Institute Of Paraphilia Studies – none
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Leather Bath - (2019) Nature's Crackling Fire CD
Leather Bath, Inc. – LBINC1908
Leather Bath is a performance and art project founded in 2010 by Greh Holger and John Wiese in Los Angeles, California. Their work consists of sound-based performance and video, collage, and installations, creating explicit publications communicating reality to mature adults. Nature's Crackling Fire is their first full length album. Edition of 200 copies in 6-panel digipak.
Grunt - (2020) Spiritual Eugenics 2xCD
Freak Animal Records – none
Born in 1993, Grunt remains one of the most active and restless forces in Finnish - or even global industrial noise network. Since first tapes published 25 years ago, project has been active without any breaks. Messy discography makes it hard to judge how many actual ”albums” has been created. List of releases reaches close to hundred, yet most of them represents other approach than creation of ”album”. Spiritual Eugenics continue to path established by Castrate The Illusionist (2018), Myth Of Blood (2015), World Draped In A Camouflage (2012), Petturien Rooli (2009) and Seer of Decay (2006).
It expands the sounds, themes and visuals to unheard levels, but keeps firmly touch of known Grunt sound. 80 minutes long album is monolithic work packaged in double digipak with booklet.
Zoviet France - (2020) Châsse 15xLP & 2x7''
Vinyl-on-demand – 155
"Members during the exciting early years represented by these 11 LPs (on
15 12''s and 2 7''s) of :zoviet*france: were Ben Ponton, Robin Storey,
Peter Jensen, Paolo Di Paolo and Lisa Hale. :zoviet*france: is an
idiosyncratic group of anonymous music makers, gatherers of sound, and
fabricators of unknown music. For nearly 40 years, they have explored
and reported back from the liminal areas of music and composition,
walking the margins where little is easily located and consensus reality
melds with the hypnagogic and half-heard.
Having wilfully obscured themselves in Newcastle upon Tyne since their inception in 1980, :zoviet*france: has developed a radical relationship with cheap technologies, homemade acoustic instruments, primitive looping and sampling techniques, and basic dub trickery from which the group has crafted a distinctly unique vocabulary of sonic hypnosis.
Just as the group’s sound has alchemically reconfigured inexpensive technologies, the packaging of their releases has avoided standard formats with aluminium, steel, wood and porcelain among the materials that have been bent and cut to shape instead."
Having wilfully obscured themselves in Newcastle upon Tyne since their inception in 1980, :zoviet*france: has developed a radical relationship with cheap technologies, homemade acoustic instruments, primitive looping and sampling techniques, and basic dub trickery from which the group has crafted a distinctly unique vocabulary of sonic hypnosis.
Just as the group’s sound has alchemically reconfigured inexpensive technologies, the packaging of their releases has avoided standard formats with aluminium, steel, wood and porcelain among the materials that have been bent and cut to shape instead."
Zoviet France - (2020) Châsse 2e 17xLP
Vinyl-on-demand – VOD 165
Zoviet*France: is an idiosyncratic group of anonymous music makers, gatherers of sound, and fabricators of unknown music. For nearly 40 years, they have explored and reported back from the liminal areas of music and composition, walking the margins where little is easily located and consensus reality melds with the hypnagogic and half-heard. Having wilfully obscured themselves in Newcastle upon Tyne since their inception in 1980, :zoviet*france: has developed a radical relationship with cheap technologies, homemade acoustic instruments, primitive looping and sampling techniques, and basic dub trickery from which the group has crafted a distinctly unique vocabulary of sonic hypnosis. Just as the group’s sound has alchemically reconfigured inexpensive technologies, the packaging of their releases has avoided standard formats with aluminium, steel, wood and porcelain among the materials that have been bent and cut to shape instead.
William Basinski - (2020) Lamentations
Temporary Residence Limited – TRR343
William Basinski’s reputation as the foremost producer of profound
meditations on death and decay has long been established, but on his new
album, Lamentations, he transforms operatic tragedy into abyssal
beauty. More than any other work since The Disintegration Loops, there
is an ominous grief throughout the album, and that sense of loss lingers
like an emotional vapor.
Captured and constructed from tape loops and studies from Basinski’s
archives – dating back to 1979 – Lamentations is over forty years of
mournful sighs meticulously crafted into songs. They are shaped by the
inevitable passage of time and the indisputable collapsing of space –
and their collective resonance is infinite and eternal.
Alfarmania - (2016) Vid Sömnens Sista Tråd CS
Styggelse – 83
This is a less limited tape edition of the impossible to find 7”ep released by 8EMINIS in a ridiculous edition of 20 lathe cut copies (…I hear a second edition of 20 copies was issued, but I could not validate the truth of that). At least now the music is more widely available given Kristian of Alfarmania has issued another version on tape (with bonus material), via his own Styggelse imprint.
The first track ‘Vid Sömnens Sista Tråd’ features crumbling atonal modulated synth layers, an underbelly of cavernous junk metal chaos and rough vocals barks from the depths of the asylum. Fantastic stuff. ‘Kvick I Jord’ is the next track, and features a broadly metallic creaking resonance and interweaving mid to high range wailing/ droning tones, as stilted bass thumbs bed down the loose structure. ‘Lomsk’ is the last of the tracks featured on the 7”ep, consisting of radio channel scanning noise, sustained burrowing textures and spoken samples again pushing atmospheres of dread and unease to the fore. The bonus material then consists of ‘En Otrampad Stig’, which was originally featured on compilation tape associated with the United Forces of Industrial II festival from 2015. This track is more stalking in atmosphere, where it take its time in elevating the tone. Atonal synth loop provides the backing for controlled yet squalling noise and the barked vocals of the mentally deranged, all wrapped up in deep mineshaft tone. There is also an unlisted 5th tracks, which is evidently an outtake from an earlier ‘Slutstationen’ compilation tape recording session and brings more Alfarmania induced anxiety.
By now you should appreciate what might be expected from an Alfarmania release and this tape delivers as strong material from the project as you should by now expect, which ultimately amounts to classic Alfarmania ‘post-mortem’ paranoia. Double sided fold out J card with suitable imagery rounds out the tape nicely, and the slogan of “No To New Support” is a nice attitude and sentiment.
Bernard Parmegiani - (2008) L'Œuvre Musicale En 12xCD
INA-GRM – Ina G 6000/11
An incredible complete works boxsetwith 33 compositions from 1964 to
2007 with a 92 pages booklet in French and English. The best way to
enter into the world of Bernard Parmegiani, French composer of musique
concrete, member of the GRM group.
"The Wire magazine recently described this amazing package as "A bargain
price treasure chest....containing worlds of inexhaustible spaciousness
and strangeness" and, indeed, listening through just some of the 12
cd's included you find yourself drawn into a multi-faceted world of
strange sound sources and audio manipulations designed to play tricks on
your senses to an extent that has left this reviewer almost paralysed
with wonderment. Parmegiani started out working for the French
equivalent of the BBC and soon found himself mentored by the founding
father of Musique Concrete, Pierre Schaeffer. Making use of
technological advances that gave the world magnetic tape and
microphones, Schaeffer pioneered a method of taking everyday sounds and
transforming them into unrecognisable, detached pieces of music with no
identifiable sound source, a style that became known as Acousmatic
music.
Parmegiani was hugely influenced by Schaeffer's pioneering work and
Groupe de Recherche Musicale (GRM), the French Radio institution that is
often described as the French equivalent of the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop. The work Parmegiani would go on to create would make use of
these Acousmatic techniques in creating a body of work which is not only
one of the most significant of the 20th century, but also hugely
influential on a whole host of musical pioneers that would follow in his
wake, with Christian Fennesz, Aphex Twin and Jim O'Rourke being notable
disciples. These 12 cd's cover the majority of Parmegiani's musique
concrete legacy and include pieces recorded between 1964 and 2007. You
can barely believe the immersive and often woozy effect of these
recordings, ranging from eerie cut-out tape loops through to popular
music plunderphonics and proto-distilled-dub that's impossible to absorb
in one sitting. Having so far only made it through half of this
gargantuan collection (with the very handy aid of the 92 page book
included in the package) - I can safely say that L' Ouvre Musicale is
not only one of the most impressive and important collections of music
I've heard this year, but also one of the most culturally significant
and rewarding.
Bernard Parmegiani - (2020) Violostries LP
Recollection GRM – REGRM 023
Violostries (1963/64), 16'39
Premiered and recorded in April 1965 at the Royan Festival - France, by
Devy Erlih (violin) & Bernard Parmegiani (sound projection).
Violostries represents the intersection of several musical research
directions, presented as two simultaneous dialogues - composer/performer
and instrument/orchestra.
After a short introduction tutti very spatialized:
1. Pulsion/Miroirs: multiplied by itself, the violin is projected into the four corners of the sound space.
2. Jeu de cellules: concertante piece for violin and audio medium, the latter being made up of very tightly woven microsounds.
3. Végétal: slow and invisible development following a continuous time,
resulting from an internal and permanent processing of the matter.
Capture éphémère (1967, 1988 version), 11'48
This work was composed in four tracks in 1967 for quadraphonic diffusion.
Remixed in stereo in 1988.
Premiered at the Studio 105 of the Maison de la Radio, Paris, May 1967.
Sounds - noises that circulate as time unfolds - continue to exist despite our recording them.
Breaths, fluttering wings: ephemeral microsonic sounds streaking space,
sound scratches, landslides, bounces, vertigo of solid objects falling
into an abyssal void, multiple snapshots forever frozen in their fall.
As many symbols leave inside us the permanent trace of their ephemeral
brushing against our ear.
Some day, a desert, a sound, then never again....
Somewhere, in my head and body something still resonates... resonance, what could be more ephemeral.
La Roue Ferris (1971), 10'45
Premiered at the Festival des chantiers navals, Menton, on August 26, 1971.
Sound projection: Bernard Parmegiani.
La Roue Ferris (Ferris wheel) spins, merging with its own resonance,
stubbornly perpetuating its variations. It only sketches a regularly
evolving movement around a constant axis. Each of its towers generates
thick sonic layers that penetrate each other, producing a very fluid
interweaving. The crackling of the origin eventually metamorphoses into
sonic threads whose lightness recalls high-altitude clouds, cirrus
clouds, haunted by the cries of swifts twirling in the warm air. The
wondrous arises and dies off, leaving us with an illusion of duration.
Bernard Parmegiani - (2012) L'Œil Écoute / Dedans-Dehors LP
Editions Mego – REGRM 003
Alex Zhang Hungtai, David Maranha, Gabriel Ferrandini - (2018) Eight Black Horses Crown Snake CD
Violante Do Céu – none
"Through me you go into the city
of grief, through me you go into the pain that is eternal, through me
you go among people lost.
Justice moved my exalted creator; the divine power made me, the supreme wisdom, and the primal love.
Before me all created things were eternal, and eternal I will last.
Abandon every hope, you who enter here.
...after he had taken me by the hand, with a cheerful look which comforted me, he drew me within the secret place [the eternal world]."
-Dante, Canto III, The Divine Comedy
Justice moved my exalted creator; the divine power made me, the supreme wisdom, and the primal love.
Before me all created things were eternal, and eternal I will last.
Abandon every hope, you who enter here.
...after he had taken me by the hand, with a cheerful look which comforted me, he drew me within the secret place [the eternal world]."
-Dante, Canto III, The Divine Comedy
credits
released September 10, 2018Alex Zhang Hungtai - Voice, Saxophone and Drums
David Maranha - Organ and Drums
Gabriel Ferrandini - Drums
Recorded in Cinema Passos Manuel 10th of March 2017
Mixed by Alex, David and Gabriel in Violante do Céu Studio
Mastered by Tó Pinheiro da Silva in Oeiras on 10th of November 2017
Cover photo from White Noise Book, Interior photo taken at Conservatório de Lisboa, both by António Júlio Duarte
Black Pus - (2020) DEF VESPER
Self Released – none
A series of improvised songs, first thought/best thought, recorded over a
few days from 2/18-2/28/20 by Black Pus in LEGO-CITY, Providence RI on a
Tascam 424 cassette 4 track. last thoughts from a pandemic-free reality
about to dramatically shift. Mixing, minimal editing, mastering and one
overdub done with Thee Zebby Manchester at Machine with Magnets. Black
Pus 2020
credits
released November 6, 2020
one person band, drums vocals oscillator live document, real time loops.
no memory cards no working actually brain memory lots of sugar
Tuesday, December 15, 2020
Black Pus - (2013) All My Relations
Thrill Jockey – THRILL 322
Black Pus is Brian Chippendale, who rose to prominence as the drummer of
noise rock titans Lightning Bolt and Mindflayer. The first Black Pus
CD-R was self released in early 2006, and was a collection of ferocious
free jazz, multi-tracked on Chippendale’s cassette four-track. Enamored
of the control of recording solo, Chippendale followed with more CD-Rs,
and began playing live under the Black Pus moniker. He refined the Black
Pus sound over numerous self-released CDs and 2011’s Primordial Pus on
Load Records, replacing the saxophone with a drum-mounted oscillator and
experimenting with pop structures. The oscillator creates gigantic bass
tones that are then fed through a series of pedals. Over the course of
the past several years Chippendale has been hand-picked by Bjo?rk and
The Flaming Lips as a collaborator, and recruited by Andrew W.K. for Lee
“Scratch” Perry’s 2008 album Repentance.
All My Relations is constant forward motion and audible physicality. Chippendale’s furious drumming style is ever present and instantly recognizable, but the pop element, which Chippendale explored in more contained ways on earlier Black Pus releases, is more fully integrated. Tracks like “1000 Years” and “Hear No Evil” bear a snarl and a smile, the sound of wild abandon that is both aggressive and inviting. Chippendale creates maximalist music out of the simple elements of drums, vocals, and an oscillator triggered by the kick drum, looping and repeating phrases and rhythms in a way that can only be called meditative. The album closes with “A Better Man,” an almost ten minute epic that expertly alternates between the minimal pulse of the kick drum and oscillator and some of the most voracious and unrestrained drumming on the album.
For the first time with any group he’s been a part of, Chippendale fully embraced the studio to realize All My Relations. He entrusted recording and producing to Keith Souza and Seth Manchester (who have worked with The Body, Battles and Skull Defekts) at Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket, RI. All My Relations retains the expansive, primal sound of Chippendale’s earlier recordings, enhanced by the clarity of the studio. Black Pus has attained vicious transcendence.
All My Relations is constant forward motion and audible physicality. Chippendale’s furious drumming style is ever present and instantly recognizable, but the pop element, which Chippendale explored in more contained ways on earlier Black Pus releases, is more fully integrated. Tracks like “1000 Years” and “Hear No Evil” bear a snarl and a smile, the sound of wild abandon that is both aggressive and inviting. Chippendale creates maximalist music out of the simple elements of drums, vocals, and an oscillator triggered by the kick drum, looping and repeating phrases and rhythms in a way that can only be called meditative. The album closes with “A Better Man,” an almost ten minute epic that expertly alternates between the minimal pulse of the kick drum and oscillator and some of the most voracious and unrestrained drumming on the album.
For the first time with any group he’s been a part of, Chippendale fully embraced the studio to realize All My Relations. He entrusted recording and producing to Keith Souza and Seth Manchester (who have worked with The Body, Battles and Skull Defekts) at Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket, RI. All My Relations retains the expansive, primal sound of Chippendale’s earlier recordings, enhanced by the clarity of the studio. Black Pus has attained vicious transcendence.
Bob Mould - (2020) Blue Hearts
Merge Records – MRG730
Legendary singer-songwriter-guitarist-bandleader Bob Mould has announced
the release of an explosive new album. BLUE HEARTS arrives via Merge
Records on Friday, September 25
BLUE HEARTS is perhaps the most directly confrontational work of Bob
Mould’s four-decade career, a raging 14-track collection described by
its creator as “the catchiest batch of protest songs I’ve ever written
in one sitting.” Produced by Mould at Chicago’s famed Electrical Audio
with longtime collaborator Beau Sorenson engineering, the album – which
once again features backing from the crack rhythm section of drummer Jon
Wurster and bassist Jason Narducy – nods to the veteran
singer-songwriter’s groundbreaking past while remaining firmly planted
in the issues of the day. Where SUNSHINE ROCK captured Mould at his most
“violently happy” (according to Rolling Stone), BLUE HEARTS is both
seething and pointed, the raging yin to the previous album’s positive
yang. The acoustic opener, “Heart on My Sleeve” catalogues the ravages
of climate change, while “American Crisis” – written initially for
SUNSHINE ROCK but deemed “too heavy” by its writer – spits plainspoken
fire at the people who fomented this catastrophic moment in history: “I
never thought I’d see this bullshit again / To come of age in the ’80s
was bad enough / We were marginalized and demonized / I watched a lot of
my generation die / Welcome back to American crisis.”
Elsewhere, the political and personal collide on songs like “Everyth!ng
to You,” “The Ocean,” and the salaciously autobiographical “Leather
Dreams,” the latter two composed earlier this year during an epic
three-day writing binge prior to January 2020’s sold-out Solo Electric
tour. As volatile, hook-laden, and aggressively honest as anything in
Mould’s remarkable canon, BLUE HEARTS is fueled by a pervasive sense of
déjà vu, its angry anthems of today equally informed by his experiences
and memories of the early 1980s. Back then, Mould was a self-described
“22-year-old closeted gay man” touring with the one and only Hüsker Dü
as AIDS consumed his community. Leaders – including the one in the White
House – seemed content to let the epidemic kill a generation. No wonder
Bob Mould found his mind wandering back…
“We have a charismatic, telegenic, say-anything leader being propped up
by evangelicals,” he says. “These fuckers tried to kill me once. They
didn’t do it. They scared me. I didn’t do enough. Guess what? I’m back,
and we’re back here again. And I’m not going to sit quietly this time
and worry about alienating anyone.”
Monday, December 7, 2020
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