporary name Goldenrod, and the resulting hour feels less like dialogue than chemical contamination. One body of sound enters another, produces an unstable reaction, and makes it impossible to determine where the Australian project’s heavy analogue pressure ends and the British group’s grotesque electronic theatre begins. Two untitled pieces occupy approximately one cassette side each, removing the usual assistance of song titles, declared themes, or instrumental credits. The listener is left with duration, texture, escalation, collapse, and the accumulating personality of equipment being pushed beyond sensible employment. It is noise made before the laptop became an infinitely renewable factory of distortion, when an hour of hostile sound still carried the fingerprints of mixers, oscillators, pedals, damaged tapes, amplifiers, physical objects, and imperfect international exchange.
Goldenrod was conceived as a short collaboration campaign built around Streicher and source material supplied by other international noise artists. Korova Scumhaters joins Streicher with Smell & Quim, while the other known Goldenrod cassettes involved Macronympha and Odal. That structure makes the project more interesting than an ordinary split release. Instead of giving each participant a private side, the materials are made to coexist inside one identity. Goldenrod therefore becomes a fictional organism assembled differently each time. Streicher provides the recurring nervous system, but its muscles, abrasions, bodily fluids, and behavioral defects change according to the collaborator. On Korova Scumhaters, the organism acquires the diseased humor and unruly physicality of Smell & Quim without surrendering Streicher’s preference for primitive, direct, low-end analogue force.
The title appears to open a corridor toward A Clockwork Orange. Korova is the milk bar where Alex and his droogs consume drugged milk before setting out on their night’s activities, a place where childish nourishment, stylized language, consumer décor, and organized violence are fused into one pop-cultural environment. “Scumhaters” adds another contradiction. The word might describe moral crusaders purging social filth, violent scum who hate everyone outside their group, or people whose hatred has become a form of contamination indistinguishable from the thing they claim to oppose. Noise culture has always been attracted to this instability of position. The record does not hand the listener a safe moral platform from which to observe ugliness. It presents aggression as atmosphere and leaves the source of that aggression unresolved.
The first half develops through crude accumulation rather than elegant composition. Heavy electronic rumble establishes a floor that never feels entirely secure, while sharper abrasions, broken signals, and unstable pulses scrape against it. The sound has enormous weight without becoming a perfectly sealed wall. Gaps remain in the structure, and through those gaps come irregular fragments that suggest voices, malfunctioning machinery, damaged recordings, or objects being handled too close to a microphone. The uncertainty is important. A clean modern harsh-noise production can create a magnificent uninterrupted surface, but Goldenrod’s materials retain awkward joints. Components grind against one another without fitting. Distortion does not erase the machinery producing it. The listener can sense cables, levels, magnetic saturation, loose connections, and the unavoidable room surrounding the equipment.
Streicher’s work has been described as “Oi Noise,” a meeting of power electronics, industrial sound, harsh noise, and the confrontational directness associated with skinhead subculture. The description fits Korova Scumhaters less as a genre label than as an account of posture. There is no interest in technological elegance. The electronics advance with the blunt insistence of a chant whose words have been burned away, leaving rhythm, pressure, and collective hostility. Low frequencies repeatedly threaten to become a march, but the music refuses the discipline necessary to maintain one. Patterns deform, surfaces collapse, and every possibility of order is dragged through Smell & Quim’s more chaotic imagination.
Smell & Quim contribute a very different history of provocation. Their best work has always combined brutal noise with British grotesquerie, performance art, pub humor, sexual absurdity, theatrical disgust, and a refusal to separate the ridiculous from the genuinely dangerous. They have spoken of wanting noise to retain song-like development, including beginnings, middles, endings, themes, and variation even when no conventional song is present. That instinct can be heard throughout this recording. The long sides do not simply switch on and remain at one level. They lurch through episodes, allowing one texture to rot before introducing another, occasionally exposing a fragment of near-rhythm or recognizable human activity before burying it again. The humor is not delivered through punchlines. It exists in disproportion, ugly timing, sudden deflation, and the suspicion that the performers may be enjoying the equipment’s indignity as much as its violence.
This makes Korova Scumhaters physically oppressive but not humorless. Certain sounds possess the shambling gait of machinery assembled by people who distrust instructions. Repetition becomes increasingly absurd as a damaged pattern continues far beyond usefulness. An abrasive electronic scream may be followed not by an even greater climax but by something flabby, mechanical, or strangely domestic. Noise often becomes unintentionally comic when treated with excessive seriousness, and Smell & Quim understood how to make that comedy intentional without reducing the force of the work. Their contribution prevents Goldenrod from becoming a perfectly controlled ideological monument. The structure keeps slipping in mud, exposing its backside, and continuing the attack from the ground.
That instability matters when considering Streicher’s imagery and chosen identity. Ulex Xane has stated directly that the project name derives from Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist and publisher of Der Stürmer, and that the name was chosen to engage questions involving ideology, history, morality, censorship, perception, and freedom of speech. The reference cannot be treated as harmless decoration. It deliberately imports the contamination of propaganda and historical atrocity into the listening experience. The difficulty is that invoking such material does not automatically explain what the invocation accomplishes. Is the imagery being examined, exploited, inhabited, parodied, or used as a weapon against the audience? Power electronics often refuses to answer because uncertainty itself produces the desired tension. That refusal can generate serious confrontation, but it can also become camouflage behind which conviction and provocation are allowed to trade masks.
Korova Scumhaters does not solve that problem, and a review should not solve it on the artists’ behalf. The music can be heard independently as an exceptional document of mid-1990s analogue noise, but the surrounding language affects its temperature. Hostility is not merely sonic once a project consciously summons fascist history, subcultural aggression, and fantasies of purification. The listener must decide how much ambiguity remains productive and when ambiguity begins protecting the artist from accountability. What keeps this particular release interesting is the presence of Smell & Quim, whose absurdity corrodes the possibility of receiving Goldenrod as a coherent authoritarian statement. The collaboration does not become ethically innocent, but it becomes internally unstable. Grotesque comedy, physical wreckage, ideological ugliness, and genuine sonic invention occupy the same contaminated enclosure.
The second untitled half feels less like a sequel than another entrance into the same wrecked complex. Low-end movement remains central, but the balance between sustained pressure and fragmented interruption changes continually. Sections of near-stasis allow hum, tape grain, and residual vibration to become audible before heavier material returns. This alternation gives the recording a bodily rhythm. Contraction is followed by temporary release, which only makes the next contraction feel more severe. The cassette-side duration is essential because thirty minutes provides enough time for crude sounds to acquire psychological depth. An abrasive loop initially heard as a mechanical event gradually becomes a mood, then an architectural feature, and finally something so familiar that its disappearance is disturbing.
The original cassette medium contributes to this effect. A C60 imposes two approximately thirty-minute territories and a compulsory interruption between them. The listener must turn the object over, briefly handle the plastic shell, and restart the mechanism. That division is preserved on the CD as two untitled tracks, but the 2009 transfer also reveals the cassette’s continuous material presence. Tape compression binds separate frequencies into a congested mass. Hiss occupies the quieter passages. Overload smears impacts and helps unrelated sources adhere. Small fluctuations in level or stability prevent repetition from becoming digitally perfect. The cassette is not merely the container in which this music first happened. It participates in the sound as a slow, magnetic adhesive.
Zero Cabal originally released the tape in 1995, during an extraordinarily fertile period for international mail-based noise. Collaborations could be assembled from cassettes sent across oceans, each generation adding degradation, misunderstanding, and new intervention. The distance between Australia and Britain was not eliminated by instant file transfer. It became part of the work. Packages traveled slowly, source tapes arrived carrying their own noise, and the finished edition reached only a small number of listeners before the label ceased activity. Such projects were built from faith in strangers and the possibility that a padded envelope might open a new creative territory. The network was inefficient, but its inefficiency produced artifacts with histories embedded in their sound.
Industrial Recollections recovered the Goldenrod cassettes in 2009 without cutting or reorganizing the material, transferring the original sides into a digital format while retaining their full duration. This was not the glamorous resurrection of a universally acknowledged classic. It was a rescue operation aimed at material that had barely circulated in the first place. That distinction is important. Reissue culture often confirms an existing canon, but Industrial Recollections also preserved recordings whose disappearance would have left almost no public absence. Korova Scumhaters survives because someone considered an obscure, ugly cassette worth carrying forward.
The result remains crude, nasty, unresolved, and remarkably alive. It documents a period when noise collaboration could function as international correspondence, identity experiment, ideological contamination, and physical audio destruction at once. There is no polished synthesis between Streicher and Smell & Quim. Their differences continue grinding throughout the hour, producing a work stronger because it never becomes comfortable inside its temporary name. Goldenrod sounds less like a band than a parcel opened after thirty years, its contents still leaking, humming, and arguing with one another. Anyone who owned the original Zero Cabal cassette, participated in the source-tape exchange, or knows how the three Goldenrod collaborations were assembled is warmly invited to add the missing history.
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