Pedro Vian & Merzbow - 2024 - Inside Richard Serra Sculptures

 

Modern Obscure Music – MOM048  250.46MB FLAC Inside Richard Serra Sculptures begins as though the recording equipment has been dropped into the hollow center of an enormous machine. A deep vibration rises from somewhere below the audible surface while abrasive electronic matter tears across it: crushed static, whipping feedback, metallic friction and frequencies sharp enough to seem physically pointed. Yet this is not simply Merzbow imposing his familiar wall of noise upon a set of architectural field recordings. The album’s real subject is the struggle between mass and interior space—between the apparent solidity of Richard Serra’s steel sculptures and the unstable acoustic life discovered inside them. Pedro Vian recorded his source material within Serra’s monumental installations at Dia Beacon in New York. Serra’s curved steel walls do not merely occupy a room; they reorganize the visitor’s movement through it. Their scale is understood through walking, changes in perspective and the uneasy sensation that tons of metal are leaning or bending around the body. Vian’s microphones convert that physical encounter into resonances, ghost voices and environmental sounds. Merzbow then processes and mixes this material until the sculptures appear to have acquired nervous systems. The steel is no longer silent or motionless. It hums, shudders, screams and seems to contract around the listener. The album is divided into two side-long pieces, each lasting roughly twenty minutes, but it behaves more like a continuous investigation than two separate compositions. Part I arrives with extraordinary density. A distant low drone is almost immediately buried beneath coarse waves of distortion, as though an immense wind were being forced through a narrow metal passage. Layers scrape against one another without settling into a stable foreground or background. Merzbow’s noise dominates the immediate sensory field, yet Vian’s recordings remain audible underneath it as a darker pressure. Instead of disappearing, they give the electronic violence somewhere to occur. Noise becomes architecture rather than decoration. This spatial quality separates the record from a routine harsh-noise collaboration. Merzbow’s frequencies do not form one flat wall. They bend, narrow, widen and suddenly reveal cavities. Certain passages feel claustrophobic, with sound pressing inward from both stereo channels, while others open into huge reverberant chambers. Small movements travel through these spaces: muted percussion, spectral voices, isolated impacts and brief electronic gestures that resemble machinery awakening behind a wall. When the heavier layers momentarily recede, the remaining drone does not offer relief. It produces a different kind of unease—the awareness of an enormous empty volume that had been concealed by the noise. Vian and Merzbow make an effective pairing precisely because their musical languages are not naturally compatible. Vian’s work often allows melody, atmosphere and percussion to establish an emotional environment. Merzbow’s sound tends to corrode environments, filling them with unstable energy and refusing the listener a safe viewing distance. Inside Richard Serra Sculptures does not smooth over this difference. It lets the two methods collide. Vian supplies traces of human presence and acoustic depth; Merzbow subjects them to pressure, multiplication and rupture. The collaboration works because neither artist becomes merely background material for the other. As Part I develops, its initial assault begins to fracture. Rapid electronic scratches and streaks of high-frequency sound appear and vanish, cutting across slower subterranean movement. Percussive details emerge without producing a conventional pulse. They operate more like knocks transmitted through steel—evidence that something is happening elsewhere in the structure. Murmured voices seem close enough to recognize as human but too obscured to understand. This refusal of clarity is essential. A plainly documented gallery ambience would reduce the sculptures to locations. By partially destroying the recordings, the artists preserve the mystery of being surrounded by objects too large to comprehend at once. Part II introduces more exposed melodic material, including a simple ascending figure whose repetition becomes a fragile organizing force. Around it, Merzbow’s static snaps, sputters and accumulates. The contrast could easily have become sentimental—delicate melody surviving beneath brutal noise—but the record avoids that easy opposition. The melody is not innocent, and the noise is not merely an attacker. Both elements alter the perception of the other. Repetition makes the notes increasingly uncanny, while the sharper frequencies begin to resemble reflections thrown back by the surrounding metal. What initially sounds like conflict gradually becomes a shared acoustic system. The second half also makes the human scale of Serra’s work more apparent. However overwhelming the sculptures may be, their meaning depends upon bodies passing through them. Footsteps, voices and changes in resonance reveal dimensions that photographs cannot fully communicate. The music recreates this relationship without attempting a literal sonic portrait. Vian’s restrained melodic and percussive elements suggest a moving observer, while Merzbow supplies the immeasurable weight surrounding that observer. The listener is placed neither outside the sculpture nor before it, but somewhere inside its curved boundaries, trying to determine distance through echoes and pressure. Richard Serra died in March 2024, only months before the album appeared, lending the project an unintended memorial dimension. Thankfully, the music never turns solemn or reverential. It responds to Serra’s work by extending its procedures into another medium. His sculptures use weight, balance, curvature and site to make space perceptible; Vian and Merzbow use volume, frequency, resonance and duration to accomplish something comparable through sound. Both demand physical participation. Played loudly, this record is not simply heard. Its low frequencies occupy the chest, its higher tones tighten the nerves, and its changing density seems to alter the dimensions of the room. Released by Vian’s Modern Obscure Music in a transparent-vinyl edition limited to 300 copies, Inside Richard Serra Sculptures is an unusually coherent meeting of ambient composition, field recording and harsh noise. Its concept is immediately legible, but the music never depends upon the concept for its power. Even without knowing where the recordings were made, the listener would recognize an intense preoccupation with enclosure, surface, weight and scale. Knowing the source deepens the experience because it explains why these sounds seem less like a performance than an environment being activated. The record’s greatest achievement is its transformation of steel from an image of permanence into a source of uncertainty. Serra’s sculptures appear immovable, yet inside this music they become unstable acoustic bodies filled with pressure, memory and invisible motion. Vian finds the latent voices within their interiors; Merzbow magnifies those voices until the metal seems to answer. Inside Richard Serra Sculptures does not provide an audio tour of an artwork. It creates a new structure from the encounter—forty-one minutes of curved noise, buried melody and resonant darkness that the listener must enter and navigate.

Occulted Death Stance - 2024 - Crush Your Enemies ／ Strength In Chaos

 

Death Hymns – DH-CH010  254.88MB FLAC

Crush Your Enemies sounds like a black-metal recording forced to survive inside the damaged machinery of an early hardcore demo. The guitars are raw, overdriven and compact; the drums push with blunt physical momentum; the vocals emerge as hostile commands rather than atmospheric shrieks. Occulted Death Stance uses the primitive recording less as a nostalgic disguise than as a weapon. Everything has been compressed into a narrow, abrasive space where riffs, distortion and rhythm strike one another until the distinction between punk urgency and black-metal repetition begins to disappear.
Although this edition is dated 2024, the five-song program first circulated as a cassette demo in 2022 through Anti-Social Kultur England, Horrible Room and the American label Unmatched Dominance. That original tape repeated the same sequence on both sides: “Steel Bonnet,” “Parting Shot,” “Pain Wheel,” “Scythian Bow” and “Will to Power.” The duplication suited music built around insistence. Rather than presenting a long narrative album, the cassette offered one concentrated attack that could be rewound, flipped or heard again immediately, transforming repetition into part of the release’s disciplinary character.
Occulted Death Stance had already moved through several related but distinct forms before this material appeared. The project’s earlier recordings included the decayed black metal of Soil of the Grave, the extended structures of Eternal Return, the more direct Strength in Chaos demo and the 2021 album Feathered Serpent. Crush Your Enemies pushes farther toward concision. Its five pieces reduce the project’s language to riffs, impact, forward movement and an atmosphere of deliberate antagonism. There is little decorative mysticism and no need for a spacious introduction. The title gives the order, and the recording begins carrying it out.
“Steel Bonnet” establishes the method immediately. Its title refers to an old Scottish military helmet, but the song does not attempt historical pageantry. The image matters because it combines protection with attack: a hard shell designed for someone entering close combat. The music behaves accordingly. The guitar tone is rough enough to retain its individual edges, while the rhythm advances with the locked-in repetition of marching boots. Occulted Death Stance does not chase technical precision. The power comes from keeping a simple figure in motion until its crudity becomes threatening.
The project’s relationship to punk is clearest in this refusal to polish the riffs into conventional metal grandeur. Changes arrive abruptly, tempos feel driven by physical impulse, and the vocals frequently seem positioned to provoke a room rather than haunt a distant forest. Yet the music does not become straightforward hardcore. Its guitar phrases preserve black metal’s circular movement, returning to the same hostile shapes until they begin to feel detached from ordinary rock progression. Punk supplies the body; black metal supplies the trance. The two styles meet in music that is simultaneously immediate and strangely obsessive.
“Parting Shot” turns departure into aggression. The phrase can describe a final insult delivered while leaving, but it also retains the literal image of firing backward at a pursuer. That double meaning fits Occulted Death Stance perfectly. The songs often feel as though they are retreating from modern life while continuing to attack it. The music does not seek reconciliation with the listener or explain the source of its hostility. It leaves a wound behind and keeps moving. The riffing is memorable without becoming clean, and its catchiness feels almost accusatory, as though accessibility itself has been repurposed as bait.
“Pain Wheel” is an especially accurate title for the project’s compositional logic. These songs move by rotation rather than development. A riff returns, gathers pressure, passes beneath the voice and comes around again with slightly greater force. The repetition creates a sensation of being fixed to something mechanical. What might appear minimal on paper becomes physically effective through persistence. The recording’s limited separation strengthens this effect: guitar, voice and percussion do not occupy polite individual spaces but grind together like parts of one crude apparatus.
The title “Scythian Bow” expands the demo’s weapon imagery beyond modern warfare. The compact recurve bow associated with the mounted peoples of the Eurasian steppe could be used from horseback, combining portability, speed and lethal efficiency. Those qualities also describe the music. Occulted Death Stance favors short, reusable structures over elaborate construction. The riffs are meant to be deployed quickly, not admired as ornamental objects. Even the rough production contributes to the sense that everything unnecessary has been discarded in favor of mobility and impact.
This interest in weapons does not make Crush Your Enemies a cinematic battle soundtrack. There are no orchestral swells, heroic speeches or polished martial effects. Its violence remains personal and close. The guitars scrape rather than soar, and the vocals sound nearer to a shouted confrontation than the voice of an omniscient commander. That proximity prevents the record from becoming fantasy spectacle. Whatever enemies the title imagines, the struggle occurs in a small room, rehearsal space or basement where amplification turns private hostility into a temporary environment.
“Will to Power” closes the sequence by naming the idea that has animated it from the beginning. The phrase carries philosophical baggage, but the song’s meaning is delivered primarily through sound: power as persistence, self-command and the refusal to soften an intention for public approval. Occulted Death Stance does not turn the concept into an intellectual lecture. The repeated riffs and barked vocals enact a will that proves itself by continuing. The performance matters more than any explicit doctrine attached to the words.
The recording’s anonymity adds to its force. Occulted Death Stance has largely been treated as an individual project without a conventional public lineup, and Crush Your Enemies provides no celebrity personality around which to organize the experience. That absence directs attention back toward the object: five songs, a confrontational title and an underground distribution network joining small English and American labels. The release behaves like a message passed between participants who already understand its codes. It does not stop to introduce itself to outsiders.
That closed quality can make the record seem forbidding, but its musical construction is not obscure. The riffs are direct, the rhythms are forceful and the songs avoid pointless complication. What makes the demo difficult is its attitude. It refuses the reassurance that aggression is only theater. Even when the historical weapons and philosophical language invite symbolic interpretation, the performance remains unpleasantly immediate. The listener is not offered a safe elevated position from which to appreciate “extremity.” The sound presses forward at the same level as the body.
Crush Your Enemies succeeds because it understands the value of limitation. Five pieces are enough. A narrow sonic range is enough. A handful of blunt riffs, a damaged guitar tone, forceful drumming and a voice stripped of social grace are enough. Occulted Death Stance does not attempt to expand this material into something grander than its natural dimensions. The release stays compact, ugly and repeatable, preserving the logic of a cassette that delivered the same attack on both sides. It is less an album of individual compositions than a single stance held for the duration: armored, antagonistic and unwilling to yield.

Merzbow, Nicolas Horvath - 2024 - PiaNoise

 

Sub Rosa – SR530  277.53MB FLAC

The piano on Pia-Noise is not placed safely in front of Merzbow’s electronics, where its melodies might remain intact while distortion supplies a dramatic backdrop. It is dropped directly into the noise. Nicolas Horvath’s notes are struck, repeated, scattered and sustained while Masami Akita surrounds them with overloaded frequencies, electronic shrieks, radio fragments, granular eruptions and constantly shifting masses of static. At times the instrument remains clearly recognizable; elsewhere it seems to be burning inside the mix, with only the hard impact of a key or a brief harmonic shape escaping through the surface.
The cover provides an exact visual equivalent. An old piano stands in a ruined room where plaster has peeled from the walls and daylight enters through tall windows. The building appears abandoned, but the instrument has not been removed. It remains inside the decay like evidence of a cultural order that has outlived the conditions supporting it. That image is more useful than a simple contrast between beauty and ugliness. Pia-Noise does not present Horvath’s piano as beautiful civilization being attacked by Merzbow’s barbaric noise. Both musicians inhabit the same damaged space, and both contribute to its instability.
Horvath and Akita had discussed working together roughly fifteen years before the record finally appeared. The collaboration was initially associated with Dapnom, one of Horvath’s underground electronic identities, but the eventual project placed his own piano at the center. The music was assembled remotely during the pandemic period, when isolation made online exchange a practical substitute for sharing a studio. Horvath called the finished work an “ode to our ruin,” while Sub Rosa connected its atmosphere to the health crisis, ecological disaster and a wider condition of social anxiety. These ideas explain the record’s emotional weather without reducing its sound to a topical illustration.
Pia-Noise contains two compositions of almost equal length. “N9512MIX” lasts just under twenty-two minutes, while “914 for Horvath” runs slightly shorter. The division creates the dimensions of an LP even though the initial Sub Rosa edition was issued on CD. Each piece provides enough time for the relationship between piano and noise to change repeatedly. This is important because their interaction cannot be summarized as a permanent duel. Sometimes Akita overwhelms Horvath, sometimes the piano guides the listener through the electronic density, and sometimes the two streams proceed with such independence that the ear must decide which one to follow.
“N9512MIX” is the more immediately punishing half. Merzbow’s processing arrives in thick, bright layers, filling the upper frequencies with pressure while lower electronic movement churns underneath. Horvath responds not by trying to outplay the volume but by exploiting the piano’s percussive body. Chords become impacts. Rapid figures cut through the static because their attacks are sharper than their decays. When he allows notes to ring, their resonance is quickly scratched, covered or absorbed by the surrounding electronics. The result resembles a concert grand being heard through an electrical catastrophe that has somehow become part of the performance.
There are lyrical fragments within Horvath’s improvisation, but they do not develop into consoling themes. A run of notes may briefly suggest late Romantic harmony, the suspended atmosphere of Satie or the chromatic restlessness of Scriabin, only to be broken apart before it can establish authority. Horvath’s extensive classical background matters here because his playing contains memories of organized musical language. Merzbow does not simply erase those memories. His noise exposes how fragile they become once their expected acoustic frame disappears. The recital hall has collapsed, but the pianist continues without pretending that the old room is still intact.
Akita’s side is equally responsive. His sound may initially appear continuous, yet close listening reveals streams moving at different rates: sustained high-frequency abrasion, flickering digital particles, sudden bursts, irregular pulses and mangled signals resembling pieces of radio transmission. Instead of one immovable wall, the noise behaves like extreme weather composed of several simultaneous systems. A piano phrase can momentarily open a cavity inside it, redirect attention toward a quieter layer or make an electronic event sound like an answer. The collaboration is most convincing when neither musician appears to control the other.
“914 for Horvath” begins from a comparatively restrained position. Space opens around the piano, and Akita’s electronics often resemble shredded broadcasts, damaged communication or distant machinery rather than a full-spectrum assault. Horvath can use a wider dynamic range here. Quiet notes linger; heavier chords arrive as structural shocks; short silences become audible enough to matter. Merzbow gradually complicates the field, but the piece retains a greater sense of breathing room. Its tension comes from expecting the noise to close every opening and noticing that it sometimes chooses not to.
This restraint makes the second piece more unsettling than a simple continuation of the first. The piano is easier to hear, but clarity provides no security. Isolated notes can sound lonely, exposed or stubbornly formal against Akita’s corroded transmissions. When the electronic pressure increases, Horvath’s phrases do not behave like victims. Their weight alters the apparent scale of the noise. A low chord can make a mass of static seem suddenly vertical, while a delicate upper-register figure reveals how violently crowded the same frequency range has become. The two performers generate architecture through collision.
Piano-and-electronics collaborations often preserve an implicit hierarchy in which the traditional instrument supplies emotional meaning and the electronic artist provides texture. Pia-Noise refuses that arrangement. Merzbow’s sound has its own phrasing, dynamics and internal color, while Horvath treats the piano as a source of noise as much as melody. Felt hammers strike metal strings; the wooden body amplifies vibration; pedals and dampers determine which resonances survive. Heard beside Akita’s generators and effects, the piano stops appearing naturally pure. It is another machine, older and mechanically visible, producing controlled impacts from a large resonating enclosure.
The title condenses this meeting into one slightly awkward but accurate compound. Pia-Noise is neither a Merzbow album decorated with piano nor a modern-classical recording subjected to electronic interference. It establishes a third field in which both practices become harder to separate. Noise makes the piano’s physical construction audible, and piano gives Merzbow’s turbulence an unstable harmonic depth. Even passages that seem mutually indifferent contribute to the design. During isolation, collaboration did not require the illusion that two people occupied the same room. It could preserve distance and still create contact.
Released by Sub Rosa in 2024, the album fits naturally within a catalog devoted to experimental electronics, musique concrète, modern composition and difficult historical crossings. Horvath had already worked with Lustmord on The Fall, a radical engagement with Dennis Johnson’s minimalist composition November, and his career has repeatedly moved between canonical repertoire, neglected composers and underground electronic practice. Merzbow’s enormous discography has likewise demonstrated that harsh noise can interact with drums, guitars, free improvisation, ambient music and acoustic instruments without surrendering its identity. Pia-Noise succeeds because neither participant treats the meeting as novelty.
The record does not offer hope in any conventional sense. Its ruined room is not repaired, and the noise never resolves into harmony. Yet continuing to play inside that room becomes its own form of resistance. Horvath’s piano survives without remaining untouched; Merzbow’s electronics communicate without becoming polite. Their collision produces something richer than despair: a dense record of two people building a common language while physically separated and imagining culture amid ongoing collapse. Pia-Noise is an ode to ruin, but it is also proof that ruin can still resonate, answer back and generate new forms.

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.