Bad Man - 2024 - The Places You'll Go

 Protected Class Recordings – 01  82.58MB FLAC

The Places You’ll Go begins by turning a phrase of cheerful possibility into a threat. The title normally promises movement, discovery, and a future opening in every direction. Bad Man strips away the exclamation point and leaves the sentence hanging over nine minutes of power electronics. The places ahead no longer resemble destinations chosen freely. They feel like rooms entered under pressure, psychological locations reached because the sound has closed off every route behind the listener.
Released in March 2024 as the first title on Protected Class Recordings, the album contains only two tracks. The title piece lasts eight minutes and fifty-nine seconds, followed by a three-and-a-half-minute performance recorded live in New Brunswick on December 23, 2023. The edition consisted of twenty-five hand-numbered CDrs with spray-painted labels, housed in spray-painted jewel cases. Private Release’s copy is number twenty-one, the numerals scrawled directly across the lower corner of the clear tray.
The object looks less manufactured than processed. Black and dark red paint nearly conceal the disc, leaving a bruised circular surface visible through the jewel case. There is no polished cover photograph announcing an image or ideology. The recording medium itself has been painted until it resembles an injured eye, scorched plate, or sealed piece of evidence. The center spindle becomes a pupil surrounded by rough pigment, while scratches and uneven application make every copy slightly different.
That handmade treatment suits Bad Man’s sound. The project, also associated with the name Ballerina in Blood, works within American harsh noise and power electronics without treating either style as a clean historical template. Electronics arrive thick, unstable, and physically strained. Feedback pushes through rougher low-frequency movement, while vocal presence is less a narrator than another damaged signal inside the pressure.
“The Places You’ll Go” develops through obstruction. Its movement is obvious, but the direction remains uncertain. Dense electronic currents surge forward, hesitate, and reform with different layers forced to the surface. A low mechanical body provides weight, while higher frequencies tear across it in narrow lines. The track does not travel from one recognizable section to another. It keeps changing the conditions inside the same confined area.
This makes the title more than a sarcastic borrowing from Dr. Seuss. The familiar phrase has become culturally attached to graduation, departure, ambition, and the comforting belief that the future belongs to whoever is brave enough to enter it. Bad Man replaces that brightly illustrated road with a corridor made from distortion. You will go places, but the recording does not promise they will be good, voluntary, or even physically real.
Power electronics often builds itself around certainty. The vocalist identifies an enemy, electronics establish domination, and repetition turns a statement into command. Bad Man sounds less stable. The voice, when it enters, has to fight through machinery already occupying the available space. Words may remain partially intelligible, but strain, breath, and aggressive cadence arrive more clearly than language.
That damaged communication creates a useful tension. The project name Bad Man is blunt enough to resemble a child’s category, the simplest possible name for danger. Yet the sound refuses simple moral clarity. The speaker does not stand outside the violence describing it. He appears implicated in the machinery, pushed and partially erased by the same forces he attempts to direct.
The title track’s nine-minute length gives this struggle time to become environmental. During the opening moments, individual bursts can be heard as separate attacks. As the piece continues, abrasion stops behaving like interruption and becomes climate. The listener adjusts to the larger pressure and begins noticing smaller changes inside it: a feedback line bending, a low pulse shifting speed, a vocal fragment moving closer, or a brief reduction exposing another rough layer underneath.
Bad Man does not confuse saturation with immobility. The piece remains crowded, but its internal proportions keep changing. At one moment the low end dominates, making the recording feel heavy and enclosed. Elsewhere the upper register takes control, narrowing the space into a harsh electrical glare. The sound is constantly rearranging the cell.
Rhythm appears without becoming functional. Repeated pulses suggest movement, but they do not offer a stable beat the body can inhabit. Each recurrence carries enough distortion or timing irregularity to feel blocked. The music advances while denying the pleasure usually attached to forward motion.
That is another way the album corrupts its title. Travel promises progress because one place is replaced by another. “The Places You’ll Go” keeps moving without providing evidence that anything has been escaped. The scenery changes inside the noise, but the listener remains under the same pressure.
The second track, “Live in New Brunswick 12/23/23,” compresses Bad Man’s methods into three minutes and thirty-six seconds. Its date places the performance two days before Christmas, a small factual detail that makes the hostility feel even more displaced. Seasonal lights, family rituals, shopping, and public cheer existed outside while a short burst of electronics and vocal strain occupied a room in New Brunswick.
The live recording has less time to establish depth gradually. It begins from a condition of exposure. Sound enters already activated, with the physical space and performance pressure folded into the electronics. The audience is not presented as a separate cheering presence. The room is heard through resonance, overload, and the sense that the signals are being pushed through speakers in immediate public time.
Studio noise can be layered, revised, and controlled after the event. A live set must continue through whatever happens. Feedback may swell too quickly, a vocal may overload, or a device may introduce an unexpected frequency. Bad Man uses that instability rather than hiding it. The short performance feels dangerous because its structure is being maintained while the sound attempts to break away from it.
Placed after the title track, the live piece behaves like a destination reached at the end of the longer journey. Yet New Brunswick is not romanticized as a place. It is identified by date and location with the bluntness of documentation. No venue name, story, or explanation is required. The event happened, it was recorded, and its residue now occupies the second track.
This combination of studio-like main piece and live appendix makes the CDr feel complete despite its brief twelve-and-a-half-minute duration. The title track constructs Bad Man’s enclosed world in detail. The live recording tests whether that world can survive outside controlled conditions. It can, though it becomes shorter, rougher, and more exposed.
The edition of twenty-five copies reinforces the release’s private scale. This was not an album designed for broad circulation or instant availability. Each disc was painted, numbered, and placed into a modified case. The labor is crude but personal. Number twenty-one is not identical to number twelve because the paint cannot fall in precisely the same pattern twice.
That individuality is especially striking in a style built from depersonalizing force. The sound can make the human body seem small, trapped inside systems of electricity and repetition. The object returns evidence of a hand. Someone painted this disc, wrote the number, assembled the case, and sent it into circulation.
Protected Class Recordings is an unusually loaded label name for music this hostile. A protected class is a legal category meant to guard people against discrimination. Here the phrase becomes the institutional banner above a release by an artist called Bad Man. The contrast suggests bureaucracy, accusation, privilege, and the possibility that protection is selective, procedural, or easily turned into another form of division.
As catalog number 01, The Places You’ll Go also functions as an opening statement. The label begins not with a manifesto but with a painted disc whose main title has been stolen from cultural optimism and emptied of reassurance. The future of the imprint starts inside a phrase about the future.
Bad Man would continue through other releases, including the later split with Agony, where the project’s harsh noise and power-electronics language became attached to another artist and another physical format. The Places You’ll Go remains especially concentrated because it arrives before that wider context can explain it. Two tracks and one damaged-looking disc provide the complete introduction.
The release does not answer where Bad Man intends to take the listener. Its strength lies in making destination feel irrelevant. The important experience is the pressured movement itself, the repeated sensation of being carried forward while every surrounding surface remains hostile.
When the New Brunswick recording ends, the journey stops abruptly. There is no arrival announcement, no final clearing of the electronics, and no view opening beyond the machinery. The disc returns to silence while its dark painted surface continues staring upward through the case. The places have been visited, but none can be named. The future promised by the title has become twelve minutes of damaged signal and a hand-numbered mark proving that one copy made it out.

Amek-Maj - 2023 - Amek-Maj

 

Freak Animal Records – FA-CD-144  286.88MB FLAC

Amek-Maj begins with a sound that seems to have been broken before it was recorded. Low electrical pressure pushes upward through crackling distortion, loose contact noise, and fragments of rough texture that appear to have been handled directly rather than generated at a safe distance. The opening does not resemble a machine switching on cleanly. It resembles damaged equipment being forced back into operation, every connection carrying grit, resistance, and the possibility of another failure.
Released by Freak Animal Records in January 2023, the self-titled CD was Amek-Maj’s first full-length album after an initial run of tapes on Freak Animal, Narcolepsia, Satatuhatta, and other labels connected to the current Finnish noise underground. The record arrives as a full-color digipak, but its visual world is anything but polished. The cover is assembled from scorched textures, rough collage, indistinct faces, torn lettering, and a photograph of a strange burned or deformed object resting on a table. Nothing sits comfortably inside the frame. Images overlap, edges remain visible, and the name Amek-Maj looks manually cut from mismatched type.
That handmade quality extends directly into the sound. The album does not present noise as one perfectly engineered wall. Its surfaces are uneven, full of small cavities, unstable levels, and signals that seem to rub against the recording medium. Heavy bass-loaded crunch provides the physical foundation, but finer details keep moving above and within it. Static tears open briefly. A brittle click repeats, then disappears. A low vibration changes shape until it feels less like electronics than an object resonating under pressure.
Freak Animal described Amek-Maj as part of a generation of Finnish noise defined by broken, handmade roughness. The phrase is accurate because the music sounds constructed from systems that never fully conceal the hand operating them. Pedals, contact microphones, cables, metal, tape, and primitive electronics do not merge into seamless production. Their individual weaknesses remain audible.
This exposure creates tension. A clean electronic signal behaves predictably, but Amek-Maj’s sounds seem capable of changing direction without warning. A low pulse may begin to stabilize before another layer overloads it. Feedback grows, catches on distortion, and bends into a harsher shape. What appears to be a continuous texture reveals itself as several damaged processes occupying the same narrow space.
The album’s bass is particularly effective. It does not simply add weight beneath high-frequency abrasion. The low end often behaves like a shifting physical mass, compressing the rest of the recording from below. At higher volume, the sound pushes into the body before its details can be consciously separated. The listener feels the pressure first, then begins hearing the smaller movements trapped inside it.
That relationship between impact and detail keeps the record from becoming monotonous. Amek-Maj can produce dense harsh noise, but density is rarely the final destination. The pieces move through stages of crushing saturation, stripped-down crackle, mechanical repetition, and rougher zones where only a few sounds remain exposed. Each reduction changes the scale of the next eruption.
Silence never becomes peaceful. Even the quieter passages contain electrical residue, tape-like grain, or faint object movement. The equipment seems to remain active below the audible surface, waiting for enough pressure to gather before breaking through again. This gives the record continuity without requiring conventional rhythm or melody.
Rhythm appears occasionally through repetition, though it always feels accidental or damaged. A contact sound strikes at irregular intervals. A loop circles with slight variations. A low mechanical pulse begins resembling a beat before distortion pulls it apart. Amek-Maj allows the body to recognize motion, then prevents that motion from becoming comfortable.
The result belongs to harsh noise, but it also carries traces of junk electronics and physical sound work. The music repeatedly suggests materials being scraped, dragged, struck, or compressed. Even when the source is electronic, it behaves like matter. Frequencies have edges. Distortion has grain. Feedback seems attached to surfaces rather than floating freely in digital space.
This material quality connects Amek-Maj with projects such as Mania, whose noise often combines heavy low-frequency crunch with fine sonic nuance. Yet Amek-Maj does not simply imitate an established Finnish style. The self-titled CD has its own unstable balance between blunt force and awkward fragility. Some sounds feel enormous, while others seem barely capable of surviving the recording process.
That fragility is one of the album’s most interesting features. Harsh noise often presents itself as invulnerable, a solid block of power aimed outward. Amek-Maj repeatedly reveals weak joints inside the structure. Signals flicker. Loops stumble. Distortion thins unexpectedly. The music remains aggressive, but its aggression is produced through strain rather than confidence.
The cover’s two small faces contribute to this atmosphere. Their expressions are difficult to read because the images are blurred, degraded, and partially swallowed by the surrounding collage. They resemble photographs recovered after damage rather than portraits intended to identify anyone. The faces remain human evidence inside a landscape of burned surfaces and unidentified matter.
The larger photograph on the right is even stranger. Its central object could be charred material, melted debris, a sculpture, or something organic distorted beyond recognition. The image provides no scale and no explanation. Like the album’s sounds, it allows the eye to recognize texture before identity.
That refusal of clear identity is central to Amek-Maj. The record constantly produces sounds that hover between categories. A rumble may be electronic, mechanical, or environmental. A sharp burst might come from feedback, metal, or a damaged recording connection. A repeating figure may be deliberate sequencing or a device caught in malfunction.
The uncertainty forces attention toward behavior. Instead of asking what an object is, the listener hears what it does: scrape, vibrate, rupture, grind, or collapse. Noise becomes a sequence of physical actions without a visible source.
The full-length format gives those actions room to accumulate. Earlier tape releases established Amek-Maj’s rough character, but the CD presents a broader range of density and pacing. The material can move from compact bursts into heavier, sustained environments without feeling like a collection of unrelated experiments. The project’s identity emerges through recurring pressure, broken repetition, and the refusal to clean up its own construction.
Freak Animal is an appropriate home for the album because the label has long supported noise that values texture, physicality, and individual method over generic extremity. The self-titled disc does not attempt to modernize harsh noise through polished mastering or decorative concept. Its production remains dirty because dirt carries information.
Every crackle reveals contact. Every overloaded frequency records a limit being crossed. Every uneven transition preserves the moment one material was forced against another. Cleaning those details away would remove the album’s nervous system.
Amek-Maj succeeds because it sounds built rather than manufactured. Its violence is assembled by hand from unstable parts, and those parts never disappear completely into the whole. Bass crushes, feedback tears, and rough loops keep catching on exposed edges. The recording grows powerful without pretending to be indestructible.
By the end, the album has created a world where malfunction is not interruption but method. Nothing operates smoothly, yet everything continues. Signals break and re-form. Surfaces grind until new textures emerge. The collage on the cover remains unresolved, the burned object keeps refusing identification, and the machinery inside the disc drags itself forward through every fault in its construction.

Amek-Maj - 2024 - Amek-Maj

 

Hiisi Productions – none  308.27MB FLAC

The 2024 Amek-Maj CD begins with the sensation of machinery working beneath a layer of dirt too thick to identify. A low electrical mass turns slowly while brittle crackle, short bursts of feedback, and irregular contact sounds move across its surface. Nothing arrives cleanly. Each signal appears worn down before it enters the mix, its edges softened by tape grain, distortion, or the resistance of whatever damaged connection produced it. The noise is harsh, but its harshness comes less from sheer volume than from the feeling that every component is being forced to operate under bad conditions.
Issued by Hiisi Productions as HIISI-049, the album is effectively untitled, represented by a single dash in the label’s catalog. That absence suits Amek-Maj. The music does not need a thematic title directing the listener toward disease, machinery, violence, or psychological collapse. Its identity is carried by the sound itself: crude, primitive, rusty harsh noise assembled from unstable electronics and physical interference. The disc offers no polished concept to stand between the listener and the material.
Compared with the 2023 self-titled album on Freak Animal, this recording feels more stripped and stubborn. The earlier CD used a broader collage language, allowing bass-heavy pressure, fragile loops, abrupt transitions, and damaged textures to occupy several distinct layers. The Hiisi release appears less interested in range. It narrows Amek-Maj’s method until roughness becomes the central subject.
The opening movement does not behave like a dramatic introduction. It establishes a working condition and remains inside it. Low frequencies churn with the dull persistence of an overloaded motor. Higher sounds scrape, flicker, and vanish before they can become stable figures. Repetition appears, but rarely with identical returns. A pulse slips in timing. A crackle thickens. A feedback tone catches briefly, then bends into another frequency.
This instability gives the music life. Amek-Maj does not create a perfectly fixed harsh-noise wall whose interest depends upon microscopic fluctuations inside one continuous texture. The mass repeatedly changes posture. It leans toward one speaker, narrows into rough midrange pressure, then widens when deeper frequencies return. At moments the sound resembles a heavy object being dragged across several different surfaces without ever being lifted.
The recording’s primitive character should not be confused with lack of control. Amek-Maj understands when an ugly texture has reached its useful limit. A grinding loop may remain just long enough for its irregularities to become recognizable before another signal enters and damages the pattern. Dense sections recede before saturation becomes anonymous. Quieter passages expose hiss, static, and faint mechanical movement that would disappear inside a more conventionally powerful mix.
Those quieter areas are especially effective because they never feel empty. The equipment continues breathing. A weak signal trembles at the edge of audibility. Something clicks without establishing rhythm. Tape-like grain fills the remaining space, making silence itself feel used and contaminated.
The rough physical design reflects this approach. The cover is a handmade-looking collage of torn paper, painted color, degraded photographs, and printed textures. The project name appears in mismatched cutout letters near the top, more like evidence attached to a folder than a professionally designed logo. Large areas of exposed brown paper sit beside bright green, orange, yellow, blue, and black fragments.
The lower-left photograph shows a seated or crouched human figure reduced by grain and reproduction until the body becomes another uncertain shape. Nearby, layers of distorted imagery overlap without producing one coherent scene. Some sections resemble landscape, burned material, fabric, paint, or damaged photocopies. The visual composition does not offer a central image. It behaves like the music, several incompatible surfaces pressed together until their boundaries begin tearing.
This collage is brighter than the sound might suggest. Strong greens and oranges interrupt the gray and brown material, preventing the package from becoming a predictable exercise in monochrome industrial bleakness. Amek-Maj’s noise has similar flashes. A sharp frequency can cut through the darker mass with almost luminous intensity. Distortion may be filthy, but it is not colorless.
The album repeatedly demonstrates how much variation can be extracted from broken sound without cleaning it. One section concentrates on dry, granular abrasion, the noise cracking and shifting in small clusters. Another becomes heavier, with low-frequency distortion pushing upward until the finer details seem trapped beneath it. Elsewhere a repetitive electrical figure creates temporary forward movement before slipping out of alignment.
Rhythm remains an unstable possibility throughout the disc. Amek-Maj rarely supplies a clear beat, but the ear continually discovers patterns among the impacts, loops, and recurring surges. These patterns are never trustworthy. A sequence repeats several times and then loses one element. A mechanical pulse speeds slightly or becomes buried beneath static. The listener’s body begins following a cycle just as the machinery damages it.
That relationship with rhythm separates the record from noise built solely around frontal assault. The sound feels worked, tested, and physically manipulated. It carries the awkwardness of hands moving through equipment rather than software arranging perfect blocks on a screen. Switches, pedals, wires, tape, and contact surfaces seem present even when their exact roles cannot be identified.
Hiisi Productions is a natural home for this recording. The Finnish label has released noise, power electronics, occult electronics, and rough experimental work that often values atmosphere and individual character over technical perfection. Its description of the album as “crude and very primitive and rusty harsh noise” is not merely promotional shorthand. Those three qualities describe separate layers of the record.
It is crude because its construction remains exposed. Transitions do not hide their seams, and sounds retain the marks of the methods used to produce them. It is primitive because the music reduces itself to pressure, repetition, friction, and interruption rather than decorating those elements with elaborate composition. It is rusty because every texture suggests oxidation, resistance, and equipment whose surfaces have changed through time and use.
Rust is especially useful as a way of hearing this album. Rust does not simply destroy metal. It creates another surface, rougher and more visually complex than what existed before. It spreads unevenly, weakening some areas while leaving others intact. Amek-Maj’s distortion behaves similarly. It coats the signals without erasing them completely. Original forms remain visible in fragments beneath the corrosion.
The CD format gives this damaged material enough clarity to reveal its layers. The low end retains weight without swallowing the higher abrasion, while quieter hiss and contact sounds remain audible between denser surges. The recording does not sound pristine, nor should it. Digital playback makes the dirt easier to inspect.
At louder volume, the album becomes intensely physical. Bass pressure moves through the room while brittle upper frequencies appear to scrape directly against the speakers. At lower volume, another character emerges. The noise becomes more secretive, and its smaller irregularities resemble activity heard through walls or machinery running somewhere below the floor.
This flexibility gives the disc more depth than its deliberately primitive presentation initially promises. It can function as blunt harsh noise, but close attention reveals a collection of shifting mechanical relationships. No sound remains entirely isolated. Each one alters the perceived weight, distance, or texture of whatever surrounds it.
The untitled nature of the release keeps those relationships open. A descriptive title might turn the noise into an illustration. The dash refuses that assignment. It marks a blank, interruption, or line connecting things without naming them.
Amek-Maj’s 2024 CD is therefore less a sequel to the Freak Animal album than a reduction. It removes much of the earlier release’s breadth and concentrates on pressure passing through imperfect systems. The sound is narrower, rougher, and more committed to its own corrosion.
By the end, nothing has been repaired. The loops still stumble, the frequencies remain overloaded, and the machinery has not learned to operate smoothly. That failure is the album’s complete form. Amek-Maj does not overcome damage in order to create music. Damage is the method through which the sound acquires texture, motion, and identity. The disc stops, but the rust remains active.

Absurd Cosmos Late Nite - 2024 - Final Lives 2

 

Index Clean – IC-007 2  719.75MB FLAC

Final Lives 2 begins in the unstable territory between a live performance and a recording about live performance. Voices appear close enough to feel conversational, yet they have been detached from the ordinary social situations that once gave them meaning. Loops drag phrases back through the room. Background sound becomes foreground. Music, speech, tape residue, and environmental noise continually exchange roles until Absurd Cosmos Late Nite seems less like one person presenting finished material than a temporary broadcast assembled from several incompatible realities.
Released in 2024 through Mark Groves’s Index Clean label, Final Lives 2 extends the peculiar language he has developed under the Absurd Cosmos Late Nite name: slow tape collage, spoken text, damaged radio atmosphere, deadpan repetition, and music that appears to be operating after normal waking hours. The release does not use lo-fi sound to simulate nostalgia. Its worn surfaces create social distance. A voice may be audible without feeling present. A familiar musical fragment can become uncanny simply because it has been slowed, repeated, or left running beyond the point where it would normally make sense.
The cover places Groves outside a shop beneath a large yellow sign reading THE FAMILY SHOP. He stands alone on the pavement, dressed in black and holding a can to his mouth. Through the windows are household goods, paintings, plants, racks, and miscellaneous objects gathered without any visible hierarchy. The photograph looks casual enough to have been taken while waiting for someone, yet its details turn it into a perfect Absurd Cosmos Late Nite image. Family has become retail signage. Domestic life has been arranged behind glass. The person outside appears connected to the scene and completely separate from it.
A small notice on the door warns against entering with food or drink, while Groves drinks directly beneath the sign. It is a minor act of disobedience too ordinary to become rebellion. That scale suits the project. Absurd Cosmos Late Nite is rarely concerned with spectacular transgression. Its world is built from small social failures, awkward declarations, cheap objects, overheard certainty, and the strange authority ordinary people acquire when their words are removed from conversation and repeated through tape.
The word “Lives” in the title carries several meanings. These may be live recordings, but they also contain lives reduced to fragments: opinions, remembered stories, vocal habits, and bits of personality caught by microphones. “Final” suggests closure, yet the number two immediately contradicts it. A final event has already produced a sequel. Completion has become another temporary condition.
This is typical of Groves’s humor. The titles often sound like found phrases that have been sharpened just enough to expose their internal absurdity. Nothing needs to become an obvious punch line. The comedy emerges from language continuing to function after its original usefulness has expired.
Groves is also known through Red Wine and Sugar, Voice Imitator, Dead Boomers, and other projects connected to Melbourne’s experimental, punk, and noise underground. Absurd Cosmos Late Nite occupies a particularly slippery space within that body of work. It can be abrasive without relying on harsh noise, comic without presenting comedy, and musical without committing to conventional songs. Its primary instrument may be the relationship between a recorded voice and the atmosphere into which that voice is returned.
The project’s earlier recordings have drawn from talkback radio, overheard statements, online comments, improvised speech, cheap electronics, and exhausted musical loops. Final Lives 2 retains that world while allowing the performance setting to roughen its boundaries. Material that may have been assembled privately is now exposed to a room, amplification, timing, and whatever accidental sounds occur around it.
Live tape collage creates an unusual tension. A conventional band demonstrates presence through visible effort and immediate coordination. A tape artist introduces sounds that may have been captured years earlier, in another building, by people unaware that they would eventually become part of a performance. The performer is physically present, but much of the material arrives from elsewhere.
Groves uses that tension rather than disguising it. A recorded voice can seem to take control of the room even though its speaker is absent. His own live speech may interrupt, imitate, contradict, or quietly coexist with the tape. Authorship becomes difficult to assign. The person operating the material is not always the person whose certainty dominates it.
This uncertainty is part of the project’s ethical and comic force. Ordinary speech often relies upon context to protect it. A strange opinion passes quickly during conversation. A boast, complaint, or explanation may be forgotten as soon as it is spoken. Recording removes that protection. Repetition allows the phrase to reveal rhythms and implications its speaker may never have intended.
Absurd Cosmos Late Nite does not approach these voices with the aggressive editing of political plunderphonics. The treatment is sleepier and more patient. Phrases are allowed to drift, sag, and become lonely. Ridicule remains possible, but so does sympathy. The speakers sound ridiculous partly because everyone sounds ridiculous when isolated from the flow of normal life.
Music enters as a damaged support system. Slow riffs, low-resolution loops, or fragments of melody can resemble something playing through a wall at three in the morning. They provide enough continuity to hold the voices together, yet they rarely become the main event. The musical material seems tired of performing its original function. A groove continues without generating excitement. A melody returns after its emotional instructions have faded.
This exhausted pacing gives the project its late-night identity. The “Late Nite” of the name is not a glamorous city after dark. It is the hour when commercial radio repeats itself, petrol stations glow without warmth, and the person behind the counter has already heard every possible version of the same customer story. Time becomes viscous. Conversation is both necessary and unbearable.
Final Lives 2 carries that atmosphere into performance. Instead of presenting a set that builds through dramatic peaks, the material accumulates sideways. One voice leads to another. A loop gathers an unexpected emotional tone through repetition. Silence or room noise briefly exposes the machinery before the next fragment begins.
The effect can be hypnotic, but not in the polished sense associated with ambient music. Attention repeatedly slips. The listener drifts away from a phrase, then returns to discover that it has continued changing in their absence. Meaning becomes unstable because concentration cannot remain fixed.
The large FLAC archive suggests a substantial body of material rather than a brief single performance. Final Lives 2 feels archival without behaving like a neutral document. The recordings have been selected, sequenced, and framed as another Absurd Cosmos Late Nite work. Their rough edges retain the rooms and occasions from which they came, but the compilation creates a new imaginary broadcast that never occurred in one place.
That is one reason the cover works so well. The Family Shop appears to contain unrelated secondhand objects whose former domestic functions have been interrupted. Paintings, tools, plants, and decorative items now share one commercial interior. Groves performs a similar operation with sound. Speech, music, and environmental fragments are removed from their original homes and displayed beside one another.
The result is not random. Arrangement produces new relationships. A statement may become pathetic when followed by a long empty loop. A harmless phrase can become threatening through repetition. A tired musical passage may suddenly feel tender when placed beneath a voice struggling to explain itself.
Final Lives 2 captures contemporary life through its leftovers rather than its major events. There are no grand declarations about technology, alienation, or cultural decline. Those conditions appear indirectly through how people speak, what they repeat, and the degraded media through which their words travel.
The recording is funny because human certainty becomes fragile once removed from its social scaffolding. It is unsettling for the same reason. Every voice believes itself to be temporarily central, yet the tape eventually reduces everyone to material.
Absurd Cosmos Late Nite offers no clean distinction between mockery and preservation. Groves rescues disposable speech by recording it, then exposes it to manipulation. He gives forgotten voices another life, but that life is stranger than the first one. It exists inside loops, low-resolution atmosphere, and rooms where the original speakers will never hear themselves.
The “final lives” are therefore not endings. They are afterlives manufactured by recording. A sentence survives its speaker’s intention. A fragment of music continues after its cultural moment. A live performance becomes a file, then a release, then another private room in which absent people begin speaking again.
Outside The Family Shop, Groves raises the can to his mouth while the objects wait behind glass. The image could be the beginning of an evening or the end of one. Final Lives 2 occupies the same suspended hour. Nothing is fully alive, nothing has finished, and the broadcast keeps drifting beyond the point where someone should have switched it off.

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.