John Cage - 2025 - Chamber Works 1943-1951 (Apartment House)

 

Another Timbre – at240  593.20MB FLAC

 Chamber Works 1943–1951 presents John Cage before the public image of the smiling philosopher, mushroom expert and composer of silence became inseparable from his music. These pieces precede 4′33″ and largely precede his systematic use of the I Ching, yet they already dismantle the habits of Western concert music from within. Apartment House does not treat them as preliminary sketches for Cage’s later ideas. The performances reveal a complete sound world: quiet, sensuous, rhythmically exact and fascinated by how a small alteration in touch, tuning or instrumental material can transform an entire room.

The album begins with “In a Landscape,” ten minutes of unbroken piano motion played by Kerry Yong with extraordinary patience. Written in 1948 at Black Mountain College, the piece rotates through a restricted collection of tones while the sustain pedal allows successive figures to overlap. The influence of Erik Satie is easy to hear, but Cage removes Satie’s dry wit and leaves something more suspended. There is no dramatic destination. Patterns return with tiny differences, resonances accumulate, and the listener gradually stops waiting for an event. Yong never forces the piece toward transcendence. His even touch lets the piano produce its own halo.
That opening establishes the album’s central argument: early Cage can be immediately beautiful without becoming conventional. The surfaces are often gentle, but their gentleness results from strict limitations. Cage was already questioning the idea that composition must communicate through tension, climax and resolution. “In a Landscape” offers continuity without narrative, while “Six Melodies” reduces the relationship between violin and piano to sparse encounters. Mira Benjamin’s violin enters with thin sustained tones, small intervals and delicate fragments that seem to hover beside Yong’s isolated notes rather than being accompanied by them.
Cage composed “Six Melodies” in 1950 using a limited gamut of sonorities. That procedure gives the six miniatures a consistent color while preventing conventional harmonic development. Apartment House makes the pieces sound almost weightless. Benjamin avoids expressive vibrato and does not inflate the rests into theatrical silences. Each note is permitted to be exactly as small as it is. The piano answers with chords, single tones and brief gestures whose placement feels inevitable despite the absence of ordinary melodic argument. Across the six sections, attention shifts from what the performers might be expressing to the grain, duration and disappearance of the sounds themselves.
“Amores,” composed in 1943, changes the album’s physical materials. Its four movements alternate prepared-piano solos with percussion pieces. Cage’s preparation turns the piano into a compact percussion orchestra by placing objects between selected strings, altering their pitch, resonance and attack. On this recording the instrument produces muted knocks, metallic pings, dry wooden colors and tones that retain only a ghost of the familiar concert piano. The result is not a novelty sound effect. Preparation divides one keyboard into a collection of distinct objects, each requiring the player to learn a new relationship between gesture and result.
Kerry Yong’s performance emphasizes the unstable, handmade quality of that instrument. Cage’s instructions may be precise, but every piano, screw, bolt and piece of weather stripping responds differently. The prepared piano therefore cannot be perfectly standardized. Yong plays it as a newly discovered instrument rather than an impaired Steinway. Simon Limbrick’s tom-toms, pod rattle and homemade woodblocks extend its vocabulary without blurring the differences between materials. The percussion movements are concise and spacious, built from attacks that bloom briefly and vanish. Silence does not function as empty background; it separates one material from another so the ear can register its weight.
The three “Haikus” for piano compress Cage’s thought further. Lasting less than four minutes together, they do not imitate Japanese music or translate written poems into notes. Their brevity creates a comparable intensity of attention. A gesture arrives, leaves a resonance and stops before it can become explanatory. Yong gives each event a distinct contour but refuses to connect the fragments through romantic phrasing. The music feels unfinished only if completion is assumed to require a conclusion. Heard on its own terms, each haiku ends when its small acoustic image has fully appeared.
The String Quartet in Four Parts is the album’s largest and most concentrated construction. Cage associated its four movements with the seasons—summer, autumn, winter and spring—and with a progression toward quieting the mind. Yet the quartet never turns those ideas into picturesque scenery. Mira Benjamin, Gordon MacKay, Bridget Carey and Anton Lukoszevieze play without vibrato, producing a pale, nearly organ-like sonority. Because the individual lines remain narrow in range and restrained in expression, the ensemble often seems to breathe as a single instrument.
The long winter movement forms the album’s still center. Chords change slowly, but the apparent simplicity concentrates attention on tuning, pressure and the friction of bows moving across strings. Apartment House sustains the music without making it inert. Minute variations inside held sonorities become active events. When the brief final movement arrives, spring does not burst forth as celebration. It feels like a modest release of tension, a return of motion after the mind has been gradually emptied. The quartet’s refusal of climax gives that small change unusual force.
“Music for Marcel Duchamp” returns to prepared piano. Cage wrote it in 1947 for Hans Richter’s film Dreams That Money Can Buy, specifically the segment involving Duchamp’s rotating optical discs. The music proceeds through a recurring rhythmic structure while the altered strings make the piano sound simultaneously ancient and mechanical. Yong’s performance catches that double character. Some tones suggest gongs or a thumb piano; others resemble components shifting inside a small machine. Repetition does not stabilize the piece. Each return exposes another irregular resonance, reminding the listener that the prepared instrument cannot entirely conceal its physical unpredictability.
The closing “Dream” is transformed from a solo piano work into a piano-and-cello performance. Yong’s melody unfolds slowly over sustained resonance while Lukoszevieze doubles and shades it, making the line appear to extend beyond the piano’s natural decay. The cello does not add sentimental commentary. It changes the apparent source of the sound. A tone begins as struck wire and continues as bowed string, creating a soft ambiguity between attack and duration. After the dry percussion, prepared-piano mutations and purified quartet writing, “Dream” closes the album with melody restored but no longer innocent.
Apartment House’s great strength is restraint. The ensemble understands that Cage’s quietness does not need to be advertised with exaggerated slowness, precious pauses or spiritual solemnity. These performances are clear and direct. The recording allows the instruments to retain air around them while preserving tactile details: the short life of a woodblock strike, the uneven ring of a prepared string, the slight roughness within a cello tone and the harmonic cloud left by a piano chord. Nothing is polished into generalized prettiness.
The period covered here ends at the threshold of Cage’s decisive turn toward chance operations. What is striking is how much of his later thought already exists in these composed works. Sounds are released from conventional dramatic duty. Percussion is treated as an equal musical language. Instrumental identity becomes flexible. Repetition opens perception rather than enforcing a theme. Silence frames activity instead of negating it. Cage had not yet removed intention from the compositional process, but he was already developing methods for hearing beyond personal expression.
Chamber Works 1943–1951 is therefore not simply an accessible introduction to a difficult composer, though its beauty makes it useful as one. It is a portrait of Cage discovering that radical music need not always sound aggressive. A piano can be transformed by a few objects placed between its strings; a quartet can abandon vibrato and reveal an interior climate; a melody can continue without declaring where it is going. Apartment House performs these discoveries as living possibilities. More than seventy years after the works were written, their sounds remain fresh because they teach the ear to notice what musical habit usually passes over.

Wasteland Jazz Unit - 2009 - Space Denial

 

Nashazphone – NP-05  290.91MB FLAC

Space Denial begins with a paradox: two wind instruments generating a mass so dense that air seems to have been eliminated from the room. Jon Lorenz’s saxophone and John Rich’s clarinet are amplified through contact microphones placed inside the horns, then driven through loud amplifiers until breath, reed vibration, feedback and distortion collapse into one continuous physical event. The title does not suggest outer space. It describes the music’s refusal to leave any open area around the listener. Every available surface is occupied by pressure.
“Hollow Gathering” fills the first side with eighteen minutes of sustained confrontation. At first the sound can resemble anonymous electronics: a thick low drone, grainy upper-frequency abrasion and unstable tones moving against one another. Gradually, the bodily origin becomes apparent. Behind the distortion are lungs emptying, teeth pressing against reeds, fingers striking keys and two players adjusting their pitches in response to the amplifier system. The music is not made by sending polite instrumental lines through an effects chain. Lorenz and Rich push their horns until the acoustic source and amplified result become inseparable.
That distinction matters because Wasteland Jazz Unit’s setup was deliberately simple. Despite descriptions of their work as “reed electronic manipulation,” the duo avoided elaborate pedals. The contact microphones and amplifier distortion supplied nearly everything. Lorenz argued that interesting sound needed to exist before processing and that excessive effects could distract from the act of producing it. Space Denial proves the point. Its enormous apparent complexity grows from a narrow system: two reeds, two bodies, amplification, feedback and the changing acoustics created when all of them interact at extreme volume.
The record’s harshness is therefore not a layer applied afterward. It is built into the performance. When Lorenz overblows the saxophone, the microphone catches more than the intended pitch. Air turbulence, key noise and reed chatter become electrical information, and the amplifier enlarges these normally incidental sounds until they rival the horn’s fundamental tone. Rich’s clarinet contributes a narrower, more penetrating band of frequencies capable of slicing through the saxophone’s broader roar. Their sounds collide, create beating patterns and produce phantom tones that neither player seems to be performing alone.
“Hollow Gathering” does not develop like a free-jazz solo in which one musician advances an idea while the other responds. The duo builds a shared object. One sustained tone thickens another; a shriek tears open the drone; a low vibration destabilizes the apparent center; feedback begins behaving like a third player. Short gestures remain audible, but they are quickly absorbed into the accumulated mass. The title captures this process beautifully. The gathering is crowded yet hollow, a congregation formed entirely around an empty center that the sound continually attempts to crush.
Wasteland Jazz Unit’s name encourages the listener to search for jazz references, but Lorenz and Rich treated that association with suspicion. Lorenz had no formal saxophone training, while Rich’s clarinet experience extended back to school band. Their crucial model was not academic technique but the liberating violence of records such as Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun, combined with the amplified reed destruction of Borbetomagus. This lack of conservatory discipline is not a deficiency hidden by volume. It allows the duo to approach the instruments as machines for converting physical effort into unstable sound.
The second side combines “Attain,” “Jaws” and “Nuzzled” into one seventeen-minute sequence. The three titles imply different relationships to pressure: reaching toward something, being caught between teeth and finally being pressed into intimate contact. The music moves through comparable states without drawing clean borders between them. More exposed horn cries emerge from the distortion, then sink back into low churning resonance. Certain passages contract into a focused frequency before widening into full-band overload. The side feels less like three separate compositions than three names assigned to stages within one prolonged bodily struggle.
“Attain” suggests upward motion, and the playing repeatedly climbs toward pitches that seem to exceed the instruments’ stable registers. Notes split into multiphonics; breath becomes scream; distortion converts a wavering line into a radiant sheet of sound. Yet every apparent summit immediately creates another level of pressure. There is no victorious arrival. The duo’s achievement lies in maintaining the climb after the ordinary musical reasons for doing so have disappeared.
“Jaws” makes the record’s relationship to the mouth impossible to ignore. Reed instruments begin at a place where teeth, tongue, saliva and breath control a small vibrating strip of material. Wasteland Jazz Unit magnifies that hidden mechanics. Biting the reed changes the pitch and introduces strained, pinched tones; pushing too much air produces rupture rather than purity. Through amplification, the listener is placed impossibly close to the players’ mouths while simultaneously being hit by sound large enough to feel architectural. The result is both intimate and monumental.
“Nuzzled” is an unexpectedly tender word for such abrasive music. It suggests the closeness between the two performers as they work inside the same hostile field. Their improvisation is not simply a competition to become louder or more extreme. Each must listen closely enough to recognize where the other’s frequency is moving, when to reinforce it and when to force the combined sound into another shape. What appears from outside as chaos depends upon concentration. The warmth in the title also reflects the musicians’ own resistance to treating their work as purely negative. Rich described the music as joyful; Lorenz wanted audiences to feel the hands striking keys and teeth vibrating against reeds.
Space Denial was the Cincinnati duo’s first full-length statement after a series of small releases and collaborations. Lorenz and Rich were also deeply involved in their city’s experimental culture through the Art Damage Lodge, a former Masonic building they helped operate, and the long-running Art Damage radio program. That local context matters. The record did not emerge from an isolated studio experiment designed for the noise market. It came from a functioning performance community in which unusual sound, DIY organization and physically intense concerts were parts of the same activity.
The original Nashazphone LP was pressed in an edition of only 190 copies. Its two-side structure is ideal for the material. Each performance receives enough time to establish a complete acoustic environment, while the act of turning the record provides the only decisive silence. On digital versions, the second side’s three titles are joined as a single track, preserving their continuity rather than pretending that this music contains conventional songs. The format recognizes that duration is one of the duo’s instruments. Extreme volume becomes more than a shock when it is sustained long enough for the ear to begin mapping its interior.
Comparisons to Borbetomagus are unavoidable, but Space Denial possesses its own stripped-down character. Without Donald Miller’s guitar or a third reed player, Wasteland Jazz Unit produces a leaner confrontation. The absence of percussion prevents the noise from settling into pulse, while the lack of pedals keeps its transformations tied to breath and feedback. Even at maximum density, there is a direct line from muscular action to audible result. One can hear the duo discovering what happens when a slight shift in embouchure enters an amplifier already near collapse.
Space Denial is punishing, but punishment is not its final purpose. The album uses intensity to make ordinarily hidden aspects of instrumental performance perceptible. Breath becomes pressure, contact becomes electricity, a reed becomes a noise generator and two horns become an environment without edges. Lorenz and Rich do not decorate free jazz with distortion or imitate harsh noise using saxophone and clarinet. They locate the point where those categories cease to matter. The record denies space so completely that, inside its crowded roar, an entirely new space begins to form.

Jürg Frey (Reinier van Houdt) - 2025 - Composer, Alone 3xCD

 Elsewhere  – 30-3  2.83GB FLAC

Composer, alone begins with a piano sounding into a room that has already been listening. Reinier van Houdt does not announce the first note or shape it into an entrance. He lets it appear, remain briefly in the air and decay until the next event becomes possible. That manner of playing defines this enormous three-disc collection of Jürg Frey’s solo piano music. Across more than three hours, notes are repeated, separated, grouped into pale harmonies and extended into melodic paths, but they are rarely pushed toward a conventional destination. The music proceeds by allowing sound enough time to disclose its interior life.
The collection spans thirty-four years, from “Invention” in 1990 to the two recent “Composer, alone” pieces completed in 2024. It therefore functions as a retrospective, but the sequence avoids simple chronology. A new twenty-five-minute composition opens the first disc, followed by works from 1995, 2013, 1993 and 1991. The second disc is occupied entirely by the seventy-three-minute “Pianist, alone (1),” written between 1998 and 2004. The third moves from 2011 backward to 2001 and 1990 before closing with the newest music. Frey’s past and present are folded together, allowing early ideas to be heard through the vocabulary he later developed.
“Composer, alone (1)” immediately establishes that this is not minimalism as decorative calm. Van Houdt places single tones and small chords with great care, but their spacing is neither predictable nor designed to produce a comfortable ambient surface. Some notes return until familiarity makes their smallest changes audible. Others enter once and disappear. Resonances overlap, forming momentary harmonies that were not struck as unified chords. The listener becomes aware of several kinds of time at once: the note’s attack, the fading string, the memory of what preceded it and the quiet expectation of another sound.
Frey’s title does not describe social isolation so much as immersion. The composer alone is independent of external demands, free to remain inside the work without measuring progress by productivity. That freedom can be heard in the music’s generosity toward duration. Nothing is hurried into significance. A repeated note does not become meaningful because it accumulates toward a climax; it becomes meaningful because each return encounters a slightly altered acoustic field. The piano, room and listener retain traces of previous sounds, ensuring that an apparent repetition is never literally the same event.
Van Houdt’s touch is essential. This music could easily become an exhibition of tasteful softness, with every note polished into fragile beauty. He avoids that trap. Some tones are warm and rounded, others arrive with a dry edge, and still others seem barely to cross the threshold into audibility. His playing is physical without becoming theatrical. The key descends, the hammer strikes and gravity supplies the force, but the gesture does not call attention to the pianist. What matters is the living patch of sound released into the room.
The shorter works on the first disc reveal how many structures Frey can build from this apparently narrow vocabulary. “Klavierstück 1” creates a broader field from isolated tones and restrained harmonic motion. “Miniature in Five Parts” compresses difference into just over five minutes, making each shift in register or density feel substantial. “In Memoriam Cornelius Cardew” lasts only two minutes, refusing the inflated solemnity of a public memorial. Its brevity resembles a private act of recollection: a few sounds held long enough to acknowledge an absence, then silence.
The three “Klavierstück Arrangements” are especially important because Van Houdt hears continuity where earlier interpretations often emphasized separation. Chords associated with the spare influence of Morton Feldman alternate with melodic fragments that can seem like foreign objects. Van Houdt draws both into long arcs. The chords no longer stand as isolated monuments, and the melodies no longer wander through as accidental interludes. Everything participates in a cautious flow. His understanding of Frey’s later music allows an implicit melodic character to emerge from pieces written decades earlier.
The second disc radically changes the listener’s scale of attention. “Pianist, alone (1)” lasts nearly seventy-three minutes and uses a restricted world of fourths and fifths, generally moving in steps no larger than a fourth. Low gong-like strikes, repeated notes, small scales, alternating harmonies and silence interrupt its steady progress. The piece does not present a mathematical process whose end can be predicted. It resembles walking through an open landscape where the terrain changes too gradually to divide into scenes.
Van Houdt does not play this long movement metronomically. Each step depends upon the preceding sound’s decay, the room’s response and the bodily rhythm established during performance. This produces a pulse that continually drifts without collapsing. The listener may initially count intervals between attacks, but the music eventually dissolves that impulse. Time stops behaving like a grid and becomes a material with varying density. A short pause can feel unexpectedly deep; a sequence of fifths can create the sensation of traveling even though no destination has been established.
The title “Pianist, alone” also identifies a performance problem. The player must seem completely absorbed, regardless of whether an audience is present. Frey leaves many phrasing decisions open, requiring Van Houdt to balance faint connections against the independence of individual sounds. Too much direction would turn the piece into a story. Too little would reduce it to a sequence of unrelated events. Its life exists between those extremes, in the barely perceptible moment when one note begins to suggest another without compelling it.
“Circular Music No. 5” opens the third disc with a more evident rotational logic. Repetition forms cycles, but the cycles do not close neatly. Rhythmic and harmonic patterns move at different lengths, producing meetings that feel temporary rather than conclusive. A listener can recognize recurrence without locating a fixed beginning. The music circles while also drifting outward, closer to a spiral than a loop. Frey’s repetition expands perception instead of reassuring it.
“Klavierstück 2” and “Invention” demonstrate the continuity beneath the album’s historical range. The earlier “Invention” is more austere and determined, as though Frey were clearing inherited musical language away to observe what remained. Later pieces inhabit the resulting openness more naturally. Yet the essential concern is already present in 1990: how little material is necessary before isolated sounds begin forming a world? Heard near the album’s conclusion, the piece becomes both an origin and a rediscovery.
“Composer, alone (2)” closes the set without summarizing it. Harmonies and repeated tones enter a space made newly available by the preceding three hours. Van Houdt listens through every attack, allowing sound to overlap with memory or vanish completely. The piece feels less like a final statement than the continuation of an activity that existed before the recording and will persist afterward. Solitude becomes not withdrawal but freedom from the obligation to conclude.
The sessions were recorded over three days in September 2024 at the Muziekcentrum van de Omroep in Hilversum, with Frey present in the hall. That presence subtly complicates the album’s title. Composer and pianist are “alone” within their respective acts, yet the recording documents an intimate dialogue between them. Frey listened so that Van Houdt was not merely performing for microphones, while engineer Micha de Kanter preserved the acoustic distance and resonance of the room. Taku Unami’s mastering leaves the quiet passages quiet, retaining the scale necessary for stronger tones to register as genuine changes.
Frey’s dot-and-line drawings on the six-panel package provide a visual parallel. Each mark is simple, but color, density, position and the absorbency of paper prevent it from becoming anonymous. Like a piano note, a watercolor dot is a precise decision whose edges cannot be fully controlled. Yuko Zama’s presentation gives the three discs the dimensions of a single patient object rather than an overstuffed archive.
Composer, alone asks for more than quiet surroundings. It asks the listener to surrender ordinary measures of progress and accept that attention itself can be active. Across its three discs, Frey does not empty music of content. He makes space for content too slight, unstable or slowly developing to survive inside a crowded form. Van Houdt meets that challenge with a rare balance of fragility and persistence. He never forces the music to speak, yet nothing feels passive. Each tone appears as a small material fact—mortal, resonant and sufficient—and three hours become a place rather than a duration.

Tetragrammacide - 2015 - Typhonian Wormholes Indecipherable Anti-Structural Formulæ

 

Behold Barbarity – BB014  235.99MB FLAC

Typhonian Wormholes: Indecipherable Anti-Structural Formulæ does not gradually introduce its extremity. After barely a minute of ominous electronic disturbance, “Paramilitant Entropic Initiation” detonates into a nearly solid block of percussion, guitar distortion and guttural vocal pressure. The recording is so saturated that individual instruments appear less like separate performances than competing forces trapped inside one overloaded signal. Cymbals become sheets of high-frequency metal, blast beats become continuous impact, and the guitars survive as jagged shapes moving behind the surface. The mix does not document chaos from a safe distance. It manufactures chaos as the listener’s immediate environment.
Tetragrammacide emerged from Kolkata, India, and had already established its method with the 2014 Tetragrammacidal Oration promo and several related recordings. This 2015 EP was the release that fixed the project’s identity internationally. Its nineteen-minute duration offered a concentrated form of black/death metal in which war-metal momentum, harsh noise, blown-out recording and occult language became inseparable. Many extreme records sound raw because of limited equipment or underground circumstances. Typhonian Wormholes sounds as though every available technological limitation has been deliberately driven into failure.
That failure is carefully controlled. Beneath the apparent formlessness, “Paramilitant Entropic Initiation” contains blunt, grinding riffs and abrupt directional changes. The drums are not simply fast; their cymbal wash occupies so much of the spectrum that each strike seems to tear open the recording again. Vocals remain partially submerged, closer to an inhuman vibration within the machinery than a frontman delivering intelligible lines. Because no element receives a clean position, the listener must reconstruct the song from fragments: a guitar contour briefly surfacing, a rhythmic accent becoming visible through the blast, a roar opening a new section.
“Intricate Acosmic Engineering” demonstrates how much structure can exist within this compression. Its title may promise something indecipherably abstract, but the music works through recognizable contrasts. Riffs tighten into churning death-metal figures, then dissolve into free-falling noise. Faster passages create a sense of forward attack, while heavier sections seem to collapse downward under their own density. The guitars occasionally reveal an almost memorable phrase before distortion corrodes its edges. Tetragrammacide understands that a riff becomes more powerful when the listener has to fight to hear it.
This is the crucial difference between the EP and shapeless sonic excess. The production conceals structure without eliminating it. Repeated listening does not make the recording less violent, but it reveals decisions beneath the violence. Certain cymbal patterns divide sections; low guitar movements create temporary centers of gravity; vocal entrances mark changes that initially register only as increases in pressure. The subtitle’s “anti-structural formulæ” does not mean that composition has disappeared. Structure is treated as an enemy to be damaged, buried and reassembled in a form that can no longer be passively consumed.
A forty-five-second interlude cuts the assault in half. It does not offer relief so much as a change of weapon. Electronic tones, ritual atmosphere and contaminated ambience suspend the physical attack while preserving its psychological pressure. In a longer album, such an interlude might function as decoration, but here its brevity and central placement are exact. It clears the field just enough for the second half to feel like another detonation rather than the uninterrupted continuation of the first.
“Extra-Terroristical Chaosophic Intelligence” is the EP’s most immediately commanding piece. Its opening impact is enormous, but beneath the clipping and cymbal glare lies a strong relationship between grinding rhythm and violent acceleration. The drums repeatedly force the guitars out of one configuration and into another. Brief chugging figures provide traction before the mix lifts again into full-spectrum turbulence. The title’s invented vocabulary mirrors the musical method: familiar components are joined into excessive compounds until ordinary meaning buckles under accumulated force.
The term “Typhonian” evokes a current of modern occultism associated with forces imagined as exterior, adversarial and beyond orderly creation. “Acosmic” and “anti-existential” language continues that refusal of the created world, while military terminology turns spiritual revolt into an operation. Yet the record does not require the listener to decode an esoteric system before its intentions become clear. The music enacts its philosophy directly. Stability is attacked, hierarchy is flattened, and every conventional distinction—riff and noise, instrument and distortion, ritual and combat—is pulled toward the same devouring center.
“Eructation of Anti-Existential Consciousness” gives that process its ugliest physical image. An eructation is something expelled upward from inside the body, and the track feels less composed than violently discharged. The vocals are deep enough to merge with the guitar’s lower register, while the upper frequencies continue burning above them. Its repeated rhythmic figures possess an unexpected catchiness, although the production refuses to let that quality become comfortable. The listener recognizes the hook at the same moment it is being crushed.
That buried memorability explains why Typhonian Wormholes has endured more strongly than many recordings devoted to pure overload. It is possible to remember its motion even when individual notes remain difficult to isolate. Tetragrammacide builds songs with enough internal shape to pull the listener back, then makes each return physically challenging. The EP occupies a narrow and productive point between black/death metal and harsh noise. Move farther toward traditional production and some of its terror would become ordinary musicianship; move farther toward undifferentiated noise and its riffs would lose their predatory function.
The outro leaves behind a contaminated field rather than delivering a conclusion. After the sustained density of the four central songs, the reduced activity exposes how thoroughly the ear has adapted to overload. Sounds that would have seemed threatening at the beginning now register as spacious. The record has temporarily altered the listener’s scale. Quietness is no longer neutral; it feels like the residue left after an enormous mechanism has stopped.
Alex Shadrin’s artwork follows the same anti-structural principle. Symbols, lines, text, ritual geometry and organic forms crowd the available area until the design resists immediate reading. It is not an illustration placed around the music but another saturated surface. There is no calm focal point and little separation between information and ornament. The eye encounters the package as the ear encounters the recording: by entering a density that must be navigated rather than glanced across.
The original cassette edition appeared through Behold Barbarity in 200 copies, with the complete program repeated on both sides. Iron Bonehead Productions also issued the EP on twelve-inch vinyl, giving these nineteen minutes an object much larger than their duration would ordinarily demand. Both formats suit the work. The tape repetition turns the EP into a recurring transmission, while vinyl enlarges Shadrin’s visual labyrinth and gives each side the dimensions of a ritual plate.
Typhonian Wormholes became a transition point in Tetragrammacide’s development. The earlier work leaned even farther toward raw noise, while later releases would allow more technical riffing, clearer death-metal architecture and increasingly elaborate esoteric concepts to emerge. Here the balance remains especially unstable. The songs are sufficiently formed to strike with precision, but their surfaces still appear ready to disintegrate.
What makes this EP exceptional is not that it is simply louder, faster or less intelligible than other extreme metal. Its achievement is the conversion of bad sound, excessive language and visual overcrowding into one coherent aesthetic system. The clipping is not a flaw surrounding the music; it is part of the composition. The absurdly compounded titles are not labels pasted onto the songs; they prepare the mind for structures that refuse ordinary syntax. Typhonian Wormholes is hostile to clarity without being careless. It constructs an experience in which comprehension must be earned inside the blast, and every discovered riff reveals another layer of damage.

Robert Fuchs - 2025 - C.O.T.H

 

Usagi  – U14  240.18MB FLAC

Robert Fuchs’s C.O.T.H. begins as though the recording were already running before anyone entered the room. A low electrical presence hangs in the background, neither silence nor a conventional drone, while small abrasions move across its surface. There is no dramatic entrance and no immediate disclosure of where the sounds originate. They simply appear, alter the pressure of the space, and recede. Released by Usagi Productions, this seven-piece CD is the full-length disc debut of Dean Fazzino’s Robert Fuchs project, and it establishes its character through restraint. Instead of confronting the listener with accumulated volume, Fazzino works with incomplete signals, unstable hums, damaged pulses and objects that seem to possess only the shortest possible lifespan.
The album’s slow pace should not be mistaken for passivity. Individual sounds are continually being tested, redirected or allowed to run down. Some hover close to equilibrium, but Fazzino rarely lets them settle completely. A faint frequency develops an irregular tremor; a dry mechanical scrape interrupts a relatively calm field; a cluster of interference briefly suggests rhythmic organization before separating again. The pieces move like systems whose rules are being revised while they operate. This gives C.O.T.H. a dreamlike flow without turning it into ambient music. Ambient music often creates a stable environment in which the listener can remain. These tracks make stability feel provisional, and every apparently empty area contains some small shift in density or direction.
“A Number of Two Figures” provides an effective introduction to this method. Its electromagnetic hum sounds less like a foundation placed beneath the composition than a phenomenon discovered inside it. Fazzino agitates that presence with discrete actions whose consequences are more important than their apparent causes. A slight adjustment produces a fresh vibration; a damaged flicker pushes the piece toward noise; a sudden reduction exposes another layer that had been concealed by the preceding activity. The track repeatedly approaches a steady state without quite arriving there. Its suspense comes from waiting to learn whether the machinery will stabilize, fail, or continue transforming at the same patient rate.
That patience separates C.O.T.H. from recordings that treat minimalism as an opportunity to magnify a single texture. Fazzino does not select one noise and invite us to study it from every angle. His vocabulary remains fragmented and surprisingly changeable, even when the overall motion is slow. Brittle details pass through soft electrical clouds, brief pulses buckle under their own weight, and thin high frequencies appear at the edge of audibility. The changes can be rapid, but they do not announce themselves as edits or virtuoso gestures. They behave more like involuntary reactions within the sound. The album consequently feels active without becoming busy, and sparse without depending on silence as a dramatic effect.
“Small Molecule” increases the friction. Its more abrasive seething suggests pressure escaping through a narrow opening, with crackling discharges repeatedly disturbing the surrounding greyness. Yet even here the album refuses the expected climb toward a large eruption. The rougher material remains contained, and the track’s most aggressive passages seem to reduce themselves as quickly as they arrive. This control is essential. By limiting the scale of each event, Fazzino makes variations in grain and pressure unusually vivid. A brief surge can register as a major disturbance because C.O.T.H. has not numbed the ear with continuous excess.
The production preserves that sense of scale. Each sound occupies a distinct position, but the separation never becomes clinical. There is still enough blur for one layer to contaminate another, enough uncertainty for a scrape to resemble an electrical fault or a pulse to resemble an object rotating somewhere out of view. Headphones reveal fine changes in the edges of the sounds, while louder playback emphasizes the low-level physical tension running beneath them. The recording does not rely on deep bass or piercing treble to prove its force. Its pressure is distributed through the middle ground, where ordinary electronic residue becomes strangely tactile.
On “Allele,” the material seems to undergo a kind of spectral decomposition. Related shapes recur in altered forms, as if the track were reproducing imperfect copies of its own components. A sound may return thinner, rougher or deprived of the frequency that previously gave it weight. This is not repetition in the conventional rhythmic sense. It is resemblance under conditions of decay. The title encourages a genetic reading, but the piece never requires one; the important effect is the feeling that its apparently disconnected noises share an underlying structure. Their relationship becomes audible gradually, through accumulation rather than explanation.
Fazzino’s work as Robert Fuchs has previously appeared largely through cassette-oriented noise labels, including New Forces and White Centipede, as well as his own imprint. C.O.T.H. retains the obscurity and physical immediacy associated with that context, but the CD format suits its uninterrupted inward movement. There is no side break to reset the ear or divide the material into two obvious halves. The seven tracks instead form a continuous descent through related electrical climates. The transitions do not attempt to disguise the pieces as one composition, yet each track seems to begin with traces of energy left behind by the previous one.
The album also makes the difference between Robert Fuchs and Fazzino’s Spate project more pronounced. Where Spate can pursue denser, harsher and more visibly complicated constructions, C.O.T.H. turns toward reduced activity and shadowed detail. That reduction does not make Robert Fuchs a quieter version of the same idea. It changes the nature of the listening. Instead of following collisions among multiple sources, one listens for the moment a modest sound begins to behave unpredictably. Instead of being overwhelmed by information, one becomes suspicious of apparent emptiness. The smallest disturbance starts to feel consequential.
Human presence is deliberately difficult to locate. Knobs are presumably being turned, sources switched and structures arranged, but the album avoids presenting those actions as performance. Its sounds often appear incidental, as though a collection of devices had continued operating after their intended purpose was forgotten. That impression is one of C.O.T.H.’s most compelling illusions. The music may resemble autonomous machinery, but its autonomy is carefully composed. Fazzino determines how long uncertainty can be sustained, when a texture has exhausted its interest, and how much additional information a track can accept before its delicate balance collapses.
The unexplained title reinforces this refusal of context. C.O.T.H. offers an acronym without supplying a stable meaning, leaving the letters to function like the sounds themselves: suggestive, exact in outline and resistant to identification. The album does not need an elaborate fictional framework or technical inventory. Its emotional ambiguity arises directly from the material. It can feel cold because the sources seem impersonal, yet the care with which their weaknesses are exposed gives the recording an unexpected intimacy. At moments it is eerie, but it never resorts to horror-music imagery. Its unease is closer to encountering a familiar device producing an unfamiliar signal.
C.O.T.H. is ultimately a noise record concerned less with impact than depletion. Its sounds arrive partially damaged, expend their limited energy and vanish before they can become dependable. Fazzino’s achievement lies in making that process absorbing across an entire album. Every fragment appears to contain several possible directions, even when it lasts only seconds, and every quiet interval retains the memory of what has just disappeared. The result is restrained but never decorative, abstract but not emotionally blank. It asks for close attention, then rewards it by revealing how unstable apparently simple sound can be. Rather than forcing open a sealed environment, C.O.T.H. lets us hear the machinery inside slowly forgetting how to continue.

VA - 2024 - Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. Live Akt 2 2xCD

 

Ferns Recordings – stem_20  1.26GB FLAC

1-1   MSBR – Live Pepper Land - Okayama 13 Dec 1995 21:03

1-2   Monde Bruits – Live At Bears - Osaka 11 Dec 1995 11:38

1-3 Aube – Live At Bears - Osaka 11 Dec 1995 17:48

2-1 Daniel Menche – Live At Bears - Osaka 11 Dec 1995 34:01

2-2 Small Cruel Party – Live At Pepper Land - Okayama 13 Dec 1995 28:28

The opening MSBR performance does not ease the listener into Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. Live Akt 2. Recorded at Pepperland in Okayama on 13 December 1995, Koji Tano’s twenty-one-minute set immediately establishes a dense, unstable field of distortion. Feedback streams collide with rough electronic pulses, metallic eruptions and frequencies that seem to scrape against the limits of the recording. Yet this is not an indiscriminate wall. Tano continually changes the pressure, allowing individual layers to rise through the mass before swallowing them again. The sound moves in waves, each escalation exposing a different internal texture. Its force comes not only from volume but from the impression that the entire space is being shaken into participation.
That physical relationship between sound and room runs through this two-CD collection. The five performances were recorded to DAT by Akifumi Nakajima, better known as Aube, during Daniel Menche and Small Cruel Party’s 1995 Japanese tour. Three sets come from Bears in Osaka on 11 December, while MSBR and Small Cruel Party were captured two nights later at Pepperland. Nakajima did not record sterile signals taken directly from mixing desks. The venue remains audible as a resonant body: low frequencies spread outward, feedback acquires distance, and louder passages seem to alter the dimensions of the room. Paul Lavigne’s mastering preserves this spatial information while giving the material enough weight to retain its intended impact.
MSBR’s set is the most openly aggressive performance on the first disc. Tano works through compressed blocks of noise, but his transitions can be unexpectedly sharp. A grinding formation collapses into thinner electronic whines; a heavy surge is interrupted by flickering signals; distortion that initially appears static begins rotating through several shades of abrasion. There is an architectural intelligence beneath the violence. Tano does not simply increase intensity until the available twenty-one minutes expire. He constructs, overloads and demolishes several temporary structures, ensuring that the ear is repeatedly forced to adjust. The result captures MSBR at a point where Japanese harsh noise could be overwhelming without sacrificing detail.
Shohei Iwasaki’s Monde Bruits follows with an eleven-minute Osaka performance that feels less frontal and more disorienting. Feedback and reverberation produce layers that appear to move independently through the venue. Sounds approach, recede and return in altered form, leaving smears behind them. The comparative brevity of the set gives it a concentrated shape: there is little preliminary activity, only an immediate immersion in a churning environment whose depth is difficult to judge. Harsh frequencies remain present, but they are dispersed rather than compacted. Where MSBR pushes a mass of sound toward the audience, Monde Bruits seems to place the audience inside a vibrating enclosure and then interfere with its boundaries.
The distinction is important because Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. Live Akt 2 is not merely five variations on extreme volume. Each artist reveals a different way of organizing noise in real time. The recording conditions create continuity, but the performances retain markedly individual proportions. Monde Bruits favors unstable depth, MSBR uses collision and compression, and Aube turns repetition into gradual transformation. Daniel Menche concentrates on accumulation and bodily resonance, while Small Cruel Party leaves enough open space for uncertainty to become part of the composition. Heard together, the sets describe an experimental noise culture far more varied than the familiar image of uninterrupted distortion suggests.
Aube’s seventeen-minute Bears set is the collection’s central axis. Nakajima was known for building each work from a restricted source, although the source used here is not identified. That absence encourages attention to the process rather than a guessing game about origins. A cyclical body of sound slowly changes color, with pulses, filtered friction and sustained frequencies folding into one another. Aube’s control is evident in the pacing. Instead of producing a sequence of dramatic contrasts, he allows small adjustments to accumulate until the material has crossed into a new state. The repetition is never exact; each return carries a different density, emphasis or halo of distortion.
The performance demonstrates why Aube’s work can seem austere and sensuous at the same time. Its structure is disciplined, but the resulting sound has substantial physical presence. Frequencies bloom through the room, contract into narrow bands and expand again with their edges newly roughened. The set does not imitate machinery so much as establish a system whose behavior can be observed. Nakajima intervenes carefully, permitting the source to retain its identity even as processing makes that identity increasingly difficult to locate. Since he also made the original DAT recordings, his presence extends beyond his own performance: artist, organizer, listener and documentarian overlap across the release.
Daniel Menche occupies the first thirty-four minutes of the second disc and uses that duration to create the collection’s most imposing ascent. The performance begins with comparatively exposed vibrations and contact-microphone textures. These are gradually multiplied, stretched and forced into deeper resonance. Menche’s development is patient but not smooth. Each apparent plateau becomes material for another transformation: the sound is assembled, pulled apart and reconstructed at a larger scale. Percussive friction becomes sustained pressure, while small tactile noises acquire an almost architectural breadth. By the set’s later stages, the room seems saturated, yet the separate movements that created this density remain perceptible.
Menche’s performance benefits particularly from the live recording. The spaciousness prevents its long build from becoming a single flattened crescendo. Resonance travels beyond the immediate sound source, creating a second layer made from the venue’s response. The most powerful passages feel less like amplification than occupation, as though the performance were filling every available cavity. Even at maximum density, however, Menche continues to shape the mass. Frequencies are withdrawn as purposefully as they are added, and the set’s momentum depends on this continual exchange between concentration and release.
Small Cruel Party’s twenty-eight-minute Pepperland recording closes the collection by reversing that logic. William Key Ransone’s work develops as a carefully distributed soundscape in which events are separated by intervals large enough to alter how they are perceived. Scrapes, resonances and indistinct mechanical gestures enter without explaining their source. Some vanish before their implications are clear; others remain long enough for the surrounding room tone to become part of them. The performance is not quiet in any simple sense, but its power lies in withholding. After the density of Menche’s set, this openness changes the listener’s scale of attention.
The sequencing of the second disc is especially effective. Menche builds upward through bodily vibration and accumulation, while Small Cruel Party disperses energy across a more ambiguous field. One performance makes the venue feel filled; the other makes its empty areas audible. Together they resist the assumption that a historical live-noise document is valuable mainly for capturing aggression. These recordings preserve decisions about duration, placement and spatial response that are difficult to reconstruct from studio releases. Audience noise is largely subordinate, but the existence of an audience still matters: every delay, escalation and abrupt change occurs within shared time.
Released by Ferns Recordings in a six-panel digisleeve limited to 250 copies, Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. Live Akt 2 marks thirty years since the original 1994 Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. cassette box, which gathered material associated with Nakajima’s G.R.O.S.S. label. This is not a straightforward sequel to that compilation, despite the title. It is a set of previously unheard performances connected by Nakajima’s recording activity and by a short period of exchange between Japanese and American experimental artists. The dedication to Koji Tano, Akifumi Nakajima and Shohei Iwasaki gives the first disc an unavoidable additional weight, since all three died before these tapes were issued.
That knowledge never needs to carry the music by itself. The performances remain immediate, varied and unusually well preserved. They reveal five artists using comparable materials to produce radically different experiences of pressure, movement and space. MSBR attacks the room, Monde Bruits destabilizes it, Aube regulates its internal currents, Menche fills it, and Small Cruel Party opens it again. Herz Aus G.R.O.S.S. Live Akt 2 succeeds because it retains those differences while making the two concerts feel like parts of one extended investigation. Nearly three decades after the DAT tapes were made, their noise has lost none of its ability to rearrange the air around it.

Winterblood - 2022 - Graue Magie

 

Self-released – none  151.17MB FLAC

Graue Magie opens with a small group of synthesizer tones suspended in an expanse that seems much larger than the sounds themselves. There is no beat to establish distance, no field recording to identify a physical location and no dramatic chord change announcing where the music intends to go. The tones simply remain, slightly blurred at their edges, while another layer gradually becomes perceptible beneath them. This is the working method of Winterblood at its most concentrated. Stefano Senesi does not build an environment by adding a great number of details. He establishes a narrow harmonic field and stays within it until repetition changes the listener’s perception of scale, color and movement.
Released digitally in September 2022, Graue Magie consists of seven untitled pieces identified only by Roman numerals. The first six last between four and seven minutes, while “VII” extends beyond twenty-one. That division gives the album a shape not immediately obvious from its deliberately consistent surface. The shorter pieces function as separate chambers, each organized around a modest melodic figure or sustained cluster. The final track removes the remaining sense of enclosure and allows the album’s central atmosphere to continue at immersive length. It is less a conclusion than a prolonged state in which the preceding material appears to lose its boundaries.
Winterblood describes its music as “polar ambient,” a term more useful here than either dark ambient or dungeon synth. Graue Magie does not possess the ominous low-frequency machinery often associated with dark ambient, and it has little interest in dungeon synth’s medieval imagery or compact melodic storytelling. Its coldness is created through distance, limited movement and pale keyboard timbres. Long notes drift across one another without generating conventional tension and release. The music can be melancholic, but it does not behave like a lament. It holds emotion at a distance, producing the sensation of sadness remembered after its immediate cause has disappeared.
“I” introduces this balance through layered chords that seem to brighten and darken without moving very far harmonically. The upper register carries a fragile melodic suggestion, while the deeper tones form a continuous grey foundation. Changes arrive slowly enough to resemble variations in light rather than compositional events. A chord becomes marginally fuller, an overtone grows clearer, or a repeated note begins to feel more isolated as the surrounding layer thins. Senesi’s restraint is severe, yet the piece is not static. Its movement is simply distributed over a timescale that discourages anticipation. Listening becomes less about waiting for the next section than noticing how the present one has quietly altered.
“II” feels more openly melodic. Its repeated figure possesses a subdued emotional pull, but Senesi avoids developing it into a theme with a destination. Instead, the phrase circles within the same narrow region until it ceases to function as a sequence of individual notes. Repetition turns it into texture. This is one of the album’s defining transformations: material that initially sounds melodic gradually becomes environmental, while drones listened to closely reveal an internal melodic contour. The distinction between foreground and background remains unstable. What appears to be accompaniment in one moment can become the piece’s emotional center simply because attention has shifted.
The middle tracks continue this process with slight but consequential differences in density. “III” has a more veiled character, its harmonies appearing through a soft layer of electronic haze. “IV,” the longest of the shorter pieces, gives its tones more room to overlap, producing a deeper and faintly ceremonial resonance. “V” contracts the scale again, allowing a simple recurring pattern to hang in comparative isolation. “VI” seems almost weightless, as though the sustained notes were gradually separating from the instrument that produced them. These distinctions are subtle, and casual listening may reduce the six tracks to a single continuous wash. The album requires attention to timbre rather than incident.
That demand is also Graue Magie’s principal risk. Senesi openly treats monotony as part of his aesthetic, and the record offers few concessions to anyone who needs pronounced contrast. There are no percussive interruptions, sudden eruptions or conspicuous changes of technique. Even the transitions between tracks can feel like adjustments to one extended composition. Yet calling the music uneventful misses the way it manipulates duration. Repetition exhausts the ordinary meaning of a phrase, leaving behind its emotional temperature. After several minutes, a progression no longer sounds like something being performed. It seems to exist independently, cycling at a pace that might continue whether anyone is present or not.
The title, which translates as Grey Magic, describes this effect with unusual precision. The magic is neither radiant nor sinister. It occupies an intermediate condition in which familiar oppositions—light and darkness, warmth and cold, comfort and unease—begin to overlap. Grey is not treated as an absence of color but as the product of several muted colors becoming inseparable. The synthesizer layers work in the same way. Individual voices can sometimes be followed, yet their greater effect comes from mixture. Soft attack and long decay erase the joins between notes, allowing harmonies to emerge as slowly changing clouds rather than sequences of deliberate gestures.
This distinguishes the album from purely functional sleep or relaxation music. Graue Magie can certainly recede into a room, and its smooth dynamics make it possible to hear without concentrated effort. Close listening, however, reveals a persistent ambiguity that prevents complete comfort. Some chords possess a faintly dissonant edge; certain high tones remain too exposed to become soothing; passages that initially feel spacious can gradually seem airless. Senesi does not dramatize these tensions, but neither does he resolve them. The album offers stillness without safety, beauty without reassurance. Its desolation is gentle precisely because nothing arrives to explain or interrupt it.
“VII” magnifies all of these qualities. At twenty-one minutes, it abandons the compact dimensions of the earlier tracks and gives the central drone enough time to alter the listener’s sense of duration. The opening establishes a broad, subdued harmonic field. New layers enter so gradually that their arrival is difficult to locate, while earlier tones fade without leaving obvious gaps. A minimal figure returns, but the extended length weakens any expectation that it will lead elsewhere. The track does not build toward a climax. Instead, it deepens through persistence, becoming increasingly detached from clock time as its repetitions accumulate.
The success of this final piece depends on the six that precede it. They have already taught the ear to register slight changes in tone, spacing and harmonic weight. Consequently, “VII” can sustain a much longer span without introducing a new vocabulary. It feels like entering the same landscape after distance has been removed: what appeared as a sequence of views is revealed as one uninterrupted territory. The track also clarifies why Senesi’s use of analog and digital equipment matters less than the continuity he creates between them. No particular synthesizer sound is displayed for its own sake. Each is softened, layered and absorbed into the overall climate.
Graue Magie belongs to a large Winterblood catalogue built from closely related methods and recurring images of coldness, forests, darkness and spiritual withdrawal. That consistency can make individual releases difficult to separate, but this album distinguishes itself through proportion. The six shorter studies provide definition and pacing; the long final immersion supplies the depth that those studies imply. It is concise enough to retain focus yet spacious enough for monotony to perform its intended work. Rather than attempting to prove how much variation can be extracted from minimal material, Senesi asks how little variation is necessary to keep perception active.
The answer is: very little, provided every shade is placed carefully. Graue Magie does not transport the listener through a succession of imaginary landscapes. It fixes attention on one obscured horizon and lets time alter what can be seen there. Its synthesizers are simple, its structures nearly motionless and its emotional language deliberately restricted. From those limitations comes an atmosphere at once sorrowful, tranquil and faintly estranging. The album’s grey magic is the slow disappearance of distinction—the point at which melody becomes weather, repetition becomes suspension, and apparently empty space begins to feel inexhaustible.

Witches Moon - 2017 - A Swing Of Sickle To Summers Dawn CDr

Not On Label – none

“Change upon the Horizon” begins with keyboards that could have come from a faded fantasy-game soundtrack, their ceremonial melody sounding both triumphant and slightly uneasy. When the guitars enter, they do not replace this atmosphere so much as tear a rough opening through it. Tremolo-picked lines surge beneath the synthesizer, programmed drums establish an urgent forward motion, and distant shrieks turn the piece from medieval reverie into raw atmospheric black metal. This combination defines Witches Moon’s A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn, a 2017 debut whose homemade CDr presentation matches its music: ambitious in imagination, modest in means and unconcerned with making its contrasting elements appear seamless.
Witches Moon was a one-person project initially based in Raleigh, North Carolina, with the anonymous musician credited simply as the Witch. Across these six tracks, guitar, voice, keyboards and percussion are arranged less like a conventional band than parts of a miniature supernatural theatre. The keyboards supply painted scenery, the guitars create weather, and the vocals appear as a figure moving through both. The album’s identity depends on the friction between them. Its melodic black metal passages have the speed and abrasion expected from the form, but the prominent synthesizers refuse to remain atmospheric decoration. They frequently carry the main theme, redirect a riff or expose a brighter emotional color beneath the distortion.
This is immediately apparent in “Change upon the Horizon.” The opening melody has a folk-like simplicity, relying on a memorable sequence rather than dense orchestration. As the metal instrumentation gathers around it, the same figure acquires a different meaning. What first suggests the arrival of daylight begins to sound like a warning. The guitar tone is thin and buzzing but articulate enough for its melodic movement to survive, while the drum programming has a conspicuous artificial snap. Neither quality damages the track. The record’s appeal lies partly in hearing one musician force limited sounds into a much larger imagined space. Its castle walls may be painted canvas, but the shadows falling across them are persuasive.
“Gatekeeper” is heavier and more direct. The keyboards still provide harmonic depth, although the guitar occupies more of the foreground with minor-key riffs alternating between rapid tremolo and slower, almost doom-like movement. The harsh vocals are embedded in the mixture rather than placed clearly above it. Their words are less immediately important than their texture: a ragged human element cutting through instruments that otherwise sound stylized and remote. The lack of a strongly audible bass leaves open space between the thin guitar and the broader synthesizer tones. This unusual balance can make the music feel simultaneously raw and ornate, with no thick middle layer smoothing over the difference.
The medieval character of A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn does not arise from historical accuracy. There is little attempt to imitate an actual early-music ensemble or reconstruct a specific period. Instead, Witches Moon uses the familiar vocabulary of fantasy medievalism: synthetic choirs, modal-sounding phrases, processional rhythms, natural imagery and occult titles. “Through the Veil” makes particularly effective use of this language. Its shifts between floating keyboards and black-metal acceleration suggest passage between two connected worlds. The transitions are sometimes blunt, but that bluntness gives the music the unpredictable logic of a dream. A pastoral phrase can become hostile within seconds, then reappear unchanged after the turbulence has passed.
Much of the album’s charm comes from this refusal to choose between dungeon synth and black metal. It is not a black metal recording with short keyboard interludes attached, nor a dungeon synth album periodically disturbed by guitars. The two styles are woven into the same compositions. Synth melodies often continue through the most aggressive sections, while riffs retain a lyrical quality that connects them to the quieter passages. The Witch would explore fully synthesizer-based music on subsequent releases, but this debut captures the point where the project’s different impulses are still colliding. The result is less polished than a carefully unified hybrid, but also more lively.
The title track forms the album’s nine-and-a-half-minute center. Its extended duration allows Witches Moon to move through several degrees of intensity without treating them as separate episodes. Keyboard themes establish an enchanted, faintly mournful atmosphere before the guitars roughen their edges. Repetition is important here. Riffs and melodic figures remain in place for long stretches, seeking immersion rather than surprise. At times they persist beyond the moment when their direction has become obvious, exposing one of the album’s limitations. Yet the repetition also permits the strange tonal mixture to settle. The synthetic grandeur and abrasive guitar gradually stop sounding incompatible, becoming two surfaces of the same imagined landscape.
The phrase “a swing of sickle to summer’s dawn” condenses the record’s central tension. The sickle can signify harvest, seasonal change or death, while dawn implies renewal and approaching warmth. Witches Moon repeatedly places those ideas together rather than resolving their opposition. The album is full of bright melodies heard through a damaged recording surface, energetic motion shadowed by archaic images of mortality. Even its most aggressive moments rarely feel hateful. There is wonder within the harshness, as though the shrieked voice were responding to something immense rather than simply expressing hostility.
“Wyrm” leans further into the record’s fantastical side. Its riffs have a circular, quest-like momentum, and the keyboard writing enlarges the song without giving it the bombast of symphonic metal. The production keeps everything at a human scale. Choir sounds remain recognizably synthetic, drums retain their programmed stiffness, and layers occasionally compete for the same space. Those qualities make the piece feel like an individual construction rather than a genre exercise assembled from professional presets. The arrangement is busy, but its central melody stays clear enough to guide the song through changes in pace.
The closing “Dance with Lightning” is the shortest track and one of the most animated. Its title accurately suggests movement: rhythms feel springier, melodic turns arrive more quickly, and the keyboards introduce flashes of color against the guitar’s persistent rasp. After the longer title piece and the denser “Wyrm,” its compactness provides an effective release. The album does not conclude with a solemn ambient recession or an enormous final chord. It ends in motion, retaining the playful quality that has been present beneath its occult imagery from the beginning.
That playfulness distinguishes Witches Moon from atmospheric black metal built primarily around solemnity and scale. A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn certainly invokes veils, gatekeepers, serpents and elemental forces, but it does so with the enthusiasm of someone assembling a private mythology in real time. The Tarot-derived artwork and archaic language frame the music without making it forbiddingly serious. One can hear affection for old fantasy soundtracks, second-wave black metal, folk melody and the solitary craft of dungeon synth. Their coexistence feels intuitive rather than theoretical.
The CDr format suits that sensibility. This is music conceived within an independent digital and handmade physical culture, where a release can exist as both an album and a personal artifact before any larger label becomes involved. A limited vinyl edition from His Wounds followed in 2020, but the original 2017 version preserves the immediacy of the project’s arrival. The comparatively clear separation of keyboards and guitar prevents the rawness from becoming unintelligible, while the unevenness remains essential to its atmosphere. Improving every sound might have made the music heavier, but it could also have erased the precarious balance that makes it distinctive.
A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn is not flawless. Several riffs repeat longer than their development warrants, the programmed percussion occasionally flattens changes in intensity, and the missing low-end weight can make the faster passages feel fragile. These are noticeable weaknesses, not secret virtues. Yet the record survives them because its melodic imagination is strong and its personality immediate. Witches Moon understands that atmosphere is not produced by obscurity alone. It requires recognizable shapes within the fog.
The album’s lasting appeal comes from hearing those shapes repeatedly transform. A keyboard melody becomes a black-metal riff; a harsh passage reveals an almost pastoral core; a cheap synthetic choir briefly acquires genuine majesty. Witches Moon does not conceal the joins between these elements. The music lets them scrape against one another, creating a debut that feels raw without being primitive and whimsical without becoming slight. A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn builds its own small world from limited resources, then fills that world with enough movement, color and mystery to make its painted horizon seem real.

Witches Moon - 2017 - The Grim Botanical

 Witches Moon Self-released – none

“The Craft” opens The Grim Botanical with chiming keyboards and the sound of an imaginary book being opened. Lasting only ninety seconds, it establishes the album less as a black metal recording than a small theatrical world in which black metal is one of several available forces. The melody has the bright artificial color of early dungeon synth, but a darker undertone keeps it from becoming decorative fantasy music. By the time “Call upon Your Name” arrives, Witches Moon has already constructed the room in which the rest of the album will occur: part woodland shrine, part amateur stage and part private studio crowded with keyboards, guitars and disembodied voices.
Released independently in October 2017, The Grim Botanical was the third Witches Moon full-length to appear during the project’s remarkably active first year. The anonymous Raleigh, North Carolina musician known as the Witch had introduced a mixture of raw melodic black metal and medievalist synthesizer music on A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn, then moved toward instrumental dungeon synth on Azazel Bedazzle. This album brings those directions together again, but the balance has changed. Keyboards no longer seem like an atmospheric layer placed around the metal instrumentation. They lead the arrangements, determine the melodic character and often control when the guitars are allowed to intensify the music.
“Call upon Your Name” demonstrates that development immediately. Its synthesizers move with a fluidity absent from much of the debut, carrying a melody that is whimsical without losing its ceremonial quality. Guitar and percussion enter as reinforcement rather than interruption. The most striking addition is the vocal arrangement. Harsh cries remain part of the project’s vocabulary, but they are joined by clean, harmonized lines that give the song the character of a pagan invocation. The voices do not sound polished in a conventional sense; their slight awkwardness adds to the ritual illusion, as if several figures had gathered around the same melody without attempting to become a formal choir.
This expanded vocal range gives The Grim Botanical much of its personality. On the debut, the distant shriek functioned primarily as another abrasive surface within the guitars. Here, voices can become characters. They chant, harmonize, cry from the background or rise into a high register that sounds deliberately strange. “7, Here Comes the Piper” makes particularly vivid use of this approach. Its elevated vocal line has an eccentric, almost storybook quality, less concerned with menace than enchantment. Against the swirling keyboards, it suggests a figure whose friendliness and danger cannot be separated. The song is playful, but its playfulness carries the uncertainty of a folk tale in which following the music may be a serious mistake.
“Weave a Wreath of Halo Harmful” occupies the darker side of the album’s garden. The title itself typifies the Witch’s language, joining beauty and injury within the same image. Synthesizers form a layered melodic canopy while the metal instrumentation supplies heat and forward movement underneath. The guitars are still comparatively thin, and the programmed percussion retains a synthetic attack, but the arrangement uses those limitations more confidently than the debut. Rather than trying to simulate the weight of a full band, Witches Moon treats the instruments as contrasting colors. The keyboard can sound lush because the guitar remains narrow; a harsh vocal can cut clearly because the rhythm section is not overloaded with low-end density.
That approach helps the album move rapidly between moods. The Grim Botanical is only thirty-three minutes long, and most of its nine tracks fall between three and five minutes. Songs therefore have little reason to prolong one atmosphere after its central idea has been established. An ominous synth passage may suddenly yield to a bright melody, while an aggressive black metal section can open into something serene without a lengthy transition. These changes occasionally feel abrupt, but abruptness is integral to the record’s appeal. Witches Moon presents the supernatural not as a single dark climate but as a place where delight, absurdity and threat coexist.
“Succulent Egg” may have the album’s most conspicuously peculiar title, and its music shares that sense of grotesque humor. The piece swells through keyboard figures, vocal entrances and stronger rhythmic accents, periodically sounding grand before some unexpected texture unsettles the impression. It illustrates why “botanical” is more than decorative wording. The album’s structures resemble unnatural growths: a simple melodic stem produces several incompatible branches, ornamental synth tones curl around distorted guitar, and voices emerge like unfamiliar flowers. The compositions grow outward from compact themes rather than following the verse-and-chorus discipline of ordinary metal songs.
The title track turns this garden into a complete environment. “The Grim Botanical” balances darkness and light more evenly than the surrounding pieces, with ominous harmonic shading beneath melodies that could otherwise seem almost cheerful. Witches Moon’s greatest skill is this ability to make brightness suspicious. The keyboards are frequently colorful and openly synthetic, yet their cheerfulness never guarantees safety. A major-sounding flourish may be followed by a blackened rasp; a gentle phrase may repeat until it feels like entrapment. The record does not depend on thick fog or continuous dissonance to communicate unease. It allows beauty to generate unease from within.
“As of Cain” introduces a more biblical shadow, although the album never settles into a single narrative. Its titles draw from witchcraft, plants, ritual language, folklore, scripture and Arthurian imagery without explaining how they connect. This looseness works because the musical identity is so coherent. Each piece belongs to the same theatrical landscape even when its reference points differ. The songs feel like scenes selected from a larger mythology whose missing parts must be imagined by the listener. Rather than laying out a concept, the Witch supplies objects—a wreath, a piper, an egg, Cain, a lake—and lets the sounds determine their relationships.
“Harlot of the Lake” is the clearest example of that mythological compression. Its title appears to distort the Lady of the Lake into a more dangerous and morally ambiguous figure, replacing chivalric distance with accusation and desire. The music similarly bends courtly or folk-like melody through black metal texture. Synth lines suggest elegance, while vocals and guitar prevent the piece from becoming stately. This is not historical medieval music, and Witches Moon makes no attempt at authenticity. The medieval quality comes from a modern fantasy vocabulary: modal melodies, synthetic choirs, archaic phrasing and the suggestion of ceremonies occurring outside recorded history.
The record’s production is cleaner than its raw reputation might imply. Individual keyboard lines remain audible even when the guitars and vocals are active, and the quick mood changes do not dissolve into an indistinct mass. At the same time, nothing sounds excessively corrected. Drum programming can be stiff, vocal layers do not always merge smoothly, and some transitions expose the solitary construction behind the music. These features preserve the project’s scale. The Grim Botanical sounds like the work of one person building an elaborate world with whatever is close at hand, and its imagination is enlarged rather than diminished by the visibility of that process.
“Call of the Void” closes the album without guitar or vocals, returning to the instrumental language of “The Craft.” The piece is brief, celestial and oddly welcoming. Instead of presenting the void as terror, it renders it as an opening beyond the crowded garden. Synthesizer tones float with a calm that feels slightly unreal after the record’s many voices and abrupt turns. The symmetry is effective: a book opens, nine scenes unfold, and the final instrumental leaves the listener at a threshold rather than providing a firm conclusion.
The Grim Botanical is more confident than A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn because it no longer needs to prove that black metal and dungeon synth can occupy the same song. It treats their coexistence as a starting point and adds folk melody, clean vocal harmony, theatrical characterization and a surprisingly broad emotional range. Not every experiment is elegant. The high voices can sound eccentric, the programmed rhythms remain limited, and some songs change direction before fully developing their best ideas. Yet elegance would be the wrong standard for music this curious.
What matters is the coherence created from so many unlikely details. The Grim Botanical can be aggressive, peaceful, sinister, comic and genuinely beautiful within a few minutes, but it never loses the distinctive Witches Moon atmosphere. The Witch approaches genre as a collection of materials rather than a set of borders, cultivating each sound until it tangles with the next. The resulting garden is artificial, overgrown and occasionally poisonous. It is also alive with melody. Among the project’s rapid sequence of early releases, The Grim Botanical stands out as the moment Witches Moon’s private mythology began to speak in several voices at once.

Witches Moon - 2020 - An Olde Goat's Game Of Stars

 The Radio Church Of Saint Toad – 008

An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars begins with forty seconds of synthetic fanfare, a modest doorway into an album that immediately feels more measured than Witches Moon’s early work. The keyboard melody is bright but antiquated, like a damaged title theme from a forgotten fantasy film, and its brevity gives it purpose: the curtain rises, the scene is established, and “A Storm of Rosen Mare and Black Chalice” enters before the atmosphere can become self-satisfied. Guitars scrape against broad keyboard chords, programmed percussion pushes the music forward, and the Witch’s voice appears as another unstable character within the arrangement. Witches Moon’s familiar collision of dungeon synth, folk melody and black metal remains intact, but the parts now move with greater confidence.
Released independently in May 2020 and issued on vinyl by Death Kvlt Productions that November, An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars arrived after the astonishing burst of recordings Witches Moon produced between 2017 and 2018. Those earlier albums often sounded like separate doors being opened in quick succession: raw atmospheric black metal on A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn, synthesizer-led fantasy on Azazel Bedazzle, theatrical genre mixing on The Grim Botanical and more isolated keyboard experiments elsewhere. The 2020 album does not choose one of those directions. It gathers them into a relatively concise forty-minute sequence in which the shifts feel like parts of a single journey rather than demonstrations of how many styles the project can attempt.
“A Storm of Rosen Mare and Black Chalice” announces this retrospective quality even in its title, which echoes the earlier A Storm of Golden Mare and Black Cauldron. It is not simply an act of self-reference. The altered phrase suggests Witches Moon revisiting its private vocabulary and changing the objects within it, as though the same deck of symbolic cards had been shuffled into a new reading. Musically, the track establishes the album’s main balance. Synthesizers carry much of the melodic and emotional information, while guitar and drums supply momentum and abrasion. Neither side is reduced to an interlude. The fantasy atmosphere continues through the metal passages, and the blackened edge remains perceptible even when the arrangement opens into calmer space.
“Burning the Seal” is tighter and more urgent. Its compact structure keeps the Witch from dwelling too long on any single figure, a recurring strength throughout the album. Earlier Witches Moon songs sometimes repeated a good riff until its enchantment began to weaken. Here, ideas are more carefully rationed. A keyboard line is introduced, reinforced by guitar and then redirected before familiarity turns into stagnation. The programmed drums still possess an artificial stiffness, but the album uses that quality as part of its clockwork character. This is not music pretending to be a conventional band in a room. It sounds like one person animating a cast of instruments and assigning each a role.
The vocals contribute strongly to that animation. The Witch moves between black-metal rasping, cleaner declarations and layered ceremonial passages without treating any single voice as the project’s natural center. “Bring Dishonor” uses those changes to make its title feel more dramatic than descriptive. Harshness arrives as accusation, while melodic voices seem to answer from another position within the composition. The vocal production is not polished enough to erase the seams between these identities, and that is precisely why they remain interesting. They sound less like studio harmonies than figures appearing from different corners of the same imagined ritual.
Witches Moon’s eccentric titles are essential to the album’s tone. “The Lament of Two Fish” risks absurdity before a note is heard, but the music does not explain or apologize for the image. Its mournful melody allows the title to remain funny and strangely touching at once. This coexistence separates Witches Moon from fantasy-oriented black metal that treats solemnity as proof of commitment. The Witch’s world can contain grief, occult symbolism, talking creatures and nursery-rhyme logic without ranking one as more legitimate than another. Its seriousness lies in the care given to the atmosphere, not in maintaining a severe expression.
“Bag of Tricks and Arts” makes that playfulness especially audible. The song moves briskly, arranging its melodic ideas like objects pulled from the title’s imaginary sack. Keyboard flourishes, guitar figures and vocal gestures appear in rapid succession, yet the piece does not collapse into randomness. Its recurring tonal color holds everything together. The synthesizers favor sounds that are openly artificial—choirs, small fanfares, glassy leads and soft orchestral approximations—but their lack of realism is an advantage. They belong to a world produced through suggestion. A convincing horn sample would not necessarily improve music whose charm depends on cardboard scenery becoming magical through belief.
The first half of the album moves with consistent economy, each proper song lasting between three and five minutes. This pacing gives the sequence a stronger album shape than some of Witches Moon’s more sprawling releases. There is enough time for individual themes to establish themselves, but little room for extended ambient wandering. The original vinyl division is sensible: side one closes after “Bag of Tricks and Arts,” having presented the record’s more animated, story-driven material. Side two begins with “Pvre Ecstasy” and gradually turns toward slower, more contemplative territory.
“Pvre Ecstasy” retains rhythmic force, but its spelling and atmosphere point toward the project’s mixture of mock archaism and genuine longing. Witches Moon often uses antiquated language the way it uses synthesizers: not to reconstruct history but to create distance from ordinary speech. The substituted “v” is visually theatrical, a small piece of typographic costume. Underneath it, however, the music’s yearning is direct. Repeated melodic phrases reach upward while the rougher instrumentation prevents them from becoming sentimental. Ecstasy here sounds less like pleasure than escape—a momentary departure from a fixed identity or physical place.
“Has the Wind Always Blown So Slow?” is the album’s longest track and its emotional center. The question contains weariness, wonder and a subtle disturbance in the perception of time. Appropriately, the music gives its central ideas more space than the surrounding songs. The tempo feels less insistent, and sustained keyboard tones allow the melody to hover rather than march forward. This is where Witches Moon’s dungeon-synth side functions most effectively, not as an ornamental pause between black-metal tracks but as a way of changing the listener’s sense of duration. The song does not become empty or purely ambient; traces of the album’s roughness remain around the edges, keeping its beauty from settling into comfort.
The title track then restores a more compact theatrical movement. “An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars” is an excellent Witches Moon title because it joins the rustic, satanic, comic and cosmic without clarifying which quality should dominate. The goat could be the Devil, a woodland animal, an aged trickster or all three at once. The stars may be pieces in a game whose rules remain hidden. The music similarly refuses a single emotional reading. Melodies can feel celebratory while the vocals darken them; aggressive passages carry an undercurrent of delight; synthetic grandeur is repeatedly made intimate by the homemade production.
This ambiguity is not merely decorative lore. It determines how the album handles black metal. The guitars are important, but they are not asked to provide an uninterrupted atmosphere of hostility. They intensify passages, sharpen melodic contours and give physical resistance to the smooth keyboard surfaces. The drum programming supplies propulsion without pretending to possess the dynamics of a live player. Bass weight remains less important than middle-register interaction among guitar, voice and synth. As a result, An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars does not sound massive, but it does sound densely inhabited. Its scale resembles a puppet theatre whose limited stage somehow accommodates storms, rituals, animals and constellations.
“Carousel of Dawn” closes the record instrumentally, mirroring the short “Intro” while expanding its function. The carousel image is appropriate for music built from circular melodies and returning symbols. Its keyboard figures rotate with a mixture of brightness and melancholy, suggesting morning without presenting it as a simple victory over darkness. Dawn merely reveals that the strange game has continued through the night. Ending without vocals also changes the apparent distance of the album. The characters retreat, leaving the mechanism turning by itself.
The production, mixing and mastering were all handled by the Witch, and the consistency of the sound supports the album’s unity. This is cleaner than the most primitive Witches Moon recordings but not polished into anonymity. Synthetic percussion remains visibly synthetic; layered voices occasionally rub against one another; guitars have texture without becoming an opaque wall. The record knows what needs clarity and what benefits from roughness. Its melodies remain legible, which is crucial because they carry far more of the album than sheer intensity does.
The limited vinyl edition—one hundred copies on black 140-gram vinyl with an insert, poster and Will-Helm Arts cover—gives the album’s two-part structure a physical expression, but An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars works because the sequence was already carefully shaped. Its songs are concise, the reflective second half follows naturally from the animated first, and the instrumental bookends prevent the journey from feeling arbitrarily cut off. Compared with the restless experiments of 2017, this is a more settled record, though never a conventional one.
Witches Moon’s achievement is not technical perfection. The programmed drums can still feel rigid, some vocal choices remain deliberately peculiar, and listeners resistant to synthetic medieval color will find little accommodation. The achievement is personality. Few projects could place “The Lament of Two Fish” beside “Bring Dishonor,” or end a black-metal album with something called “Carousel of Dawn,” without seeming merely cute or self-conscious. Witches Moon makes those gestures feel natural because its world has always been spacious enough for menace and whimsy to coexist. An Olde Goat’s Game of Stars is the sound of that world becoming more disciplined without losing its oddness: a nocturnal game played with familiar pieces, rearranged beneath a larger and clearer sky.