Kondo Toshinori & IMA - 1986 - Konton

 

Epic/Sony – 32・8H-71  233.72MB FLAC

Konton begins at sundown and finishes with something called “Gan,” moving through darkness, cryptic initials, shifting sand and a chant of “YoYoYo” along the way. The titles suggest fragments of a journey, but Toshinori Kondo & IMA offer no explanatory narrative. Instead, the six pieces form a compact thirty-five-minute passage through electric rhythm, amplified trumpet, Korean percussion and mid-1980s digital technology. Released by Epic/Sony in June 1986, the album turns the hard urban surfaces of Metal Position into something deeper and more spacious. It still moves with considerable force, but its grooves now contain shadows, ritual implications and sudden areas of open air.
The title means chaos, confusion or primordial disorder. Yet Konton is not chaotic in the obvious free-jazz sense. The music is tightly organized, often built from repeated bass figures, disciplined drums and clearly defined electronic textures. Its chaos exists inside the mixture. Japanese electric jazz and punk musicians work alongside Bill Laswell’s New York production ideas, Nicky Skopelitis’s Fairlight programming and Kim Duk-soo’s Korean percussion. Acoustic impact meets digital sampling; Kondo’s breath-driven trumpet confronts rhythm produced by both hands and machines. The album does not blur these sources into a smooth global fusion. It preserves enough difference for friction to remain audible.
IMA’s core lineup has settled into the form that would carry it through much of the next several years. Kondo plays trumpet, Haruo Togashi keyboards, Taizo Sakai electric guitar, Reck electric guitar and bass, and Hideo Yamaki drums. The shift to Reck as the principal bassist is significant. Earlier IMA recordings depended heavily upon the American funk foundation supplied by Rodney Drummer, but Konton develops a more angular internal pulse. Reck’s bass is forceful without becoming comfortably rounded, and Yamaki’s drumming can lock tightly to it while placing sharp accents against the expected beat. The groove remains physical, but it feels less inherited from an established funk vocabulary.
Bill Laswell produces and contributes electric bass, continuing a relationship with Kondo that had already shaped Taihen and the “China Boogie” single. His presence is unmistakable in the album’s low-frequency architecture and sharply separated layers, but Konton does not sound like an IMA performance placed inside a generic Laswell production. Kondo’s compositions and the band’s distinctive timing resist that. Laswell gives the music depth, impact and international studio scale; IMA fills that space with unstable gestures. The rhythm may be mixed with tremendous clarity, but Kondo’s trumpet behaves as though clarity itself needs to be damaged.
“Sundown” introduces the record through collaboration. Credited to Togashi, Laswell and Skopelitis, it places Fairlight programming beside keyboards and heavy electric bass. The technology is period-specific, but it is not used merely to demonstrate novelty. Digital sounds create a horizon against which the physical instruments become more vivid. The track’s title suggests the transition from visible day into uncertainty, and the arrangement proceeds in the same way. Its opening structure is easy to grasp, yet the details gradually alter the emotional temperature. By the time Kondo is fully present, the groove has become less an invitation to dance than an environment through which the trumpet must navigate.
Kondo’s sound is more concentrated here than on Metal Position. He is credited simply with trumpet rather than the larger collection of voice, speaker and synthetic-percussion roles listed on the previous album. That apparent reduction sharpens his identity. His tone can still appear electrically magnified, smeared or compressed, but the fundamental action remains unmistakable: air is forced through brass and projected against an artificial landscape. Kondo rarely treats the groove as a platform for a conventional solo. He enters at angles, leaves phrases unresolved and uses changes in tone as structural events. A single sustained note can make the rhythm underneath it seem suddenly ominous.
“Yami,” meaning darkness, deepens the nocturnal atmosphere. The band does not represent darkness through mere slowness or ambient emptiness. It remains active and rhythmically alert, but the spaces between instrumental attacks begin to feel more consequential. Togashi’s keyboards supply color without offering reassurance, while guitar creates clipped shapes and flashes of abrasion. Yamaki’s drums hold the music together through precision rather than heaviness alone. The track demonstrates one of IMA’s central discoveries: a steady beat can increase uncertainty when the sounds surrounding it refuse to explain themselves.
“Y.U.” completes the first side and would become one of IMA’s major live vehicles. Its studio version lasts a little over six minutes, while the performance later released on Kamikaze Blow nearly doubles that length. Even here, the composition contains the potential for expansion. The title can be heard as “why you,” though the initials remain deliberately open. Repetition turns the phrase into an interrogation without a stated subject. The band accumulates intensity instead of chasing a conventional verse-chorus payoff. Kondo’s trumpet and the rhythm section appear to question one another, and the music’s force comes from the refusal to provide a final answer.
The second side opens with Togashi’s “Sandswitch,” the album’s most suggestive compound title. Sand shifts naturally, but a switch implies abrupt mechanical control. The piece lives between those forms of movement. Keyboards and programmed elements can change the environment instantly, while drums, bass and guitar create slower alterations in texture and weight. Togashi is essential throughout Konton because he does not use synthesizers simply to modernize jazz harmony. His electronic tones behave as weather, architecture and interference. They define the space in which Kondo plays while remaining capable of changing that space beneath him.
Kim Duk-soo brings a different conception of time and impact to the record. A major figure in Korean samul nori, he is credited with changgo—the hourglass-shaped drum—and kkwaenggwari, a small gong capable of cutting through dense ensembles. These instruments are not presented as a picturesque “traditional” interlude. Their physical attacks enter the electric framework as contemporary rhythmic information. The metallic gong is particularly compatible with IMA’s aesthetic: ancient in lineage but capable of sounding as sharp and disruptive as any electronic percussion. Kondo’s internationalism works best in moments like these, when collaboration creates genuine pressure rather than a decorative display of cultural variety.
“YoYoYo,” also credited to Togashi, Laswell and Skopelitis, brings the technological and vocal implications of the album into a compact form, even though Kondo is not formally credited as a singer here. Its repeated syllables function less like lyrics than a rhythmic signal. The Fairlight allows sound to be captured, organized and reintroduced as an object, matching IMA’s tendency to treat fragments of voice as percussion. The track feels playful, but its play has a mechanical edge. A simple human utterance can become a loop, slogan or command once technology removes it from ordinary conversation.
“Gan” closes the album with its longest performance. The romanized title is left unexplained, and the music benefits from that ambiguity. Rather than gathering the preceding elements into a triumphant finale, the piece opens them further. Kondo has more room to stretch phrases, while the band’s repetition produces a state somewhere between funk propulsion and ritual trance. Electric bass and drums maintain bodily momentum; keyboards, guitar and percussion complicate the edges; trumpet moves between declaration and raw sound. The track does not solve the album’s konton. It demonstrates that disorder can be sustained inside a disciplined form.
The production carries many recognizable signs of 1986: hard drum transients, bright digital textures, compressed bass and sharply delineated stereo space. Listeners resistant to Fairlight-era sound may find parts of “Sundown” and “YoYoYo” dated, while those approaching Kondo through free improvisation may consider the rhythmic structures restrictive. At just six tracks, the album also concentrates its methods so strongly that certain bass and drum patterns can seem overly insistent. The record offers little softness and no conventional ballad to release the accumulated pressure.
What prevents Konton from becoming a technological period piece is the quality of the ensemble’s physical interaction. Yamaki does not play like a drummer obediently following a program, Reck does not treat bass as neutral support, and Kondo never permits processing to erase the vulnerability of breath. Even Skopelitis’s Fairlight and Laswell’s studio construction are used to create resistance for the musicians rather than replace them. The album’s electronic world has enough solidity for the players to strike against it.
Within IMA’s development, Konton is the crucial hinge. Taihen introduced a broad collision of funk, folk memory, voices and avant-garde trumpet. Metal Position hardened that collision into new wave and industrial dance music. Konton retains the metallic rhythm but gives it greater depth, cultural reach and psychological darkness. The all-important partnership of Kondo, Togashi, Reck, Sakai and Yamaki is now clearly defined, and the pieces anticipate the expanded live force heard on Kamikaze Blow and the urban confrontations of Tokyo Rose.
The album’s chaos is therefore not a lack of form. It is the coexistence of several forms that refuse to become one. Korean percussion remains distinct from Fairlight programming; Laswell’s bass weight does not absorb Reck’s angular pulse; Kondo’s trumpet is amplified without ceasing to be breath. Konton finds IMA learning that a groove can hold all these contradictions without resolving them. The result is one of the group’s most compact and persuasive records: six pieces of disciplined disorder, beginning at sundown and continuing until the boundaries between ritual, machine, body and city have become impossible to maintain.

Larry Ochs - 2015 - The Fictive Five

 

Tzadik – TZ 4012  373.82MB FLAC

The first sound on Larry Ochs’ The Fictive Five is not an introduction so much as an opening image: tenor saxophone and trumpet arrive in a broad, sustained blaze while drums and two double basses begin altering the ground beneath them. The sound is immediately large, but it is not a conventional free-jazz assault. Individual details remain unusually clear. Bowed strings roughen the air, plucked notes appear like dark objects, Harris Eisenstadt’s drums redirect the ensemble without forcing it into a beat, and Nate Wooley’s trumpet changes from clean projection to grainy growl. The music generates the sensation of a landscape coming into focus while it is already moving.
Released by Tzadik in October 2015, The Fictive Five consists of three extended compositions and one brief intervening piece. “Similitude,” “By Any Other Name” and “Translucent” last between seventeen and twenty-five minutes; “A Marked Refraction” occupies just over four. Ochs designed the long works as “compositions for improvisers,” using coded charts, conventional notation and visual cues developed through decades with the Rova Saxophone Quartet. These are neither predetermined chamber pieces nor unstructured group improvisations. The written material establishes situations, tensions and possible directions, then leaves the musicians responsible for discovering how the music travels between them.
Ochs assembled an exceptional quintet for that purpose. He plays tenor and sopranino saxophones, joined by Wooley on trumpet, Pascal Niggenkemper on double bass and prepared bass, Ken Filiano on double bass and effects, and Eisenstadt on drums. The absence of piano, guitar or another chordal instrument is decisive. Harmony is implied through the interaction of five linear and textural voices rather than declared in blocks. The paired basses supply enormous depth, but they do not form a normal rhythm section. Filiano and Niggenkemper may reinforce one another, divide the register, exchange bowed and plucked attacks or produce sounds whose instrumental source is temporarily unclear.
The group first appeared during Ochs’ 2013 residency at The Stone in New York. The musicians were sufficiently excited by those performances to preserve the project, although Ochs’ Bay Area home and everyone’s schedules prevented them from reconvening until December 2014. The album was recorded immediately after that reunion at East Side Sound. This history helps explain the session’s mixture of familiarity and discovery. The players understand the compositions and trust one another, but the music has not been polished through years of repetition. It retains the tension of five people encountering possibilities that still feel new.
“Similitude,” dedicated to Wim Wenders, begins with nearly nine minutes of sustained horn intensity. Wooley’s trumpet is especially striking, projecting clear tones that acquire rough edges, vocal inflections and compressed bursts of noise. Ochs answers on tenor with a sound that is broad without becoming ponderous. The horns do not operate as soloist and accompanist; they create a shifting combined mass. Below them, Eisenstadt avoids treating volume as permission to batter the music indiscriminately. His playing is forceful but analytical, locating the exact accent that will change the direction of a phrase.
The piece eventually withdraws from its initial brightness, as if an imaginary camera were pulling back from the immediate action. This is central to Ochs’ conception of the album. Three compositions are dedicated to makers of images: Wenders, South African artist and animator William Kentridge, and filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. The pieces were not written to accompany specific films. Ochs instead imagined music capable of generating what he calls a movie in the listener’s mind. The dedications recognize different approaches to time, landscape and visual narrative without instructing the audience what to picture.
The Wenders association makes particular sense in “Similitude.” Its scale feels expansive and horizontal. Musical events suggest figures moving through large spaces, yet the piece maintains an emotional human presence within that openness. The two basses create changing horizons rather than a fixed foundation. Bowed tones stretch into the distance while pizzicato figures imply motion nearer the foreground. The music can sound fierce at close range and almost contemplative when heard as a complete arc. Its title proposes likeness rather than identity: one gesture resembles another, but every return occurs in altered light.
“A Marked Refraction” acts as more than an interlude. After the opener’s twenty-four-minute span, its compactness changes the listener’s sense of scale. Sounds appear as quick markings rather than parts of a vast landscape. The musicians seem to examine how a gesture changes when it passes through another player’s timbre: a bass scrape refracted through percussion, a clipped horn phrase redirected by silence. Its position also prevents the album’s three long works from becoming a continuous sequence of monuments. Ochs understands that duration acquires meaning through contrast. Four concentrated minutes can feel as open as twenty when the surrounding proportions are carefully controlled.
“By Any Other Name,” dedicated to Kentridge, begins in a dark register. Bowed basses groan beneath solemn horn statements, creating a space that feels subterranean without becoming static. Kentridge’s animated films frequently allow traces of erasure and revision to remain visible, and Ochs’ composition suggests a related process in sound. Ideas are stated, altered and partially rubbed away. The listener can still sense what existed before, even after a different instrumental combination occupies the foreground.
The middle of the piece is built from changing subsets. Duets and trios emerge from the quintet, creating a round-robin succession of perspectives: trumpet and drums, bowed bass against plucked bass, saxophone surrounded by sparse string noises. These passages do not resemble a conventional series of solos. Nobody steps forward to display an isolated identity while the others maintain accompaniment. Instead, the composition changes its population. Each temporary group reveals different properties within the same material, as though the larger scene were being examined from several positions.
Filiano and Niggenkemper are crucial to that effect. Filiano can produce a resonant, traditional bass body, but his use of effects expands the instrument beyond its acoustic outline. Niggenkemper’s preparations introduce clicks, rattles, scraped harmonics and metallic attacks. Together they sometimes sound like an enlarged composite instrument with too many strings and several conflicting resonating chambers. At other moments, their differences are sharply exposed. One provides pulse while the other creates friction; one descends into weight while the other removes any clear sense of pitch.
After its more fragmented exchanges, “By Any Other Name” regathers the ensemble into a fiery passage and returns toward the dark atmosphere from which it began. The symmetry is satisfying but not mechanical. The ending does not reproduce the opening; it reveals how far the original material has traveled. Ochs’ structures work because the musicians are not required to protect them. The composed frame can absorb interruption, contradiction and detour. Form becomes visible through change rather than obedience.
“Translucent,” dedicated to Kelly Reichardt, has the album’s most distinctive relationship with silence. It starts with short, tense saxophone phrases and equally concentrated drum responses, leaving white space around each exchange. Ochs’ use of the sopranino adds a narrower, more penetrating color than his tenor, but he resists filling the entire register with activity. Eisenstadt replies in forceful fragments, treating each drum sound as an independent shape. The effect is high-strung without being crowded.
As the basses and trumpet enter, the piece develops a quicker but still breathable flow. The title is exact: translucent material passes light while altering its clarity. Individual lines remain perceivable through the ensemble, yet none emerges completely untouched by the others. Wooley can make the trumpet sound brilliant, fragile or nearly airless, while the basses continually change the apparent density surrounding it. The final portion softens into an extended descent. Instead of ending with accumulated force, the music patiently comes in for a landing, making the album’s conclusion feel earned rather than imposed.
The recording and mix preserve the quintet’s physical dimensions. Marc Urselli recorded the session at East Side Sound in New York, while Myles Boisen mixed it at Headless Buddha Lab in Oakland. The basses possess weight without merging into an undifferentiated low-frequency cloud. Eisenstadt’s kit is present and detailed, and the horns retain breath, saliva, metal and room tone. That clarity is important because so much of the composition resides in changing instrumental relationships. If the sound were excessively reverberant or aggressively compressed, the music’s internal geography would disappear.
The album demands sustained attention. Its three long pieces do not provide conventional themes to memorize, and some transitions can initially feel episodic. The double-bass emphasis gives the record an unusually dark center of gravity, which may seem heavy across nearly seventy minutes. Listeners seeking constant explosive release will encounter long passages of restraint, while those attracted to chamber delicacy must accept sudden eruptions of raw horn sound. Yet these tensions are not symptoms of indecision. They are the conditions under which the album’s imagined narratives become possible.
The Fictive Five succeeds because Ochs’ structures neither suppress the players nor leave them responsible for inventing significance from nothing. The compositions provide invisible architecture; Wooley, Filiano, Niggenkemper and Eisenstadt continually redesign its interior. The resulting music possesses the unpredictability of improvisation and the large-scale memory of composition. Events that initially seem spontaneous acquire meaning when they return, fracture or cast shadows twenty minutes later. This is music to inhabit rather than decode: four landscapes with no prescribed images, waiting for the listener to close their eyes and begin seeing.

Lazro, Zingaro, Leandre, Lovens - 2002 - Madly You

 

Potlatch – P 102  271.78MB FLAC

Madly You begins without ceremony. Bowed violin and double bass immediately produce a web of high harmonics, dry friction and unstable resonance, while Paul Lovens places small percussion sounds around them with extraordinary care. Nothing resembles a count-in, theme or declaration of leadership. The four musicians seem to arrive inside a conversation that was already underway. When Daunik Lazro’s baritone saxophone enters, it does not simply add a lower melodic voice. It introduces breath, weight and animal-like vibration into a string environment whose pitches have already begun to lose their ordinary outlines.
Recorded live at the Forum de Blanc-Mesnil during the Banlieues Bleues festival on March 22, 2001, and issued by Potlatch in 2002, the CD contains two collective improvisations. “Madly You” lasts 40:47; “Lyou Mad,” its title playfully rearranging the same words, lasts 19:33. There are no short pieces, alternate takes or composed themes to provide orientation. The record presents one hour of real-time quartet invention, preserving not only its eruptions and discoveries but also the moments when the musicians test an idea, withdraw it or wait to discover who will move next.
The instrumentation is beautifully balanced despite containing no conventional harmonic instrument. Lazro plays alto and baritone saxophones, Carlos Alves “Zingaro” violin, Joëlle Léandre double bass and voice, and Lovens drums, percussion and musical saw. Every instrument can behave melodically, rhythmically or texturally. The baritone can provide a bass foundation but is equally capable of thin, whistling harmonics; the double bass can sustain pitch or become a wooden percussion body; the violin can sing or scratch; Lovens’ percussion can mark time or erase any clear sense that time is being divided regularly.
This refusal of assigned roles is the heart of the performance. Many free-improvised recordings advertise equality while still revolving around a dominant horn player. Madly You contains no such center. Lazro may emerge with a long baritone statement, but the strings can redirect its emotional meaning. Léandre may seize attention with a vocal cry, only for Lovens to answer with a tiny metallic sound that changes the scale of the entire event. Zingaro can produce enough intensity to resemble a second saxophone, then reduce his presence to a nearly inaudible filament.
Lazro’s baritone is especially compelling because he rejects the instrument’s familiar identities. He does not depend upon a swaggering low-register riff, nor does he treat the horn as an oversized vehicle for muscular free-jazz shouting. His sound can suggest a large animal in pain, a bank of oscillators, escaping air or a voice heard through thick walls. At points he moves rapidly through barely accented lines, making the baritone seem unexpectedly light. Elsewhere he allows a note to leak into the room as a hiss, creating tension through reduced volume rather than force.
The opening improvisation develops through changing alliances. Lazro’s deeper tones lock momentarily with Léandre’s bass, forming a dark composite voice whose components are difficult to separate. When he moves to alto, the relationship shifts upward: saxophone and Zingaro’s violin release a cage full of cries, whistles and sharp glissandi. These pairings never become permanent duos. Lovens listens for the instant when one relationship has become predictable, then inserts a cymbal scrape, drum stroke or loose metallic clatter that changes the conversation without dominating it.
Lovens’ kit sounds less like a single instrument than a collection of independent objects. His history in European improvised music taught him how to create momentum without maintaining a beat, but the playing here goes beyond tasteful nonmetric commentary. He can strike with considerable force when the music demands it. Just as importantly, he knows how to place one dry impact against a sustained string sound so that both become more vivid. Unattached cymbals and small percussion pieces produce noises that might initially be mistaken for electronic processing, though the performance is entirely acoustic.
The musical saw pushes that confusion further. In the second improvisation, its minute cracks, sliding pitches and disembodied whoops resemble computer-generated sound. The instrument’s vaudeville history adds a subtle absurdity: an old acoustic novelty produces some of the record’s most futuristic tones. This is characteristic of Madly You. The quartet does not seek newness through equipment. It discovers unfamiliar sounds by using ordinary acoustic materials with extreme attention and imagination.
Léandre’s double bass gives the music both gravity and provocation. She is capable of producing a full, resonant tone, but conventional beauty is only one item in a much larger vocabulary. Bow hair drags against strings, harmonics flare, pizzicato notes snap into the ensemble and the instrument’s body becomes a resonating chamber for physical attack. Her long history with Lazro is audible in their immediate understanding. They know how to reinforce one another’s low frequencies without turning the performance into a heavy monochrome mass.
Her voice makes the interaction more theatrical. Guttural cries, rolling syllables, groans and operatic projections enter without functioning as lyrics. These sounds can be funny, defiant or genuinely unsettling, and their meaning changes according to the responses around them. Zingaro may answer a vocal curve with a violin glissando; Lovens may puncture a grand gesture with a perfectly timed strike. The other musicians do not treat Léandre’s vocalizations as an expressive spectacle requiring passive support. They challenge, complicate and occasionally parody them.
Zingaro is the quartet’s most continuously mobile colorist. His violin can move between recognizable bowed tone and raw noise so gradually that the transition becomes impossible to locate. In the first piece, his interaction with Léandre creates an unusually broad string field. Because violin and bass occupy opposite ends of the family’s normal register, they can surround Lazro and Lovens, but both players continually escape those limits. Léandre reaches toward thin harmonics while Zingaro digs into coarse lower-string attacks. Their ranges overlap in the middle, where identities become uncertain.
The forty-minute title performance contains passages of considerable density, but it does not follow the standard free-improvisation arc of quiet opening, gradual crescendo, climax and exhausted conclusion. Intensity rises and disperses several times. A fierce collective passage may lead not to silence but to an intimate exchange between two players. A near-march briefly forms, giving the listener a glimpse of familiar rhythmic organization before the quartet takes it apart. Elsewhere, the four engage in collective skittering, each producing small quick sounds until individual gestures merge into a single restless surface.
This changing scale keeps the performance alive. The music can feel enormous when baritone, bowed bass and drums gather their weight, then suddenly shrink to the dimensions of a cymbal edge or a strand of horsehair crossing a violin string. The live recording preserves those contrasts with impressive clarity. Jean-Marc Foussat’s recording, mixing and editing allow the quiet details to remain audible without reducing the force of the loud passages. Audience presence is secondary; the room is heard primarily through the instruments’ resonance.
“Lyou Mad” does not operate as a leftover or abbreviated second set. Its shorter duration produces a different concentration. Lazro’s baritone is more immediately foregrounded, while Léandre and Zingaro move between stormy string textures and chamber-like exchanges. The players can sound more playful here because the first improvisation has already established the full range of their collective language. There is less need to demonstrate the space; they can begin rearranging its contents.
The musical saw contributes to that playful instability, but the piece never becomes whimsical. A gentle pulse may appear, with Léandre briefly suggesting walking bass against Lovens’ rhythmic figures, only to be deepened and disrupted. The quartet recognizes familiar musical behaviors without treating them as forbidden. Swing, march, chamber counterpoint and vocal theater can all appear for a few seconds. Freedom means being able to use those materials without becoming obligated to continue them.
An hour of continuous collective improvisation inevitably asks a great deal of the listener. The title piece contains stretches in which direction is intentionally uncertain, and anyone searching for recurring themes may experience parts of it as undifferentiated activity. The predominance of bowed strings, baritone multiphonics and metallic percussion also gives portions of the album a rough, gray tonal surface. Léandre’s vocal interjections can feel overly theatrical if heard outside the ensemble conversation.
Yet the record’s apparent disorder is supported by exceptional listening. These are musicians who understand that improvisation is not simply the unrestricted production of personal ideas. Every gesture proposes a relationship. The others may accept it, refuse it, exaggerate it or reveal a detail hidden inside it. Nobody needs to maintain authority, and nobody disappears into tasteful accompaniment. Even the silences feel collectively negotiated.
Madly You captures European free improvisation at its most communicative: neither subdued sound investigation nor indiscriminate eruption, but an acoustic social space capable of holding humor, violence, patience and surprise. Its two long performances continuously reverse expected roles and turn old instruments into sources of sounds without obvious ancestry. The altered second title, “Lyou Mad,” provides an apt summary of the quartet’s method. The same elements return in another order, and the rearrangement changes everything.

Macronympha - 2003 - Close To The Edge

 

Mother Savage Noise Productions – none  528.40MB FLAC

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

Von Einem - 2015 - The Von Einem Tapes 2xCD

 

Index Clean – IC-001  781.09MB FLAC

The Von Einem Tapes gathers seven cassettes recorded between 2011 and 2014 into a thirty-track, two-CD set lasting more than two hours. Such collections can expose every inconsistency accumulated across several years of small-edition releases, but this one feels remarkably unified. Mark Groves, the Australian musician behind Von Einem, had already established a narrow but surprisingly flexible vocabulary: processed speech, restrained industrial percussion, decaying electronics, low drones, metallic reverberations and sudden outbreaks of abrasive noise. Individual tapes may have been issued by different labels and created under slightly different circumstances, yet they appear to have originated inside the same sealed psychological environment. Mastered by Joe Talia, the compilation preserves their cassette-born roughness while giving the complete sequence enough continuity to function as something more substantial than a chronological clearinghouse.
Von Einem is named after Bevan Spencer von Einem, the only person convicted in connection with the group associated with Adelaide’s so-called Family murders. The project also draws upon other Australian crimes, psychological profiles and fragments of procedural language. That subject matter immediately creates an ethical problem. Naming a project after a convicted murderer risks directing fascination toward the offender, while the use of real cases can lend music an unearned appearance of seriousness. Groves generally avoids the theatrical aggression and domineering personality common to crime-fixated power electronics. His treated voice is clinical, flattened and often partially obscured, sounding closer to a damaged documentary narration than a performer assuming the identity of a killer. This distance does not resolve the problem completely, but it prevents the recordings from becoming straightforward exercises in murderer mythology.
The first disc is dominated by compressed scenes and abrupt pieces. “Silence and Brush Fences,” “Mummified Rather Than Dissolved,” “White Holden Sedan” and “Dirties” have titles that resemble isolated phrases extracted from police reports, local newspapers or inventories of evidence. The music behaves similarly. Sounds are presented as incomplete details rather than fully developed compositions: a pulse begins, a voice supplies several sentences, an electronic frequency shifts slightly, and then the piece ends before its implications become clear. Even the shortest tracks contribute to the cumulative pressure. They are not introductions to larger works so much as sealed rooms arranged along the same corridor.
Groves’ rhythms are especially effective because they rarely settle into conventional industrial momentum. The beats in “Dirties” and “Black Moods” thud rather than drive, repeating with the awkward regularity of machinery that has been repaired but not properly realigned. Synthesizer tones circle those impacts without releasing the tension they create. Elsewhere, junk-metal resonance, static and feedback occupy the foreground, although Von Einem seldom becomes a continuous wall of noise. Groves appears more interested in controlling empty space than overwhelming it. A sound can feel physically oppressive because of what has been removed around it: a lone impact echoes into silence, or a narrow frequency remains suspended after the voice has disappeared.
The processed narration gives the music much of its identity. Groves’ Australian accent remains audible beneath the treatments, grounding the work in a particular place rather than the anonymous dystopia inhabited by countless industrial projects. His delivery is calm to the point of emotional vacancy. It suggests someone reading a psychological assessment after every directly human response has been edited out. At its most effective, this method makes the listener conscious of how institutional language can convert suffering into a collection of dates, locations and behavioral patterns. At other moments, the recurring combination of impassive speech, low percussion and corrosive drone becomes predictable. Across thirty tracks, clinical detachment can harden into a formula.
The second disc opens the sound sufficiently to prevent that formula from consuming the collection. Distant, atonal piano appears in “Twice in the Head,” its notes sounding less composed than remembered from another room. “Forged Cheques” introduces an orchestral-string sample against crumbling drones and higher electronic squeals. These elements do not make the music lush; instead, they create brief suggestions of a wider emotional world that the prevailing numbness has suppressed. “Scripted Phases” places a fractured rhythmic framework beneath a windswept drone, while “Disturbed Then Refilled” returns to a thicker heavy-electronics pulse, a sustained midrange tone and a voice so altered that speech becomes another unstable texture.
This movement between recognizable detail and abstraction is crucial. The record is least convincing when its criminal references are expected to provide all the gravity. It is considerably stronger when the sound independently generates unease—when an object seems to be dragged beyond the microphone, when a rhythm falls out of alignment, or when a voice is reduced to consonants and electrical residue. The real cases should not function as decorative horror material, and the compilation occasionally comes uncomfortably close to allowing evocative titles to do work that the compositions have not earned. Yet its best pieces resist spectacle. They make violence feel bureaucratic, regional and concealed inside ordinary environments.
Vehicle references such as “White Holden Sedan” and “Orange Sigma” intensify that specifically Australian atmosphere. They are mundane objects, but their placement among descriptions of damaged bodies, forged documents and disturbed sites makes familiarity itself unsettling. The landscape implied by The Von Einem Tapes is not a gothic ruin or fantastical torture chamber. It is made from suburbs, roads, institutional interiors and quiet stretches of land. Groves’ “Thornbury Bunker” recordings repeatedly turn ordinary spaces into acoustic containers. The result is closer to forensic industrial music than horror soundtrack imitation.
The later portion of the set contains several longer pieces, including “A Group That Preyed on Itself,” “Hope Forest” and the concluding “Lower Light.” Here the tight miniatures begin to stretch into more patient environments. Sounds are permitted to deteriorate gradually, and the listener becomes aware of layers that would have been cut short on the earlier tracks. “Lower Light” is particularly well placed at the end. It does not offer a climax or explanation; it lets the compilation recede into a dimmer, less definite space. After so much processed information, the lack of resolution feels appropriate.
Talia’s mastering is essential to the success of this progression. The recordings retain differences in density and fidelity, as material sourced from seven independent cassette releases should, but changes in volume and texture do not make the compilation feel randomly assembled. The grain is preserved without allowing it to blur every piece into the same grey surface. The sequence also benefits from the alternation between one- or two-minute fragments and works lasting four, six or more minutes. Two uninterrupted hours of Von Einem’s restricted palette would be punishing in an unproductive way; the short pieces create exits, resets and changes of scale.
The six-panel wallet and accompanying booklet frame the release as a complete early-period statement, but the music remains more interesting than its packaging or scarcity. The Von Einem Tapes documents Groves learning how much he can remove from industrial noise while maintaining its physical menace. Its weaknesses are inseparable from that method: repetitions accumulate, voices sometimes lapse into generalized ominousness, and the invocation of actual crimes remains morally uneasy. Nevertheless, the compilation develops a distinct character through restraint, regional specificity and close attention to pacing. Rather than shouting its transgressions, Von Einem speaks quietly from inside a deteriorating mechanism. The listener is left to decide whether that voice is documenting the darkness, exploiting it or demonstrating how easily the two activities can become indistinguishable.

VA - (2008) Hated Perversions CD

 Institute Of Paraphilia Studies ‎– none

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

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

 

Taint + Goat - 2001 - Live Action Houston TX

 

Biteworks – 001cdr  233.61MB FLAC

Live Action Houston, TX preserves two extended noise performances without attempting to disguise the unstable conditions of the room in which they occurred. Taint and Goat are given one track apiece, and the division makes immediate sense: this is not a collaboration or split assembled from unrelated studio leftovers, but a paired document of two artists testing their sounds against the same physical environment. Released by Keith Brewer’s Biteworks label in 2001 as a CD-R limited to approximately thirty copies, it has the secrecy and roughness of something passed directly between performers, label contacts and serious noise collectors. The recording does not convert either set into a polished album. It retains overloaded frequencies, uncertain distance, room resonance and the sensation that the sound is exceeding whatever equipment was available to capture it.
The performances appear to come from the Dead Audio Music Festival held at Houston’s Superstitious Art Warehouse on September 22, 2001. The enormous lineup also included Black Leather Jesus, Concrete Violin, Rotten Piece, Stimbox, Xome, T.E.F., Steel Hook Prostheses and numerous Texas-area experimental projects. It was less a conventional concert than a concentrated gathering of the American noise network as it existed before social media, streaming archives or readily available digital distribution. The event occurred through mail, flyers, phone calls, personal introductions and packages of cassettes sent between people who might know one another only through project names. A tiny CD-R like this extended the festival afterward, allowing thirty listeners to hear a fraction of what had happened inside the warehouse.
Some online databases list the title as Live Action Austin, TX, but contemporary Taint documentation identifies it as a Houston recording, and both Taint and Goat appear on the surviving Dead Audio festival lineup. The confusion is characteristic of an object issued so privately that there was never a standardized commercial listing to correct later copies of the information. Biteworks assigned it the label’s first CD-R catalog number, but the presentation remained closer to a personal artifact than a formal debut. Its scarcity was not an artificial collector’s strategy so much as a reflection of how these recordings moved: burned in small batches, packaged by hand and circulated until the available copies were gone.
Taint opens the disc with a performance that demonstrates why Keith Brewer’s work stood apart from simpler definitions of power electronics. The set is violent, but its violence does not depend upon uninterrupted maximum volume. Brewer works with contrast, allowing a thin electrical whistle or low mechanical vibration to establish itself before forcing another sound through it. Frequencies seem to bend under pressure. Harsh midrange currents scrape against heavier bass movement, while sudden vocal eruptions transform the electronics from an abstract system into a confrontation. The room recording blurs the equipment’s edges, but it also gives every change in intensity a physical dimension.
Brewer had been developing Taint since the beginning of the 1990s, moving from a one-shot fanzine name into one of the most distinctive American harsh-noise projects of the decade. By 2001, releases such as Victimology, Whoredom, Dau ghter: Victimology 2 and Justmeat had established a recognizable language of sexual pathology, criminal obsession and psychological damage. Vice, issued the same year as this performance, showed how tightly Brewer could organize that material in the studio. The Houston recording offers the opposite perspective. It removes the carefully constructed packaging and much of the verbal framework, leaving the listener with gesture, pressure and the decisions being made in real time.
The Taint set does not unfold like a studio composition played from beginning to end. It sounds assembled at the point of impact. Brewer introduces an abrasive texture, lets it grind against the room, then cuts or redirects it before it becomes passive. The most effective passages are those in which several unstable layers remain separately audible: a buried low-frequency engine, a narrow feedback tone and a harsher surface that repeatedly tears open. Rather than merging into one undifferentiated roar, these components compete for space. The listener can hear the performance changing shape as Brewer adjusts the balance, pushes a signal too far or abruptly withdraws an element that had seemed permanent.
The voice appears less as narration than as physical material. Words are partially destroyed by distortion, microphone overload and the volume surrounding them. What survives is breath, strain and cadence. This makes the live performance different from Taint recordings in which titles, samples or printed material direct the interpretation. Here the body behind the electronics becomes the primary subject. Brewer’s shouts do not stand majestically above the noise; they struggle inside it. That struggle prevents the set from becoming a demonstration of domination. The machinery can swallow its operator as readily as it can be used against an audience.
Room sound is essential to the recording’s effect. A studio version might have offered deeper bass, cleaner separation and more precisely edited transitions, but it would not contain the same sense of air being displaced inside a warehouse. The recording saturates when the set becomes dense, flattening some detail while producing a hard ceiling against which the sound can push. Far from ruining the performance, this limitation reveals its scale. Noise music is often described through equipment and frequencies, but live noise also involves architecture: concrete, open floor space, inadequate electrical systems, bodies absorbing sound and walls returning it several milliseconds later.
Goat’s performance occupies that architecture differently. Andy O’Sullivan’s project would become associated with dense, sustained harsh noise and the nearly immovable structures later described as harsh noise wall. The Houston set contains that drive toward density, but it is not static. Goat begins with a more dispersed field of hiss, rumble and damaged electronic movement, then gradually compresses those materials. Where Taint’s section feels argumentative, constantly setting one frequency against another, Goat’s performance is accumulative. Sounds pile up until their individual origins become irrelevant and the room is occupied by a broad, granular mass.
This does not mean the Goat set is featureless. Its activity takes place inside the noise rather than through dramatic stops and starts. Static shifts in thickness; low frequencies rise sufficiently to change the apparent weight of the entire field; sharper feedback edges emerge and then become buried again. Listening at low volume can make the piece seem like an extended block, but greater volume exposes its internal turbulence. The surface continually flakes, folds and renews itself. Instead of delivering a succession of events, O’Sullivan establishes a hostile condition and explores how long it can remain physically compelling.
The live recording intensifies that method because microphone saturation introduces another layer that Goat can effectively absorb. It is sometimes impossible to determine whether a rough edge originates from the performance, the public-address system or the recording device. That uncertainty becomes part of the piece. The warehouse, recorder and audience position are no longer neutral channels carrying the work; they are additional distortion units. Every stage of transmission damages the original signal, but the damage is precisely what gives this document its grain. A clean board recording might reveal more equipment detail while sacrificing the abrasive atmospheric depth heard here.
Placed after Taint, Goat also changes the listener’s understanding of duration. Brewer’s set advances through confrontation and redirection, creating suspense around what will be introduced or cut next. O’Sullivan suspends that kind of expectation. Once Goat’s mass reaches full density, the question is not where it will go but how long the listener can remain attentive to microscopic change. This is one of the fundamental divisions within harsh noise: sound as a chain of forceful actions versus sound as a space into which one enters. Live Action Houston, TX presents both approaches without needing to announce the distinction.
The pairing also captures a productive moment in American noise. Taint represented an established 1990s network rooted in mail-order releases, handmade editions and the confrontational tradition of power electronics. Goat pointed toward the increasingly austere noise of the following decade, in which continuous texture, anonymity and extreme reduction would become central concerns. Neither set fits perfectly into a historical category, but hearing them together reveals a shift underway. Brewer treats feedback as a weapon wielded through performance; O’Sullivan treats it as an environment capable of continuing after the performer’s personality has receded.
As a live CD-R, the release carries weaknesses that should not be mistaken for mysteries. Some passages lose definition when the recording overloads. The lowest frequencies cannot be reproduced with the force they probably had in the room, while occasional transitions feel determined by practical equipment handling rather than compositional necessity. There is little contextual information within the audio itself, and listeners expecting the elaborate conceptual framing of major Taint releases may find it skeletal. Yet those limitations are honest. The disc does not pretend that a microphone placed in a warehouse can reproduce the bodily experience of standing near a noise performance.
What it can preserve is time, action and proximity. Small fluctuations in volume suggest movement around the equipment. Feedback catches and changes angle. A voice enters with more force than the recorder can accept. The noise strikes the room and comes back altered. These details prevent Live Action Houston, TX from functioning as a generic bootleg. It captures not only two sets but two different beliefs about what a live noise set should accomplish. Taint creates drama by forcing unstable elements into conflict. Goat reduces drama until attention settles upon the changing substance of noise itself.
The release is also a reminder of how fragile underground documentation can be. An edition of thirty CD-Rs could easily vanish through disc rot, damaged surfaces, dead websites and collections dispersed after their owners’ deaths. Even its city has been inconsistently recorded. Yet the audio survives as evidence of a large Houston gathering and of two artists at a meaningful point in their development. It does not require exaggerated claims about rarity to justify attention. The performances are strong because they remain active, tactile and distinctly different from one another.
Live Action Houston, TX ultimately succeeds through the simplicity of its construction: one room, two artists and two uninterrupted encounters with amplified sound. Taint offers the more volatile performance, carving passages of feedback, vocal strain and mechanical pressure into a changing sequence. Goat answers with density, allowing a slowly consolidated field to absorb equipment, architecture and recording damage. The CD-R documents an evening, but it also stages a useful argument between movement and stasis. Nothing is polished enough to erase the warehouse, and nothing is so chaotic that the identities of the artists disappear. More than two decades later, the room remains audible around them, holding the noise for thirty vanished copies and anyone who encounters the recording afterward.

Taint - 2004 - Misogynist Lust

 

Freak Animal Records – Freak-CD-021  309.63MB FLAC

Misogynist Lust begins with no gradual descent into its subject. “Undeserving” immediately establishes a compact, frontal sound built from rough analogue pressure, needling feedback and a voice fighting to remain intelligible inside the electronics. The album contains ten pieces in approximately forty minutes, and almost all of them stay between three and six minutes. That economy distinguishes it from power electronics records that depend upon extended drones or twenty-minute displays of endurance. Keith Brewer attacks, develops one diseased combination of frequencies and stops before it can settle into background noise. The 2004 Freak Animal CD is consequently severe but highly active: a sequence of individual wounds rather than one long grey wall.
The material originated in the late 1990s, first appearing through the Italian Slaughter Productions Listen and Die! cassette box and then as a self-released Taint Entertainment tape limited to twenty-eight copies. Freak Animal’s CD edition expanded its circulation to 300 copies and gave the recordings a permanence that their original cassette existence could not guarantee. The label did not polish Taint into a cleaner European power-electronics product. Tape grain, overloaded signals and abrupt edits remain fundamental to the sound. The CD makes those surfaces more immediate, exposing numerous small movements that could disappear behind hiss on a heavily played cassette.
“Undeserving,” “Dirty Blonde Whore,” “Streetmeat” and “Whoremonger” form a brutally concentrated opening run. Brewer’s electronics do not resemble industrial machinery operating with regular efficiency. They feel unstable, as though every device has been pushed beyond its intended range. Low tones buckle beneath high feedback, distortion splits into several competing bands, and voices repeatedly emerge only to be crushed back into the mix. There are pulses, but rarely anything as orderly as a beat. Momentum comes from escalation: a frequency thickens, another sharpens, and the available space contracts until something must be removed.
This is what separates Brewer from performers who treat aggression as a matter of shouting over static. Taint’s sound has architecture. Even at its harshest, one can hear foreground, depth and movement between layers. “Dirty Blonde Whore” drives a coarse vocal attack through a narrow channel of scraping electronics, while “Streetmeat” places greater weight on the low end, giving its abrasion a heavier physical body. “Whoremonger” stretches its material into a crawling, hostile churn. The pieces share a vocabulary, but they do not merely duplicate one another. Each finds a different balance between vocal presence, bass pressure and upper-frequency pain.
Contributions associated with Thomas Garrison of Control, Jonathan Canady of Deathpile and the obscure Ultra connect the album to a broader American network of late-1990s noise. Their presence does not turn Misogynist Lust into a series of obvious collaborations. Instead, additional source sounds seem to have been incorporated into Brewer’s compositional method, cut apart and made to serve Taint’s atmosphere. This was common in the cassette underground: artists exchanged recordings through the mail, processed one another’s material and created collaborations without sharing a studio. The sound passed from machine to machine, accumulating damage and losing any clean point of origin.
“Every Little Girl” is one of the album’s most sustained and disturbing constructions. It develops slowly enough for its component sounds to become individually recognizable before they are forced together. A low industrial foundation supplies weight, thin feedback hangs above it, and a processed voice enters with the detached quality of recorded testimony or institutional speech. The track does not produce horror through a sudden blast. It creates an environment in which implication grows more oppressive as the listener waits. Brewer understood that anticipation can be more effective than continuous attack, especially when the title has already contaminated how every sound will be interpreted.
The naming throughout Misogynist Lust is deliberately degrading. Women are reduced to commodities, physical types, sexual functions or locations attached to violent stories. The album does not provide a stable critical distance from that language. It inhabits an offender’s vocabulary so completely that documentation, role-playing, exposure and endorsement become difficult to separate. Such uncertainty was central to a strain of power electronics influenced by true-crime writing, extreme pornography and the confrontational methods of Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jügend and Peter Sotos. Taint’s work pushes that ambiguity further by refusing explanatory liner notes that might offer the listener an approved interpretation.
That refusal remains the album’s central ethical problem. The music convincingly represents obsession as ugly, repetitive and isolating, but the titles still transform violence against women and girls into material for an overwhelmingly male underground audience. One cannot assume that extremity automatically equals criticism. At the same time, the record never makes its fantasies sound liberating, glamorous or triumphant. Brewer’s world is cramped and spiritually dead. Desire has curdled into compulsion; the voice issuing commands sounds imprisoned inside the same electrical enclosure it attempts to control. The album’s most persuasive interpretation lies in that contradiction rather than in any claim that its provocations are harmless.
“Laura Smithers, Friendswood TX” gives the sequence a specific geographical wound. The title refers to the 1997 disappearance and murder of a twelve-year-old girl from Friendswood, Texas, south of Houston. Brewer lived in Waco, and this use of a nearby Texas case removes the distancing effect common to records built around famous European atrocities or legendary serial killers. The track is notably concise. Feedback flashes across a murky background while voices and source material pass through without forming a conventional narrative. It supplies no biography or explanation. A name and location are placed inside noise, leaving the listener to confront how real suffering has been converted into an aesthetic object.
The title track follows with one of the album’s fullest combinations of voice and electronics. “Misogynist Lust” does not move toward a recognizable climax; it tightens. Brewer stacks rough, dragging frequencies until the vocal performance seems physically pinned beneath them. High tones cut through the mass, but they offer no release. The piece is less a declaration than a demonstration of fixation consuming itself. Its sound circles repeatedly around the same psychic blockage, gaining power through small adjustments in density rather than large changes of direction.
“Sluttish” provides another variation on that method, with a more agitated surface and a voice that arrives in broken bursts. It is followed by “Show Me,” whose command-like title prepares the listener for a more direct confrontation. Yet the track’s electronics remain more interesting than its verbal aggression. Brewer creates an unstable middle register that seems to wobble between feedback and damaged amplification. A thick lower signal periodically enters and alters the scale of the entire mix. These shifts make the piece feel larger than the limited equipment likely used to create it. Taint’s production is crude, but never careless.
“Wackelpeter” closes the CD in only ninety-one seconds. Associated with Ultra, it feels less like a grand conclusion than an ugly fragment left moving after the main sequence has exhausted itself. Its brevity is perfectly judged. After forty minutes of tightly constructed hostility, an extended finale would risk making the record feel ceremonious. Instead, Misogynist Lust ends abruptly, denying the listener a cleansing fade or dramatic resolution. The final sound disappears, but the language printed across the track list remains.
The 2004 CD sequence differs somewhat from surviving descriptions of the original cassette, which included additional or separately indexed material and arranged the pieces in another order. Freak Animal’s edition makes the album feel more deliberate by beginning with “Undeserving,” placing the title track deep into the second half and using “Wackelpeter” as a brief exit. That structure creates a clear progression from frontal attacks through increasingly psychological pieces. The forty-minute running time is another strength. Brewer maintains intensity without stretching every idea beyond its useful life.
Production is the album’s greatest accomplishment. Its high frequencies are painful without becoming a uniform digital screech, and its bass remains dirty rather than inflated into modern subsonic spectacle. The voice changes function from track to track: sometimes an attacker, sometimes a documentary fragment and sometimes another piece of material being ground down. Tape noise supplies atmosphere without concealing the construction. Even moments that initially resemble formless distortion reveal cycles, edits and deliberate shifts when heard closely. Brewer’s control over abrasive sound explains why the record endured beyond its microscopic original edition.
Misogynist Lust also captures Taint at a transition point. Earlier recordings frequently carried the instability of cassette experimentation, while later works such as Vice, Sex Sick and Brewer’s Mania material would develop heavier structures and more intricate editing. These recordings retain the rawness of the former while anticipating the compositional discipline of the latter. The result is not Taint’s most varied album, but it may be one of the clearest demonstrations of Brewer’s ability to turn a few primitive electronic sources into distinct physical spaces.
Its reputation as a power-electronics classic is therefore understandable, though the word “classic” should not neutralize what the record asks an audience to consume. The album’s language is intentionally hateful, its use of real victims is ethically unresolved, and its conceptual ambiguity can provide convenient cover for listeners interested only in degradation. None of those objections erases the precision of the sound. Brewer constructs feedback with exceptional patience, knows when to let a vocal dominate and recognizes when a piece has reached its endpoint. Misogynist Lust remains powerful because those contradictions cannot be comfortably separated. It is a technically focused, physically punishing record built around fantasies and realities that should resist comfortable appreciation. The sound does not absolve the concept, and the concept does not exhaust the sound.

Mysogyny - 1989 - Skrag

 

Dead Mind Records – DMR41  354.46MB FLAC

Skrag begins before Keith Brewer had fully decided what his noise should become. Recorded and released in 1989 under the deliberately misspelled name Mysogyny, the cassette predates Taint, the project through which Brewer would become one of the defining figures in American power electronics and harsh noise. There are no titles, samples explaining a concept or printed narratives directing the listener toward a particular crime. Instead, Skrag presents crude electronic pressure, tape manipulation, scraped metal, overloaded signals and domestic room sound as eight untitled pieces. It is primitive even by the standards of late-1980s cassette noise, but its lack of refinement is precisely what gives the recording its unsettled character.
The original tape circulated in the United States through Big Body Parts as BBP-063, with a European version handled by Peter Zincken’s Nihilistic Recordings. This placed a teenage Brewer inside an international mail-art network before he had established a recognizable discography. Cassettes crossed borders through handwritten correspondence, photocopied catalogs and trades between artists who might never meet. Sound quality changed with each duplication, and different editions could contain alternate edits or missing material. That instability became part of Skrag: the master preserved by Zincken includes several short pieces absent from the known Big Body Parts version.
Dead Mind Records returned to that longer master in 2020, after Brewer’s death in November 2019, and issued two cassette editions of fifty copies. Its eight tracks last approximately fifty-six minutes, ranging from brief two-minute interruptions to an eighteen-minute central piece. Heard in this more complete form, Skrag is not merely an undeveloped version of Taint. It belongs to an earlier language of industrial cassette culture, when a recording could be assembled from whatever machinery, objects, cheap microphones and damaged tape decks happened to be available. The distinction between an instrument, an accident and a recording defect is continually erased.
The opening piece establishes that uncertainty with a compact field of abrasion. Sounds scrape past one another without settling into a stable rhythm, while the cassette grain binds them into one rough surface. The longer second section expands the idea. Low mechanical rumbling occupies the background as sharper noises enter, disappear and return at altered levels. Brewer does not yet display the precise control over feedback that would distinguish his later work, but he already understands tension. He can leave an unpleasant frequency hanging long enough for it to become physically irritating, then replace it with something heavier rather than offering relief.
There is little conventional power-electronics vocalizing. When traces of voices or human activity emerge, they are swallowed by processing and distance. The body is present through handling: objects are moved, tape machines are operated, and signals are pushed until the recording medium responds. Instead of a vocalist dominating electronic accompaniment, Skrag lets the equipment become the central performer. Brewer seems to be testing how much violence can be suggested by friction, repetition and amplification alone. The results are closer to private experimental action than a staged industrial concert.
The two sides work on different scales. Short pieces behave like sudden discoveries: a useful sound is found, worried for several minutes and abandoned. The longer passages are less impatient. The eleven-minute second track and eighteen-minute fifth track allow layers to deteriorate in real time. Repetitions do not return exactly as they began because tape speed, microphone placement and manual interference keep altering them. What initially resembles a static drone begins to reveal pulses, unstable overtones and partially buried events. Brewer’s later recordings would organize these details more forcefully, but the attraction to contaminated repetition is already unmistakable.
The eighteen-minute centerpiece is the recording’s strongest demonstration of endurance. It does not build toward a clean climax. Instead, a collection of coarse sounds accumulates, loses definition and reorganizes itself. Dense sections give way to stretches in which the machinery seems distant, as though the recorder has been left running after the primary action moved elsewhere. These changes create depth without requiring studio polish. The listener is not positioned in front of a finished composition but inside a workspace, hearing the difference between immediate contact noise and signals arriving from another part of the room.
This room-bound quality separates Skrag from the spectacular harsh noise Brewer later made as Taint and Mania. There is no enormous stereo image or carefully sculpted bass. The sound is narrow, dirty and often starved of frequency range. Yet that limitation produces intimacy. Scraping noises feel close enough to touch, while background hum suggests walls surrounding the equipment. Even silence is never entirely empty; hiss and electrical residue remain active. The cassette does not transport the listener into an imaginary factory. It exposes a small real space being temporarily transformed through recording.
The final three pieces are significantly shorter, giving the end of the extended version a fragmented rhythm. After the fifth track’s prolonged excavation, these sections feel like leftover experiments rescued from the master rather than parts of an intentionally balanced album. That is not a weakness. Their inclusion clarifies Brewer’s early process. One piece compresses rough feedback and low-end movement into less than five minutes; the final pair offer quick, raw gestures that stop before they can become formal compositions. The tape ends without resolution because none was required. Skrag documents activity rather than presenting a grand statement.
Knowing Brewer’s later work inevitably affects how the cassette is heard. Taint would develop far more deliberate structures, confrontational vocals and obsessive themes involving sexual violence, criminal psychology and exploitation. Mania would push his sound toward thicker editing and highly controlled frequency pressure. Elements of both futures can be found here, particularly in the attraction to rough surfaces and the refusal of comforting musical order. Still, it would be a mistake to praise every accidental scrape simply because its maker eventually became important. Some portions drift, several sounds remain underdeveloped, and the extended duration exposes the limits of Brewer’s equipment and experience.
What makes Skrag worthwhile is not technical perfection but genuine curiosity. Brewer had not yet learned the conventions of power electronics well enough to reproduce them automatically. The recording therefore moves unpredictably between industrial drone, crude harsh noise, object manipulation and accidental musique concrète. It sounds like someone discovering that a tape recorder does more than preserve sound: it can compress space, magnify insignificant actions and turn equipment failure into composition. That discovery remains audible throughout the master.
The name Mysogyny suggests an early attempt to establish a hostile identity, but the audio carries little of the explicit thematic apparatus Brewer later attached to Taint. Without track titles or textual explanations, the provocation remains on the cassette shell while the recording concentrates on matter—metal, current, tape and air. This makes Skrag easier to approach as sound while also revealing how much Brewer’s later reputation depended upon combining sonic ability with morally abrasive subject matter. Here the ability comes first.
Skrag is consequently best understood as an origin point that remains rough enough to resist mythology. It contains dead stretches, awkward transitions and sounds that were probably more exciting to create than they are to hear. It also contains the first evidence of Brewer’s unusual patience with abrasive material. He listens to noise changing, allows recording defects to become structural and recognizes that crude sound can produce an atmosphere no expensive studio could manufacture. More than thirty years later, the surviving Nihilistic master does not sound like a polished lost classic. It sounds like a door being forced open by someone who had not yet decided what waited behind it.