Peoples Person - 2017 - Peoples Person

 

Usagi – U13  200.41MB FLAC People’s Person does not attack with speed. The self-titled recording advances like heavy machinery moving through loose ground, its weight carried by slow waves of crackle, rumble, feedback and overloaded electronics. Each surge sounds capable of becoming a complete harsh-noise eruption, yet the project repeatedly holds something back. Pressure gathers beneath the surface, isolated squeals break free, and the larger mass continues dragging itself forward at an unnervingly patient pace. The restraint does not make the recording less violent. It makes every increase feel earned. Originally issued on cassette by Team Boro Tapes in 2017, People’s Person presents approximately thirty-five minutes of crude Swedish harsh noise. The project belongs to the same interconnected underground as Capers, Heinz Hopf and the Team Boro label itself, but this recording establishes a separate personality. There is no attempt to disguise simple equipment behind technical spectacle. Distortion, damaged tape, feedback and rough low-frequency movement are treated as sufficient materials. What matters is how slowly they are allowed to reveal their force. The album’s opening establishes that patience immediately. A subdued electrical texture begins spreading across the stereo field, more crackle than wall, with enough empty space around it for individual details to remain exposed. Feedback tones appear almost melodic for a moment, not because they form a tune, but because their pitches linger long enough to create expectation. One tone bends slightly, another answers from a different position, and the recording seems to consider several possible directions before settling into heavier abrasion. When the deeper noise arrives, it does not erase the earlier material. The lighter feedback continues moving inside the rumble, sometimes visible and sometimes buried. This layering gives the album depth without making it polished. The sounds appear to occupy a physical room, bouncing from one surface to another rather than being digitally stacked into perfect alignment. Solitary squeals hang in the air after the larger pressure recedes. Crackle spreads unevenly. Bass arrives as a loose, vibrating mass instead of a clean foundation. That looseness is one of People’s Person’s defining qualities. The music is direct, but something always sits slightly wrong inside it. A transition happens later than expected. A feedback tone remains exposed after it seems to have completed its purpose. A wall begins to form and then sags before reaching maximum density. Instead of correcting these irregularities, People’s Person allows them to become the record’s character. Swedish harsh noise has often distinguished itself through an unusually rough meeting of junk sound, overloaded electronics, tape manipulation and blunt physical energy. Recordings associated with compilations such as Underground Sweden, Fuck Money Fuck Life and Piller Thriller did not require elaborate concepts to justify themselves. Their authority came from sound pushed until equipment, recording medium and performance became difficult to separate. People’s Person clearly belongs to that tradition, but the self-titled tape replaces some of its frantic violence with a sluggish, almost comfortable momentum. Comfort is a strange word for this music, yet it describes the way the recording inhabits its own harshness. People’s Person does not sound desperate to prove that noise can hurt. The project settles into grinding frequencies and lets them move at their natural speed. The listener is not struck by an endless series of abrupt edits. The sound closes around the room gradually, giving the ear enough time to adjust before another layer increases the pressure. This makes the loudest sections feel less like explosions than environmental changes. A low rumble grows until it alters the apparent size of the space. Crackling begins at the edges and spreads inward. Feedback that initially sounded distant moves closer without becoming dramatically louder. By the time the recording reaches full density, the listener may not be able to identify the exact moment when exposure became confinement. The early work of The Rita provides one useful point of comparison, especially in the album’s attention to coarse movement inside a seemingly continuous surface. People’s Person never turns the noise into a motionless slab. The wall breathes, slips and fractures. Different layers grind at slightly different speeds, producing internal drag. A heavier frequency may dominate for several seconds before weakening enough to reveal thin static underneath. That changing relationship between surface and depth prevents the album from becoming anonymous. Many harsh-noise recordings can produce impressive force, but force alone reveals little about the person creating it. People’s Person has a recognizable sense of timing. The project understands that a single feedback cry can become more dramatic when surrounded by slower, dirtier movement. It knows when to release additional pressure and when to leave a weak signal struggling alone. The weaker sounds are essential. They create vulnerability inside a style often presented as invincible. A thin tone flickers as if a cable is losing contact. A loop catches and returns in an altered form. Tape grain becomes loud enough to resemble weather moving across the recording. These details make the album feel constructed from equipment being used near its limits rather than from an unlimited electronic source. Destroyed tape is especially compatible with People’s Person’s pacing. Tape damage does not simply add dirt. It changes time. A signal wavers, stretches or loses part of itself during repetition. The resulting movement is never perfectly stable, even when the source remains constant. People’s Person uses this instability without turning the record into a demonstration of tape technique. The damage remains embedded in the larger grind. There are moments when the album nearly becomes rhythmic. Repeated bursts establish a pulse, or a low-frequency movement returns at intervals regular enough for the body to anticipate it. No beat fully develops. The pattern either drifts out of alignment or is covered by another layer. Rhythm appears as a byproduct of machinery continuing to work, not as an invitation to move comfortably with it. The self-titled presentation keeps attention on these physical behaviors. There is no elaborate title instructing the listener to imagine war, disease, machinery, sexuality or social collapse. People’s Person offers its name and its sound. That apparent plainness fits a project uninterested in separating concept from execution. The phrase itself contains a mild contradiction: a “people person” is socially open, agreeable and comfortable among others, while this music communicates through obstruction, overload and abrasive distance. At the same time, the album is less hostile than its materials initially suggest. Its aggression does not feel aimed at a named victim. There are no commanding vocals or ideological declarations forcing the listener into a specific position. The noise remains severe, but the slow pacing allows a peculiar generosity. Each texture is given enough space to be heard before it is damaged, buried or replaced. This is where People’s Person differs from noise that mistakes constant activity for intensity. Thirty-five minutes of maximum-speed editing could contain hundreds of events without allowing any of them to acquire weight. Here a single change in feedback pitch can reshape an entire passage because the surrounding movement has remained patient. A small increase in bass feels enormous. A brief reduction reveals how much pressure had accumulated unnoticed. The original cassette format would have strengthened this unstable physical character. Tape adds its own low-level hiss, compression and mechanical movement, joining the recording rather than merely carrying it. Turning the cassette divides the album into two sustained encounters, but the sides belong to the same general environment. The interruption is practical rather than conceptual: the machine stops, the listener turns the object, and the machinery resumes. Team Boro Tapes was an appropriate home for the release because the label’s identity grew from direct involvement in the Swedish noise underground rather than from distant curation. People’s Person was not being presented as an exotic example of Scandinavian extremity for an international audience. It emerged from the same network of performers, compilations, mail orders and small editions that gave the sound its immediate context. The album’s later CD edition on Usagi Productions allows the 2017 material to circulate beyond the narrow reach of the original tape. What might initially seem like a minor underground artifact proves strong enough to survive the change in format. Digital playback clarifies the separation between low rumble, midrange crackle and higher feedback without cleaning away the recording’s damage. The dirt becomes easier to inspect. That clarity confirms how carefully the album’s apparent sloppiness is controlled. People’s Person does not simply switch on several devices and accept whatever mass appears. The walls have pacing. Frequencies enter in relation to one another. Dense passages contain channels through which thinner tones can travel. When the noise recedes, it exposes exactly enough underlying activity to prevent the recording from feeling emptied. The result is rough without being careless. Its directness comes from refusing unnecessary decoration, not from lacking decisions. Every sustained passage asks how long one texture can remain active before perception changes. Every feedback tone tests how much open space it can occupy. Every collapse in density prepares the ground for another slow accumulation. The connection to Capers and Heinz Hopf helps place People’s Person inside a wider body of Swedish noise activity, yet the self-titled album does not sound like a leftover alias created to release interchangeable material. Its sluggish movement is too particular. Where another project might emphasize explosive junk abuse, power-electronics aggression or frantic tape action, People’s Person appears satisfied to let a damaged system grind at its own pace. That pace becomes almost psychedelic during the longer stretches. Repetition alters the listener’s sense of scale. Crackle that first seemed like a surface begins to resemble thousands of individual impacts. A low tone expands until it feels architectural. Feedback traces slow curves through the mass, momentarily opening depth where the recording had appeared completely flat. Nothing within this psychedelic effect offers escape or transcendence. The listener is not carried beyond the material world. Attention is pushed further into matter: damaged signal, magnetic residue, vibrating speaker, loose connection and electrical resistance. People’s Person makes crude sound expansive by refusing to hurry through it. The album eventually reaches heavier walls, but these sections do not behave as predictable climaxes. They are temporary conditions produced by accumulation. Frequencies crowd together, the low end thickens, and earlier details become difficult to distinguish. Then some element drops away, revealing that the wall was never one object. It was a collection of unstable parts briefly pressed into the same shape. This continuous forming and deformation gives the recording its durability. A harsh-noise wall can be impressive for several minutes and exhausting thereafter if its surface refuses meaningful change. People’s Person keeps changing without advertising those changes. The music rewards close attention while remaining physically effective at high volume. It can be heard as one heavy environment or followed as a sequence of small mechanical decisions. The title’s social irony remains unresolved. Perhaps the “people’s person” is the figure capable of giving the audience exactly what it wants: rough sound, slow pressure and the pleasure of equipment being forced past good behavior. Perhaps the name is simply another slightly wrong element, an ordinary phrase attached to music that has no obvious use in ordinary life. Either way, the record does not depend upon explanation. Its personality is already present in the way feedback is allowed to hover, the way rumble advances without urgency, and the way every apparently crude passage contains an internal sense of proportion. People’s Person makes no grand claim for noise and offers no manifesto about extremity. It switches on, gathers weight and continues. By the end of its thirty-five minutes, the album has not traveled toward resolution. The machinery remains damaged, the feedback remains loose, and the walls never become permanent enough to offer security. The recording simply withdraws while its pressure still feels active. What remains is not silence as relief, but the sensation of a slow system continuing somewhere beyond the limits of the release—relaxed, slightly misaligned and heavy enough to keep moving through anything placed in its way.

Sissy Spacek - 2025 - Entrance

 

Shelter Press – SP161CD  298.33MB FLAC

Entrance begins by making distance difficult to measure. A scrape sounds close enough to touch, then a hollow electronic tone opens behind it and suddenly the recording seems enormous. Thin feedback, rolling percussion, clipped whispers and small metallic impacts appear in a space that continually changes shape. Nothing remains fixed long enough to establish a stable foreground or background. Sissy Spacek has not abandoned noise on Entrance. The project has reduced its violence to individual movements and scattered those movements across an hour of remarkably tense musique concrète.
Released by Shelter Press in April 2025, Entrance contains four extended compositions assembled by John Wiese and Charlie Mumma from contributions by Tim Barnes, Marco Fusinato, Aaron Hemphill, Brad Laner, Katsura Mouri, Ralf Wehowsky and C. Spencer Yeh. The participants did not gather in one studio to improvise the album from beginning to end. Each supplied sounds according to general instructions, and those recordings were subsequently cut, manipulated and reassembled by Wiese and Mumma. The result often resembles spontaneous group performance even though its performers were separated by time and location.
That illusion is central to Entrance. A percussion figure may appear to answer an electronic scrape, while a bowed or amplified texture seems to react immediately to a sudden change in density. The exchanges possess the timing of musicians listening to one another. In reality, the listening occurred later, through editing. Wiese’s composition transforms recorded fragments into participants capable of responding across an encounter that never physically happened.
Sissy Spacek has always contained this contradiction. The project emerged from the violent collision of American noisecore, grindcore and tape collage, producing music in which live speed was repeatedly chopped into impossible structures. John Wiese’s editing could make a full band appear faster, more fragmented and less human than any group could become through performance alone. Entrance uses related methods at the opposite extreme. Instead of compressing impact, the album expands gestures until their surfaces, tails and surrounding silences become audible.
“Web of Unfolding Appearance” establishes this changed scale without sounding tentative. Small events enter sharply, but they do not accumulate into a conventional wall. Rattling percussion, irregular tones, faint voice and electrical residue coexist without being forced into the same density. The piece continually opens and folds back upon itself. A sound that initially seems insignificant may return transformed, while an apparently dominant texture can disappear before establishing control.
Aaron Hemphill, Katsura Mouri, Ralf Wehowsky and C. Spencer Yeh contribute to this first construction alongside Wiese and Mumma. Their individual sources carry associations—instrument, performer, physical action—but the editing partially dissolves those identities. Entrance never reduces everything to anonymous raw material, however. Personality survives in the pressure of a gesture, the grain of an attack and the way a sound resists manipulation.
This separates the album from musique concrète that treats recorded sources primarily as objects to be stripped of their origins. Sissy Spacek allows recognition and abstraction to overlap. A listener may hear something resembling percussion, string friction, guitar feedback or a human breath without being able to follow that source through the complete piece. Each sound enters with a possible history, then acquires another role inside the composition.
“Figure of Reflected Light” stretches this process across nearly eighteen minutes. Contributions from Marco Fusinato, Brad Laner and Yeh move through Wiese and Mumma’s framework as flashes, surfaces and unstable resonances. The title describes the music precisely. Reflected light reveals an object while altering its appearance according to angle and surface. These sounds are similarly indirect. They arrive after passing through another person’s recording, Wiese’s editing and the final sequence.
The album’s delicacy should not be confused with calmness. Entrance contains quiet passages, but they remain alert and pressurized. A faint squeal can seem more invasive than a full harsh-noise blast because nothing conceals its edge. A scrape occupies open space with uncomfortable clarity. When percussion rolls beneath the quieter activity, the music acquires forward motion without settling into rhythm.
This is ambient music only if ambience is understood as a condition of sustained attention rather than decorative atmosphere. Entrance does not soften a room. It makes the room uncertain. Speakers become possible doorways, walls seem to recede, and tiny noises acquire exaggerated dimensions. The album creates environment through constant structural change.
Charlie Mumma’s presence is important even when recognizable drumming is absent. Sissy Spacek’s noisecore recordings depend upon his ability to turn percussion into continuous physical crisis, but Entrance extracts another quality from his playing: the shape of impact itself. A drum strike contains attack, resonance, air and decay. Once separated from a beat, each component becomes available as compositional material.
“Trancher and the Inheritors,” built with Tim Barnes and Yeh, places percussion among clipped friction, intermittent electronics and passages of suspended activity. The French verb trancher suggests cutting, severing or deciding. Cutting is both the composition’s method and one of its audible actions. Sounds are removed from their original continuity, but the edits do not always announce themselves through violent interruption. A cut may produce a nearly seamless transition into a different room.
The “inheritors” may be the fragments themselves. Each carries properties received from its source while entering a structure the original performer could not completely anticipate. Authorship becomes collective but unequal. The musicians generate the material; Wiese and Mumma determine its final relationships; the completed piece creates the illusion that everyone acted together.
Ralf Wehowsky is particularly suited to this process. His work with P16.D4 helped establish an approach to electroacoustic music in which instrumental recordings, tape procedures and collective exchange could be broken apart without losing intellectual or physical intensity. His appearance on Entrance connects Sissy Spacek’s contemporary practice with an earlier network of European cassette culture, mail collaboration and studio composition.
The connection is not presented as historical tribute. Wehowsky’s sounds enter the same unstable field as the other contributions. Entrance refuses to arrange its collaborators as featured guests stepping forward for solos. Their identities matter, but the record’s deepest achievement is making those identities interact after their boundaries have been disturbed.
“True Dimension (From the Opaque-Spike)” closes the album with another sixteen-minute field of bent electronics, intermittent pressure and objects whose scale remains impossible to determine. The title proposes a true dimension while immediately locating it inside something opaque. Measurement is promised and obstructed in the same phrase. The sound behaves accordingly. Depth opens, collapses and returns from another angle.
Across the four sides, Entrance rarely produces the cathartic release expected from Sissy Spacek’s most violent recordings. Its tension comes from deferred collision. Scrapes, rattles, feedback and percussion approach one another, form temporary relationships and separate before those relationships become predictable. The hour does not build toward one overwhelming climax. It remains perpetually at the entrance to another possible event.
The double-LP format gives each composition its own physical side, turning the act of flipping vinyl into part of the album’s architecture. The gatefold edition presents the four pieces as large environments, while the CD gathers the same program into one uninterrupted sequence and uses alternate artwork. Both editions acknowledge that Entrance is simultaneously one hour-long construction and four separately framed acts of listening.
After twenty-six years of continual mutation, Sissy Spacek does not need to prove its extremity through maximum volume or speed. Entrance demonstrates that the project’s real extremity lies in refusing a permanent form. Grindcore, harsh noise, free improvisation, tape music and musique concrète have never been separate identities so much as different ways of reorganizing physical action.
Entrance is quiet enough to expose the human scale of its materials and abstract enough to make those materials unfamiliar. It turns absent collaborators into an impossible ensemble, transforms editing into communication and makes intimacy feel as disorienting as violence. When the final piece disappears, no doorway has been crossed. The listener remains before the opening, surrounded by sounds whose true dimensions continue changing in the dark.

Templegarden's - 1999 - Pornografia CDr

 

Fich-Art – FICH 037  278.71MB FLAC

Pornografia opens inside a low mechanical womb. A pulse expands and contracts beneath distant metal, processed breath and slow electronic pressure, creating an environment that feels organic without sounding natural. The machinery does not operate with the regularity of a factory rhythm. It seems buried inside tissue, pushing against enclosed walls and searching for an exit. Templegarden’s begins the album with gestation rather than impact, allowing the first ten minutes to establish a world in which body and equipment have already become inseparable.
Although the CDr appeared near the end of the 1990s, the material was recorded during two sessions in November 1994 and August 1995. Pornografia first circulated as a Fich-Art cassette in 1997 before returning as a homemade CDr, catalog number Fich 037. Its ten pieces preserve Templegarden’s at a raw transitional point: more spacious than the rhythmic industrial associated with the broader Ant-Zen network, darker and less resolved than the project’s later full-length work.
Templegarden’s developed through the collaboration of Andreas Schramm, Andrea Börner and Leigh Hunt, with connections extending through Fich-Art, Ars Moriendi, Asche and other projects within the German industrial underground. That background is audible, but Pornografia does not feel like a side project assembled from borrowed habits. It has its own climate. Metal percussion, drones, environmental residue, damaged loops and blurred instrumental fragments move through long stretches of cold air.
The title promises explicit display, but the record rarely gives anything away cleanly. Pornography ordinarily removes distance, presenting bodies as visible surfaces and arranging desire around access. Pornografia does the opposite. It obscures its sources, traps sounds behind layers and makes contact feel impossible. The listener can hear movement, pressure and physical presence without receiving a clear view of what produces them.
That concealment gives the album an erotic charge without reducing it to sexual illustration. Sounds approach and withdraw. A low tone presses against a sharper texture. Breathlike movement enters the machinery and disappears before it can become voice. Repetition creates anticipation, but the expected release is repeatedly postponed. Desire becomes a mechanical condition: the continual movement toward something that remains inaccessible.
“Womb” establishes this language with patient low-frequency pressure and scattered industrial detail. The piece does not treat the womb as a peaceful refuge. It is an enclosed chamber where growth and imprisonment can sound nearly identical. Every pulse suggests life, yet the surrounding metal makes that life feel manufactured. The title turns the female body into architecture, while the recording allows architecture to acquire bodily movement.
The album becomes more fractured in “Mind, Body… Separation Exit.” Loose impacts and electronic residue interrupt one another rather than forming a stable pattern. The title describes several divisions at once: consciousness from flesh, person from environment, recording from original event. “Exit” promises movement beyond those divisions, but the sound offers no recognizable doorway.
Pornografia repeatedly uses industrial materials without building conventional industrial music. Percussion may establish a short cycle, but it rarely settles into a danceable rhythm. Drones create atmosphere without becoming passive dark ambient. Metallic sounds retain enough physical grain to suggest objects being struck or dragged, yet processing removes the scale and location needed to identify them.
This refusal of category reflects the album’s position in the mid-1990s. German post-industrial music had already moved far beyond the foundational vocabularies of power electronics, tape experimentation and factory rhythm. Labels such as Ant-Zen and Fich-Art connected musicians interested in rhythm, texture, performance, collage and dark electronics without requiring one fixed style. Templegarden’s used that openness to make music that felt composed but not domesticated.
“Cold” is less a description of temperature than a production method. Sounds are separated by empty space, stripped of comforting resonance and allowed to appear as hard surfaces. A metallic scrape can seem close while a drone behind it suggests enormous distance. The composition continually changes the apparent dimensions of the room.
“She’s in a Distance” develops that spatial unease. The title identifies a human figure but keeps her unreachable. The music does not provide a portrait or narrative. Presence is communicated through absence: a faint gesture, a receding tone, a suggestion of voice swallowed by the surrounding field. The unnamed “she” may be a memory, body, recording or projection, but distance becomes more important than identity.
The titles across Pornografia form a vocabulary of division and restriction. Womb, separation, cold, distance, mortality, winter, answering machines and forced endings all describe conditions in which contact is obstructed. Even “But Your God Only Sees What You Say It Sees” turns divine vision into another restricted mechanism. The title suggests that belief may become a device for authorizing whatever the believer has already decided to see.
The music handles these ideas without spoken explanation. Templegarden’s does not direct the listener through slogans or narratives. Meaning remains embedded in pacing and texture. Mechanical repetition becomes limitation. A disappearing signal becomes mortality. Electronic hiss becomes distance. The album trusts sound to carry psychological weight without requiring language to resolve it.
“Mortal” and “Winterearth” deepen the record’s exhausted atmosphere. Their longer durations allow drones, cold metallic resonance and irregular pulse to accumulate slowly. The music does not depict an apocalyptic event. It sounds like an environment after the event has become ordinary: machinery continuing without purpose, exposed surfaces cooling, and traces of life adapting to permanent damage.
The homemade CDr format strengthens this sense of partial survival. Unlike a factory-pressed disc, a recordable CDr carries visible evidence of small-scale production. Each copy had to be burned, printed, assembled and circulated through mail order or direct contact. The object belongs to a period when underground digital media still retained much of cassette culture’s physical intimacy. Compact disc technology was available, but the release did not suddenly become industrially manufactured in large numbers.
Fich-Art’s catalog documented that transition. The label moved between cassette, vinyl, CDr and pressed CD without treating one format as the inevitable replacement for another. Pornografia’s movement from tape to CDr was not merely an upgrade in fidelity. It gave the same recordings another material body. Tape softened and compressed their grit; the CDr exposed more of the brittle high frequencies and open digital silence surrounding them.
“Adjoining the Answer-Machine” turns communication technology into haunted architecture. An answering machine is designed to preserve a voice when its recipient is absent, but recorded speech often intensifies absence instead of overcoming it. Templegarden’s hears the device as a room attached to another room, a place where fragments wait without knowing whether anyone will return.
“Restriction Forces Ending” nearly states the album’s compositional principle. These pieces do not end because their tensions have been resolved. They stop because duration, medium and structure impose a boundary. Restriction does not prevent the work from taking form; it creates the form. The listener is repeatedly brought to an edge that feels externally enforced.
Then the untitled closing piece changes the album’s emotional temperature. A lush shoegaze-like instrumental emerges after the preceding industrial desolation, allowing melody and blurred guitar color to occupy the space previously held by metal and machinery. It does not erase what came before. Its beauty feels more vulnerable because the album has trained the listener to expect obstruction.
The sudden shift also reveals that Pornografia was never committed to industrial purity. Templegarden’s could treat abrasion, ambience, rhythm, collage and guitar music as parts of one expressive field. The final piece opens a window without explaining where it leads. After an hour of separation and cold surfaces, the possibility of warmth appears precisely when the record is about to disappear.
Pornografia remains compelling because its roughness does not conceal a lack of ideas. The primitive recording methods, homemade editions and uncertain borders are the ideas. Bodies become rooms, machines acquire breath, communication preserves distance, and beauty survives as an unannounced final track. The title offers exposure, but the album understands that what cannot be completely seen or reached may exert the greatest pressure.

The Haters - 2012 - These Things Happen, Vol. 2

 

Helicopter – HEL 92092  413.28MB FLAC

These Things Happen Vol. 1 begins with Formica being deprived of its ordinary purpose. The synthetic laminate associated with counters, tables and wipe-clean domestic surfaces becomes material for impact, friction and collapse. “Truncated Formica (Smash Version)” places repeated blows inside a mass of feedback and low mechanical movement. The object is no longer useful as a surface. It becomes audible only while being damaged.
Released by John Wiese’s Helicopter label in 2012, These Things Happen Vol. 1 gathers fourteen pieces originally created for seven-inch records, including material that had become extremely scarce or remained effectively unheard. The recordings were newly transferred and remastered from the original DAT tapes, giving a clear view of the Haters’ work during a period when GX Jupitter-Larsen repeatedly used the vinyl single as both sound carrier and conceptual object.
The seven-inch format suits the Haters because it is physically restrictive. A side lasts only a few minutes, the groove occupies a small circular area, and the listener must repeatedly handle the object. Jupitter-Larsen does not treat those limitations as problems to overcome. Duration, surface, rotation, groove spacing and playback failure become part of the composition.
“Truncated Formica” exists in two versions. The “Smash Version” emphasizes impact and destruction, with blows interrupting feedback that seems to recoil after each strike. The “Clici-Clic Version” feels more mechanical, building from repeated contact, deeper roaring sound and the suggestion of smaller components snapping or shifting inside a larger object. One version destroys through blunt force; the other listens to destruction as a system of tiny events.
This distinction is important. The Haters’ music is often summarized as amplified destruction, but the project is not simply interested in breaking things loudly. Jupitter-Larsen studies what happens during deterioration. An object has one acoustic identity while intact, another while being damaged and another after it has become debris. The process creates a sequence of temporary forms.
“Rubbish Often Tears” and “Reflections Off Trash” push that process into accumulated waste. Rubbish is not one substance. It is a social category imposed upon unrelated materials after their original uses have ended. Plastic, paper, metal and broken equipment become unified only because someone has decided to discard them. The Haters reverses that decision by treating trash as a field of possible actions.
Tearing, scraping, dragging and collision reveal differences hidden by the word rubbish. A sheet splits differently from a container. A hollow object resonates while a flat one produces friction. The sound does not restore these things to usefulness. It grants them another period of activity while they continue falling apart.
The compilation’s central selections from Drops Ascending originated on a double seven-inch issued by Vinyl Communications in 1995. The complete work drew from explosions, flamethrowers, car-accident recordings, skipping compact discs, scratched records and a “trashcape” constructed from things collapsing. Volume 1 includes the first two parts, presenting destruction as an impossible upward movement.
A dropped object obeys gravity, but “Drops Ascending” treats falling as something capable of being reorganized. Recording reverses ordinary physical time. An impact can be replayed, edited, layered or made to precede its cause. The event still sounds destructive, yet its direction is no longer certain. Falling becomes a pattern rather than a final destination.
The pieces are dense but not formless. Low rumbles hold together sharper collisions, while bursts of abrasive sound enter and disappear before they can become a permanent wall. Skipping discs and damaged vinyl introduce repetition that is both mechanical and accidental. A groove repeats because playback has failed, but the failure immediately creates rhythm.
This is one of the Haters’ fundamental discoveries: an apparatus can function perfectly while producing the appearance of malfunction, and it can malfunction while generating an unexpectedly coherent result. The project does not divide useful operation from defect as cleanly as ordinary engineering would. Damage is another way a system behaves.
“Nirgends 2” and “A Furthered Pause 2” move the collection toward absence. Nirgends means nowhere, but the recording occupies a definite physical space in speakers and air. A pause should interrupt action, yet a “furthered” pause becomes an action through extension. Jupitter-Larsen repeatedly turns negative conditions—nowhere, silence, emptiness, interruption—into measurable material.
The Haters’ performances make this logic visible. Jupitter-Larsen and changing participants have used paper, fabric, masks, amplified tools, spinning devices and heaps of debris to create situations in which the action cannot be separated from its residue. The performer does not stand before an instrument and demonstrate mastery. Bodies, equipment and material enter the same unstable process.
These Things Happen preserves sound from that practice without pretending a recording can contain the entire action. The listener hears impact and erosion but does not necessarily see the object, physical effort or resulting mess. That missing information is productive. A sound suggests matter without identifying it completely, making every scrape both specific and abstract.
“Nikumu Ni” and “Nikumu San” are shorter, concentrated constructions. Their Japanese numbering marks them as second and third parts, fragments belonging to a larger cycle rather than independent statements. Repeated abrasion and shifting pressure create the sensation of material being worked continuously from different positions.
“Smear” treats deformation as lateral movement. To smear something is not necessarily to destroy it completely; it is to spread substance across a surface until its original boundaries disappear. The Haters’ sound behaves similarly. Impact becomes resonance, resonance enters distortion, and distortion spreads until source and recording process can no longer be separated.
“Disconnected Number” and “Unlisted Number” turn communication failure into another form of absence. A disconnected telephone number once pointed toward a person or place but no longer completes the circuit. An unlisted number may still function while remaining inaccessible to public search. One connection has been severed; the other has been deliberately concealed.
Placed beside works created from physical damage, these titles suggest that disappearance can occur administratively as well as materially. Something does not have to be smashed in order to become unreachable. It may simply be removed from the available system of reference.
The collection closes with “Paper Tears/Time Doesn’t Move,” a twenty-seven-second piece originating from the Haters’ split seven-inch with Little Fyodor. The original record turned vinyl geometry into a joke about duration. Its grooves were spaced unusually far apart and became progressively wider, causing both sides together to end in less time than the listener needed to settle down after placing the needle.
The track is almost over before it can be recognized as a composition. Paper tears, but time does not move—or moves so abruptly that awareness cannot keep pace. The seven-inch becomes a machine for producing anticlimax. Instead of filling the format’s available duration, the Haters wastes space deliberately, allowing the physical groove to carry the argument.
Transferred to CD, that visual and mechanical joke cannot operate in the same way. The laser does not reveal widening vinyl grooves. Yet the absurd brevity remains, appearing after nearly an hour of accumulated abrasion like a trapdoor opening beneath the compilation.
The remastering does not clean these recordings into conventional fidelity. It clarifies the grain of impact, the depth of rumble and the separation between simultaneous layers. Dirt remains information. A damaged source made pristine would contradict the work, but a careful transfer allows the damage itself to be heard more precisely.
These Things Happen Vol. 1 succeeds because it does more than collect rare singles. It reveals how consistently the Haters used the seven-inch record as a laboratory for entropy. Formica shatters, rubbish tears, objects fall, pauses expand, numbers disconnect, paper splits and time refuses to behave. The title dismisses catastrophe with the language of ordinary inevitability: these things happen.
For the Haters, however, happening is never ordinary. Every collapse has texture, every failure produces structure, and every ruined object enters another temporary state before disappearing. The compilation ends, but nothing has been restored. The debris remains where it fell, still capable of making sound if someone chooses to disturb it again.

携帯電話中毒 - 2001 - 非和音

 

Dotsmark – ooocd-3  265.65MB FLAC

非和音 begins with the miniature vocabulary of an early mobile phone: a clipped electronic greeting, brittle button tones, narrow-band speech and a melody too synthetic to disguise its circuitry. These sounds were designed to announce simple events—an incoming call, a completed command, a lost connection—but 携帯電話中毒 removes them from their practical setting and forces them into unstable electronic music. What should last a second begins repeating. A notification becomes rhythm. A fragment of speech becomes percussion. The device stops communicating information and starts exposing its nervous system.
Released by Dotsmark in 2001 as ooocd-3, 非和音 was the second CD by the Japanese project whose name translates as Mobile Phone Addiction. Contemporary shop listings credit the work to Hirano Y and describe the preceding album, 電話畑, as techno made entirely from mobile phones. 非和音 retains that basic fascination while opening the method into noise, collage, crude sampling and deliberately awkward digital composition. Its fifteen short tracks form a catalog of what the portable telephone could sound like before the smartphone absorbed every other machine.
The title is an especially exact joke. 和音 means chord or harmony, but in the Japanese mobile-phone market it also appeared constantly in descriptions of polyphonic ringtones. New handsets were promoted through the number of simultaneous tones they could produce. 非和音 can therefore mean dissonance, non-harmony or the refusal of the technological promise contained in those specifications. The record uses devices sold through increasing musical capacity to create music that sounds cheerfully incorrect.
“intro” presents the project’s materials without attempting to make them grand. Small tones flash, signals interrupt one another and the reduced frequency range immediately establishes the scale of the instrument. This is not electronic music pretending to arise from a limitless studio. It comes from an object made to fit in a pocket, powered by a small battery and equipped with a speaker incapable of producing convincing bass. Instead of concealing those restrictions, 携帯電話中毒 treats them as compositional rules.
“よろしくーそれでわー” turns casual language into an unstable social exchange. The title moves quickly from greeting toward departure—roughly, “pleased to meet you, well then”—as though a conversation has been compressed until its beginning and ending touch. Voice fragments appear less like a commanding human presence than material traveling through a poor connection. Personality survives, but only in the pitch, rhythm and digital grain of speech.
That damaged sociability is central to 非和音. A telephone promises contact, yet every sound on the album also indicates separation. The other person is somewhere else. The voice has been converted, transmitted and reconstructed. The call may end without warning. Even successful communication depends upon a machine repeatedly reminding its users that they are not physically together.
“portable erectronica,” with its conspicuous misspelling, makes the project’s ambitions sound both futuristic and homemade. The track approaches techno through tiny pulses and compact loops, but its rhythms never acquire the weight or smoothness of club machinery. They twitch, restart and collide with tones that resemble menu commands or ringtone fragments. Portability reduces electronic dance music to a nervous object vibrating against the body.
“雑音すごいですよ”—“the noise is incredible”—states the obvious with the enthusiasm of someone demonstrating a malfunction. Noise here is not the enormous physical saturation associated with Japanese harsh-noise performance. It is interference, insufficient resolution and several small sounds occupying the same restricted speaker. The track makes technological weakness active. Distortion does not conceal the source; it reveals how little room the source possesses.
That narrowness gives the album its character. Modern digital production can place hundreds of clean elements across a huge frequency field. 非和音 often seems to operate inside a few centimeters of plastic. High tones crowd together, speech becomes thin and rhythmic figures possess almost no lower body. Yet the absence of depth produces intimacy. The sounds appear close because there is nowhere else for them to go.
“圏外,” meaning outside the service area, is one of the record’s conceptual centers. A mobile phone without reception remains powered and functional, but its primary purpose has temporarily disappeared. It becomes an isolated receiver searching for a network that cannot hear it. The music translates that condition into suspended signals, interrupted movement and patterns that seem to wait for confirmation which never arrives.
Placed after it, “川” offers the startlingly simple image of a river. The title introduces natural continuity into a record built from digital interruption. Water flows without requiring coverage, a keypad or a charged battery. Yet the track does not function as peaceful field recording. The contrast makes the electronics sound even more artificial, while repeating tones begin to suggest another kind of current moving through an invisible channel.
“さらばアナログ,” or “Farewell, Analog,” captures the optimism and absurdity surrounding digital consumer technology at the beginning of the century. The phrase sounds ceremonial, as though older media have been conclusively defeated. The recording undermines that confidence. Its digital sounds are fragile, crude and frequently less convincing than the technologies they supposedly replace. The farewell becomes affectionate because the new system has already acquired its own dirt.
This contradiction becomes explicit in “melody from 24bit” and “melody from 240bit.” The second title inflates the specification beyond practical sense, turning numerical improvement into comedy. More bits should promise greater accuracy, but the record’s melodies do not become emotionally complete through measurement. They remain tiny, repetitive and attached to devices whose musical language was designed primarily to attract attention.
Between them, “denkiair” suggests electrical air: an atmosphere manufactured from transmission rather than weather. The phrase describes the album’s most peculiar achievement. Despite the limited speakers and clipped source material, these sounds generate a complete environment. Beeps and digital residue accumulate until the listener seems surrounded by invisible activity—calls crossing, towers transmitting and machines announcing states that no person has requested.
“記録,” meaning record or documentation, raises another question. A telephone call once vanished when the participants hung up, but recording gives that temporary exchange another life. Voices become samples, errors become repeatable and a device intended for immediate communication becomes an archive of obsolete signals. 非和音 now preserves not only Hirano Y’s compositions but the acoustic identity of a technological moment.
“単音♥” returns affectionately to the monophonic tone. The heart prevents the title from reading as a complaint about primitive equipment. One note at a time can still form melody, rhythm and personality. Limitation encourages precision: when a machine cannot create a lush chord, the movement between individual pitches becomes more exposed. The track treats simplicity as a pleasure rather than an embarrassment waiting to be corrected by the next model.
“flash back techno2000” converts a past only one year old into nostalgia. The title understands how quickly consumer technology makes itself historical. A handset can feel futuristic when purchased and obsolete before its battery begins failing. Techno receives the same accelerated treatment. The future imagined in 2000 has already become a flashback in 2001, available to be sampled, mocked and restarted.
“磁場,” or “magnetic field,” expands the project beyond the visible telephone. Communication depends upon forces the user cannot see: radio waves, electrical current and zones of reception shaped by architecture and distance. The track makes that invisible infrastructure feel unstable. Signals overlap and small oscillations seem to pull against one another, turning the environment around the device into another instrument.
“Go Go K.D.C.” closes the album with the energy of a homemade theme song. The initials transform 携帯電話中毒 into a compact logo, while the repeated encouragement gives the project the character of a tiny technological gang rushing toward planned obsolescence. It is playful rather than triumphant. The equipment is cheap, the frequencies are cramped and the future promised by the sounds has already disappeared.
非和音 now carries an unintended historical atmosphere, but its value is not limited to nostalgia for flip phones and early ringtones. The album hears consumer electronics at the moment when their functions remain visible. Each beep still has a purpose, each interruption indicates a specific failure and every melody exposes the limits of its speaker.
携帯電話中毒 reorganizes those purposes until the phone becomes more than a communication device. It is a synthesizer, sampler, percussion box, social prosthesis and source of accidental noise. The CD ends after fifteen compact experiments, but the network it imagines continues searching. Somewhere beyond coverage, a monophonic melody repeats, a voice says hello and goodbye in the same breath, and a small machine keeps trying to turn disconnection into music.

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.