Clock DVA - 2021 - Horology - Anthology Vol. 1-3 15xCD

 

Vinyl-on-demand – VOD CD09  3.41GB FLAC

Horology begins before Clock DVA had settled into a band, before Sheffield’s electronic underground had been divided into tidy histories, and before anyone knew which homemade tapes would become evidence of a revolution. Across fifteen CDs, the collection repeatedly catches ideas while they are still unstable. Tape loops snag against bass guitar. Violin scratches through primitive electronics. Drum machines appear without the polished certainty they would later acquire. Voices move between whispered ritual, spoken theory, bodily panic, and damaged cabaret. The set does not lead smoothly toward the Clock DVA heard on White Souls in Black Suits, Thirst, or Buried Dreams. It exposes a much larger workshop beneath those records, full of abandoned routes, private experiments, and sounds that never intended to become songs.
Released by Vinyl-on-Demand in 2021, Horology: Anthology Vol. 1–3 compresses three earlier vinyl box sets into one enormous CD edition. The first six discs collect Clock DVA’s recordings from 1978 through 1980. Five more reach backward into The Future and Adi Newton’s radiophonic work. The final four gather tape and reel experiments made during Clock DVA’s formative period. The result is not simply fifteen albums arranged inside a folder. It is a map of overlapping practices: group improvisation, industrial song, home-studio research, electronic composition, performance art, occult study, tape manipulation, and the social chemistry of late-1970s Sheffield.
The first volume begins with Lomticks of Time, where Clock DVA already sound suspicious of conventional rock structure. Bass and percussion may establish a pulse, but the electronics refuse to behave like decoration. They interrupt, stain, and destabilize. Adi Newton’s voice does not offer the listener a comfortable emotional center. He sounds detached from the room and trapped inside it at once, delivering phrases as though language has become another machine producing unreliable signals.
The early recordings retain punk’s permission to begin without mastery, but Clock DVA were never content with punk’s basic vocabulary. Their music absorbs free improvisation, musique concrète, krautrock repetition, jazz dislocation, electronic research, and the corrosive theatre surrounding industrial culture. A saxophone or violin can enter with none of the elegance those instruments normally imply. They are used as pressure devices, scraping across the rhythm and widening the wound.
The two CDs devoted to 2nd show how quickly the group’s language was expanding. These pieces do not behave like demos awaiting proper studio treatment. Their roughness is structural. Magnetic tape compresses drums into dull impacts, voices occupy awkward distances, and electronic tones move unpredictably across the stereo field. The limitations create a claustrophobic room where every sound appears to contaminate the next.
There are recognizable songs inside this material, but they seem surrounded by experiments attempting to dissolve them. A bass pattern may suggest post-punk discipline, then a free horn line cuts across it. A drum machine establishes repetitive order while spoken voice makes that order feel clinical or obscene. Clock DVA were learning that rhythm did not have to produce pleasure. It could become surveillance, compulsion, or ritual.
Sex Works Beyond Entanglement pushes further into the body. Titles such as “Genitals and Genosis,” “Theatre of Eroticism,” “Antigone,” and “Throbbing Sweeping Obscene” reveal Newton’s interest in sexuality as philosophy, biological system, taboo, and psychic machinery. The recordings are erotic only in the widest and least comforting sense. Desire appears connected to repetition, violence, transformation, and the unstable border between individual identity and physical process.
The electronics are wonderfully primitive. Oscillations pulse without behaving like finished synthesizer parts. Tape speed alters texture and pitch. Voices are doubled, filtered, or made to hover at the edge of intelligibility. Rather than concealing the studio process, the recordings allow each technique to remain exposed. One can almost hear hands operating switches, reels, microphones, and unstable connections.
Deep Floor brings the ensemble closer to the grim momentum associated with early Clock DVA, but even here the ground keeps shifting. Percussion can be brutally direct, while guitar, horn, or electronics resist locking into agreement. The music walks with a limp and seems proud of it. Groove is present, but it has been deprived of ease.
Fragment is an exact title for the sixth disc. These recordings preserve incomplete forms without apologizing for them. Some pieces appear briefly, establish one texture or rhythmic argument, then disappear. Others extend into loose zones where the musicians test how little structure is required to keep a performance alive. The disc does not finish the first volume with a triumphant summary. It leaves the band in pieces, which is the most honest portrait possible.
Horology II then rewinds to The Future, the project Newton formed with Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh before Ware and Marsh moved toward The Human League and later Heaven 17. These recordings are historically fascinating because familiar futures remain undecided inside them. Synth-pop, industrial music, minimal electronics, and proto-techno share the same inexpensive machinery without yet recognizing themselves as separate territories.
The Future pieces are often more concise and rhythmically inviting than Clock DVA’s early tapes. Sequences pulse with a clarity that points toward dance music, but there is still grit around the circuitry. Melodies appear beside electronic abrasion. Machine repetition offers both pop potential and depersonalized force. The recordings capture Sheffield musicians realizing that synthesizers could replace traditional rock instrumentation without requiring them to reproduce progressive rock’s technical grandeur.
What separated Newton’s path was his attraction to rupture. Ware and Marsh would refine electronic repetition into a modern pop language. Newton retained the laboratory, the séance, and the interrogation chamber. The Future disc is therefore less an origin story with an obvious conclusion than a junction where several possible versions of British electronic music briefly occupied the same room.
The four Radiophonic Dvations discs move almost completely away from the idea of a band. These are Newton’s zones of acoustic research, occult suggestion, tape experiment, and psychoacoustic pressure. The title “radiophonic” acknowledges the legacy of electronic sound assembled through tape, oscillator, filters, and studio imagination, but the recordings are darker and more private than a workshop demonstration.
Many passages unfold without percussion or recognizable song form. Tones drift, collide, and recede. Tape loops establish cycles whose repetition alters perception rather than supporting melody. Voices arrive as transmissions, incantations, documentary fragments, or forms of internal speech. Silence is allowed to remain active around the sounds.
This is some of the collection’s most demanding material because it offers fewer historical handles. The listener cannot simply identify an early version of a famous song or trace a rhythmic idea toward a later album. The pieces occupy their own sealed environments. They demonstrate that Newton’s electronic practice was not a secondary activity conducted between band sessions. It was one of the engines driving Clock DVA from the beginning.
The Radiophonic Dvations also clarify the intellectual atmosphere surrounding the project. Newton drew upon figures including Antonin Artaud, Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Charles Baudelaire, and the Marquis de Sade, not as decorative references but as methods for breaking ordinary perception. Theatre could become cruelty. Eroticism could expose systems of power. Sound could alter consciousness without needing to communicate a conventional message.
This does not make the recordings academic. Their textures remain bodily. Low oscillations create pressure. High frequencies irritate the ear. Repetition produces fatigue or trance. Abstract ideas are tested against physical hearing.
Horology III opens the archive further through four discs of tape and reel recordings made between 1978 and 1980. Here the distinction between composition, rehearsal, experiment, and accident becomes nearly useless. EMS synthesizer, electric violin, guitar, bass, loops, voice, and unidentified devices enter combinations whose purpose may only have existed during the act of recording.
These discs are the set’s exposed wiring. Familiar Clock DVA elements appear without the structures that normally organize them. A bass figure may circulate beneath raw oscillator movement. Violin creates a sustained metallic thread while tape fragments interrupt its continuity. Voices emerge without becoming songs. Some recordings feel closer to 1960s electroacoustic composition than post-punk, despite being produced within the same period and social environment that generated the band’s earliest performances.
The studio becomes an instrument whose most important feature is memory. Tape allows an event to be captured, reversed, layered, slowed, accelerated, and made to answer itself. Horology repeatedly reveals how central this process was to Newton’s thinking. The recorder does not merely preserve music after it has happened. It creates forms that cannot exist before recording.
That is why the collection’s title works so well. Horology is the study and measurement of time, but these tapes refuse a simple chronological clock. Material from nearby years sounds as though it belongs to different decades. An electronic pulse anticipates music still far in the future, while an improvised violin passage reaches backward toward an older avant-garde. Tape loops create circular time. Archival recovery makes private moments suddenly present more than forty years later.
The fifteen-CD format risks absurdity, yet the excess is necessary. A smaller anthology would inevitably favor the tracks that resemble the established story of Clock DVA: Sheffield pioneers moving from industrial post-punk toward severe electronic music. Horology preserves the mess that story normally removes. It includes the failed forms, repeated ideas, skeletal rehearsals, and solitary investigations required for the recognizable work to emerge.
The collection also refuses the myth that electronic music developed through clean technological progress. These recordings are full of unreliable equipment, crude synchronization, tape hiss, distortion, and manual intervention. Their intelligence does not come from advanced tools. It comes from using limited tools without respecting their intended purpose.
Clock DVA’s later music would become increasingly precise. On Buried Dreams and Man-Amplified, rhythm, sampling, cybernetics, surveillance, and digital systems were organized with chilling control. Horology shows that precision growing from a much dirtier origin. Beneath the later geometry lies a room full of loose wires, wounded instruments, occult books, cheap tape, and people testing whether sound could be made to think.
The package’s scale turns listening into excavation. Fifteen discs cannot be absorbed as one ordinary album. They require return, comparison, and temporary disorientation. Ideas disappear for several hours, then reappear in altered form. A texture first heard as random becomes recognizable as part of Newton’s continuing vocabulary. The archive slowly teaches the listener how to hear it.
Horology does not improve Clock DVA’s past by making it cleaner. It preserves the friction between ambition and available means. The recordings remain uneven, overloaded, unfinished, and sometimes deliberately hostile. That is where their value lives. The box captures a moment when genres had not yet hardened, electronic instruments had not yet become polite, and a group could approach the recording studio as laboratory, trap, and instrument of psychic disturbance.
By the fifteenth disc, Clock DVA have not arrived at a destination. They have multiplied. The band, The Future, Newton’s solo experiments, and the anonymous tape fragments exist beside one another as competing mechanisms. Horology measures their time without straightening it. The clock runs forward, backward, and in circles, its internal machinery visible through the cracked face.

Junta - 2024 - Pathetic Frustration

Satatuhatta – SATATUHATTA-77  190.80MB FLAC

Pathetic Frustration begins with “Panic Attack Is the Best Defence,” a title that converts involuntary collapse into strategy. Junta’s noise arrives in waves rather than as one fixed slab, surging forward, thinning, then reforming with different frequencies forced to the surface. High abrasion tears across a heavier electrical body while lower pressure keeps the recording from becoming weightless static. The sound is violently saturated, but it remains active inside that saturation. It does not merely stay loud. It twists, swells, buckles, and keeps changing the location of its damage.
Released by Finland’s Satatuhatta label in 2024, Pathetic Frustration is a C21 cassette containing two pieces of almost equal length. “Panic Attack Is the Best Defence” runs for nine minutes and fifty-four seconds, while “Muffl’l Oy Hell” follows at nine minutes and fifty-six. The chrome tape was limited to one hundred copies, giving each side approximately ten minutes to establish its own pressure system without stretching the material beyond its natural intensity.
Satatuhatta introduced the cassette as Junta’s most uncompromising recording to that point, describing a free-flowing electronic harsh storm influenced by Japanese noise. That comparison makes sense because the release is not organized around the rigid immobility of a harsh noise wall. Its density remains fluid. Frequencies constantly overtake one another, and the stereo field feels crowded with competing currents rather than occupied by one single texture.
The first side treats panic as acceleration without escape. Sounds pile up faster than the ear can organize them. A sharp frequency may dominate briefly, then be swallowed by midrange distortion or pushed aside by a deeper surge. The recording gives the impression of several systems malfunctioning simultaneously, each one increasing the pressure placed upon the others.
Yet the track does not sound careless. Its apparent disorder has direction. Junta understands how long one texture can remain exposed before another must enter, and how a sudden reduction in density can make the following eruption feel physically larger. The piece moves through changing states of overload while refusing the conventional rise toward one final climax.
That refusal matches the title. A panic attack does not necessarily progress in a straight line. It loops through physical signals, catastrophic interpretation, attempted control, and renewed alarm. Calling it “the best defence” adds bitter humor. The body protects itself by becoming temporarily impossible to inhabit.
Junta does not illustrate anxiety through samples, speech, or recognizable heartbeat effects. The connection is structural. The music places the listener inside rapid changes of intensity without providing a stable perspective from which to measure them. Abrasion arrives from several directions, and every possible exit seems to produce another frequency.
The cassette format intensifies this instability. Tape compression binds separate layers into a thick surface while allowing peaks to smear and strain. High frequencies acquire grain rather than digital sharpness, and the lower material pushes against the limited space available on the tape. The sound feels physically crowded because the medium itself is being asked to carry more energy than comfort permits.
Chrome tape gives the recording enough definition to preserve motion within the mass. The noise does not collapse into dull mud. Scraping upper layers remain distinct from the heavier middle and lower bands, allowing the listener to follow how one area of the spectrum attacks another. The better the playback system, the more internal conflict becomes audible.
Turning the cassette over leads into “Muffl’l Oy Hell,” whose strange title reads like corporate language, damaged speech, or a Finnish company name crushed into nonsense. “Oy” is the abbreviation used for a Finnish limited company, placing a tiny piece of administrative order inside an otherwise mangled phrase. Hell has apparently been incorporated, registered, and placed into operation.
The second side feels heavier in implication because its title shifts frustration from personal panic toward organized machinery. The noise remains mobile, but the movement suggests an industrial system cycling through several kinds of failure. Distortion grinds, recedes, and returns with altered pressure. High frequencies flare like exposed electrical edges while the broader mass continues working beneath them.
Where the first side’s title implies the body turning against itself, “Muffl’l Oy Hell” suggests an institution designed to continue regardless of human distress. The two pieces therefore complement each other without becoming a narrative. Panic is the defence available to the individual. Hell is the company that keeps normal business hours.
Junta’s use of humor is crucial. Pathetic Frustration is not funny because the sounds are harmless or because harsh noise has been reduced to parody. The humor is embedded in the gap between extreme sonic force and titles that sound defeated, bureaucratic, or absurd. “Pathetic” weakens “frustration” before the recording has even begun, as though the emotional condition is not impressive enough to deserve dignity.
That self-contempt gives the release a different character from noise built around invincible aggression. Junta does not present frustration as righteous power. It is repetitive, embarrassing, bodily, and unable to solve whatever caused it. The electronics may be overwhelming, but their emotional source is described as pathetic.
This creates tension between sound and title. The cassette sounds enormous while naming weakness. That contradiction prevents the harshness from functioning as simple domination. The noise can overpower the listener, yet the project has already admitted that power may be nothing more than helplessness amplified until it fills the room.
The Japanese influence appears less through imitation of one artist than through a shared understanding of harsh noise as continuous motion. The best Japanese noise recordings often contain astonishing detail inside apparent excess. Feedback, distortion, contact sounds, and electronic pressure behave like rapidly changing weather rather than one stationary wall. Junta works within that tradition while retaining the cold directness associated with contemporary Finnish noise.
Finland has produced a particularly severe noise culture, often emphasizing rough physical sound, private fixation, crude electronics, and an unwillingness to make experimental music socially polite. Satatuhatta has continued that lineage while releasing a broad range of current harsh noise and sound work. Pathetic Frustration fits the label because it is direct enough to strike immediately but detailed enough to reward repeated listening.
Its twenty-minute length is nearly perfect. A full hour of similar intensity might turn the noise into background through exhaustion. Two ten-minute sides preserve concentration. Each begins, develops, and stops before adaptation can fully neutralize its force.
The cassette’s equal-sided construction also gives it a severe balance. Neither piece becomes the obvious main event accompanied by a shorter extra track. Panic and hell receive the same amount of magnetic tape. The body’s collapse and the institution’s machinery are treated as parallel conditions.
There is no voice to clarify who is frustrated or why. No sample identifies a political target, personal event, or psychological diagnosis. The absence keeps the emotion broad without making it empty. Frustration is translated directly into blocked motion: sound constantly moving but never reaching a destination.
That may be the cassette’s defining quality. The noise is free-flowing, yet freedom does not produce release. Every surge runs into another surge. Every frequency creates more obstruction. Motion becomes another form of confinement.
Pathetic Frustration therefore avoids both purity and catharsis. It is too restless to become a perfect wall and too unresolved to offer emotional cleansing. The listener is not carried through frustration and delivered beyond it. The cassette simply gives frustration enough voltage to reveal its texture.
When “Muffl’l Oy Hell” ends, the pressure disappears because the tape has run out, not because the problem has been solved. The mechanism stops. The room returns. Somewhere inside the cassette, panic remains the best defence, hell remains open for business, and twenty minutes of electronic failure wait to begin again from the opposite side.

 

Incapacitants - 2025 - Chwalfa

 

Otoroku – roku044  502.50MB FLAC Chwalfa begins with Incapacitants already operating at full temperature. There is no patient introduction, no isolated signal offered as a guide, and no orderly climb toward overload. “Night One” erupts as a field of clipped tape loops, crushed feedback, overloaded electronics, and rapidly shifting pressure in which Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai appear less like two performers than two fronts of weather colliding inside the same room. The sound is enormous, but its scale never becomes static. Every few seconds the internal balance changes. A shrieking upper frequency is buried beneath a thicker surge, a low electrical mass opens briefly into granular detail, then another layer enters and burns the opening shut. Recorded at London’s Cafe OTO on September 6 and 7, 2024, Chwalfa documents the duo’s first UK appearance since 2016. OTOROKU gives one complete performance to each disc: “Night One” lasting thirty-seven minutes and sixteen seconds, followed by the thirty-eight-minute “Night Two.” The format is important. These are not excerpts selected from several concerts or studio pieces dressed in live atmosphere. Each disc preserves one uninterrupted encounter between the duo, their equipment, the room, and an audience placed close enough to experience noise as moving air. The Welsh title can mean dispersal, rout, upheaval, upset, or a confused and chaotic condition. All of those meanings apply, but none completely contains the music. Incapacitants create confusion without sounding uncertain. Their noise is chaotic at the level of surface activity, yet the performances possess a fierce internal responsiveness. Mikawa and Kosakai listen through the density, answering changes in pressure with new disruptions. One electronic current swells, another slices through it, and the first mutates in response. What appears from outside to be total saturation is actually a conversation conducted at catastrophic volume. “Night One” carries a restless, vertical energy. High frequencies flare upward while dense midrange distortion churns beneath them. The sound often seems to be climbing out of itself, generating new layers faster than the existing ones can collapse. Tape loops provide fragments of recurrence, but repetition never stabilizes the performance. A loop appears, catches, deforms, and becomes another surface for feedback to attack. This continual mutation separates Incapacitants from harsh noise built around one perfected wall. Their sound can become as dense as any wall, but it refuses immobility. The mass bends, folds, and repeatedly changes direction. At moments it resembles hundreds of short events compressed until they occur simultaneously. Elsewhere it expands into a broad electrical roar whose smaller details remain active beneath the apparent unity. The cover captures this method from above. Mikawa and Kosakai stand far apart inside Cafe OTO, each bent over a small table of pedals, mixers, and compact electronic devices. They look almost ordinary, two men working quietly at separate stations beneath plain white walls. The image refuses the scale heard on the discs. Nothing visible explains how these modest arrangements of cables and boxes could produce something resembling industrial collapse, volcanic pressure, and an entire damaged communications system operating at once. That visual contradiction has always been part of Incapacitants. The duo do not rely on theatrical costumes or elaborate machinery to announce extremity. Their physical performances can become intensely expressive, with bodies tensing, faces twisting, and hands working frantically across equipment, but the source remains recognizably human and limited. Two people produce more sound than the room seems capable of holding. Mikawa began Incapacitants as a solo project in 1981 before Kosakai joined later in the decade. Across more than forty years, the project has maintained a remarkably direct premise: live electronic noise generated through contact microphones, pedals, loops, feedback, and improvised control. That longevity has not turned the music into ceremonial reenactment. Chwalfa sounds dangerous because the duo have refined their ability to create instability without making instability predictable. Experience appears through timing. Incapacitants know when to press harder and when to let one frequency remain exposed long enough to become unbearable. They understand that maximum volume does not require every part of the spectrum to be filled continuously. Brief thinning can make the next surge feel enormous. A small pocket of brittle clicking or damaged loop repetition can suddenly reveal the depth of the larger mass surrounding it. Near the center of “Night One,” the performance seems to pull apart into several competing bands. A low mechanical vibration holds the floor while midrange distortion writhes above it and thin feedback needles through the upper edge. The listener can choose one layer and follow it briefly, but the others keep changing its context. Incapacitants make focused listening difficult without making it pointless. The reward lies in repeatedly losing the sound one has selected. This is noise as excess perception. There is always more activity than the ear can process, yet the music does not become meaningless because of that excess. It becomes physical. The body receives pressure before the mind organizes detail. Bass moves through the chest, high frequencies tighten the jaw, and the rapidly shifting middle produces a sense of motion even when no recognizable rhythm exists. “Night Two” begins from a similarly scorched condition but soon develops a different personality. The sound feels broader and heavier, with longer masses of distortion allowed to gather before being ruptured. Where the first night often appears to climb and splinter, the second seems to sink, drag, and then detonate from below. The difference is not dramatic enough to make the discs opposites, but it confirms that Incapacitants are responding to a present situation rather than reproducing a fixed set. The live room becomes audible through the pressure. Cafe OTO is known for intimate performances in which small gestures can command near-total quiet. Chwalfa overturns that familiar atmosphere. The venue’s walls, speakers, and floor become components in the duo’s electronics. Feedback is shaped by the dimensions of the room, while the doubled subwoofers transform low frequency into architecture. The recording does not merely capture sound occurring in OTO. It captures OTO being temporarily remade by sound. Billy Steiger’s recording and Oli Barrett’s mix preserve the performances without smoothing their overload. Peaks remain fierce, but the internal layers do not collapse into flat digital clipping. The two discs retain depth. Certain sounds appear close enough to touch, while others hover far behind the main surge. Even at extreme density, the room has corners. The second performance contains several moments where a damaged pulse begins to emerge. It never becomes a beat, yet the recurrence gives the noise temporary forward motion. Another signal then bends the pulse out of shape, turning rhythm back into texture. Incapacitants repeatedly approach musical forms without submitting to them. A loop almost becomes a riff. Feedback almost becomes a sustained melody. Repetition almost becomes meter. Each form survives just long enough to be recognized before the duo tear through it. That destructive relationship with form is not nihilistic. Chwalfa is intensely alive. The performances contain exhilaration, humor, concentration, and the strange joy of two people discovering how much uncontrolled movement can be produced through practiced interaction. The volume may suggest annihilation, but the music’s energy comes from construction happening faster than destruction can erase it. Vymethoxy Redspiders’ liner notes connect Incapacitants less with conventional noise lineage than with the “fire music” of free jazz, invoking Albert Ayler, Dave Burrell, and Sun Ra at his most apocalyptic. The comparison is useful because it emphasizes emotional outpouring and collective improvisation rather than genre technique. Incapacitants do not play electronic noise as a demonstration of equipment. They hurl sound into motion with the same commitment that free-jazz musicians bring to breath, pressure, and instrumental extremity. The duo’s instruments may not produce recognizable notes, but they create phrasing. A dense surge acts like a held cry. A sudden cut resembles breath. A rapidly oscillating loop becomes a tremor around which the other player builds. The performances possess musical intelligence even while refusing melody, meter, and conventional development. The two-disc structure also prevents one night from becoming definitive. “Night One” does not stand as the perfect Incapacitants statement followed by a bonus performance. The second night revisits the same tools and discovers another route through them. Listening to both reveals how much variation exists inside a method sometimes dismissed as indiscriminate noise. By the final section of “Night Two,” the sound has accumulated nearly eighty minutes of pressure across the set, yet the duo do not resolve it through a grand concluding gesture. The performance continues mutating until it stops. There is no final chord, no clean collapse, and no ceremonial release. The ending feels imposed by the end of the live action rather than built into a composition. Chwalfa captures upheaval without reducing it to chaos for its own sake. Mikawa and Kosakai disperse every stable form that begins to appear, but their interaction remains exact, bodily, and alert. The two ordinary-looking men on the cover stand beneath Cafe OTO’s ceiling with a handful of electronics, creating enough sound to make the room feel briefly detached from London and dropped into some furnace beneath the planet. The album does not ask whether noise can still be extreme after decades of accumulated history. It answers by making history irrelevant for seventy-five minutes. There is only the present pressure, the next loop catching fire, the next feedback line cutting through, and two performers listening to one another inside a volume that should make listening impossible.

Chaos Cascade - 2024 - Dino Velvet

 

Desolation Galaxies Records – DeGa15  304.53MB FLAC

Dino Velvet begins with the cover already chewing through the album’s central contradiction. A woman’s face is rendered in stark black and white, glamorous enough to suggest fashion photography until the machinery becomes visible. A metal apparatus enters her mouth, clamps across her face, and converts elegance into restraint. An insect-like form sits above one eye, adding another layer of invasion. The title appears beneath her in small, refined lettering: Dino Velvet. Something prehistoric and crushing has been wrapped in something soft, luxurious, and faintly erotic.
Chaos Cascade uses that contradiction throughout the album. The sound is brutal power electronics, but it rarely behaves like one uninterrupted block of aggression. Thick oscillators, vomiting vocals, shrill feedback, mechanical rhythms, and collapsing low frequencies are constantly arranged against one another. Hardness meets texture. Force meets a strange, diseased sensuality. The record does not simply roar. It presses close.
Released in 2024 by Desolation Galaxies Records as DeGa15, Dino Velvet is a limited CD edition of one hundred copies. It contains eleven tracks, with German project Pissoir Rouge contributing to seven of them. That collaboration expands the record without turning it into a split. Chaos Cascade remains the dominant identity, but Pissoir Rouge introduces another layer of damaged electronics, vocal sickness, and rhythmic filth that repeatedly changes the shape of the attack.
The opening stretch establishes a grinding sound built from several different pressures operating at once. Low oscillators create the physical base, dense enough to move air rather than merely occupy the speakers. Above them, feedback streaks across the surface in sharp, unstable lines. Vocals arrive already mangled, forced through distortion until words become less important than breath, strain, and the sensation of a throat being used beyond comfort.
This is not power electronics built around one commanding speech. The voice does not stand above the machinery and control it. It is caught inside the same violent system. Some passages make the vocals sound enormous, as though amplified through industrial ductwork. Others bury them until only a shredded human contour remains. The result is less a political address than a body being processed.
Chaos Cascade’s strength lies in keeping density mobile. Many harsh recordings find one effective texture and remain there, relying on volume to maintain intensity. Dino Velvet keeps altering its weight. A piece may begin with a narrow, needling frequency, then widen into a distorted mechanical pulse. Another starts from a deep electrical churn and gradually exposes higher layers until the entire mix seems to peel upward.
Rhythm appears often enough to make the violence bodily. These are not clean beats designed for a club, but blunt repetitions resembling damaged machinery trying to complete a cycle. A pulse catches, drags, and returns. Distortion fills the spaces between impacts. The body can recognize the pattern, but cannot settle comfortably inside it.
That tension gives the album its grinding character. Forward motion exists, yet every step meets resistance. The music moves like equipment overloaded by material too heavy for its intended purpose. Nothing glides. Even the quieter sections feel burdened.
Pissoir Rouge’s presence strengthens this diseased mechanical quality. The project’s contributions do not arrive as polite guest spots with clearly separated identities. They enter the tracks as contamination. Additional electronics crowd the middle frequencies, vocals acquire another layer of instability, and the arrangements feel less like one person controlling a system than several operators pushing the same machine toward different forms of failure.
The collaboration is especially effective because the two projects share brutality without becoming interchangeable. Chaos Cascade favors a broad, crushing sound, often using dense oscillator movement and heavy feedback as physical mass. Pissoir Rouge brings a more cramped, septic quality. Where Chaos Cascade can feel like a structure collapsing outward, Pissoir Rouge seems to work from inside the walls.
Together they create an atmosphere that is both enormous and claustrophobic. The record can fill the room while still feeling pressed directly against the face. That sensation returns the listener to the cover, where a mechanical device does not destroy the woman from a distance. It grips, enters, and remains attached.
The title Dino Velvet encourages several readings without settling into one. “Dino” suggests something extinct, oversized, primitive, or lumbering. “Velvet” suggests touch, luxury, darkness, and surface. Combined, the words describe the album’s production unusually well. The low end has prehistoric weight, while feedback and vocal distortion create a rough nap across the surface, a kind of velvet made from wire and dried blood.
There is also humor in the name. Power electronics frequently adopts titles announcing violence with absolute seriousness. Dino Velvet sounds like a nightclub, a cheap perfume, a porn alias, or a forgotten glam-rock performer. That absurdity prevents the record from becoming solemn. Chaos Cascade understands that extremity can become ridiculous when it poses too stiffly.
The humor does not weaken the attack. It makes the attack stranger. A grotesque title placed beside genuinely punishing sound creates uncertainty about how much theatricality is intended. The listener cannot reduce the album to confession, ideology, parody, or pure abstraction. Each possibility remains active.
The eleven-track structure keeps the album moving through separate concentrations rather than one endless performance. Tracks end before their strongest textures become fully familiar. The next begins with a different arrangement of pressure, forcing the ear to recalibrate. This makes Dino Velvet more dynamic than an hour-long slab of continuous harshness.
Some pieces emphasize thick low-frequency grinding. Others sharpen the upper register until feedback feels like something drawn tightly across metal. Several bring damaged pulse close to industrial rhythm, then corrode it before it can become functional. The most effective moments combine all three levels: bass as body, rhythm as machinery, and feedback as exposed nerve.
The vocals provide the human residue binding those layers together. Even when unintelligible, they prevent the album from becoming an exercise in equipment. Someone remains inside the sound, breathing, retching, commanding, or simply enduring. The machinery matters because it is acting upon a voice.
The production preserves separation inside overload. Dino Velvet is saturated, but not flattened. Deep oscillator movement remains distinct from the midrange grind, while high feedback cuts through without erasing everything beneath it. The CD format gives the sound enough space to reveal how carefully the violence has been layered.
This detail becomes especially apparent at higher volume. What first appears to be one solid mass divides into shifting planes. A vocal sits farther back than expected. A rhythmic pulse continues beneath a feedback eruption. A low tone changes pitch slowly enough that its motion is felt before it is consciously heard.
The album belongs firmly to contemporary German power electronics, yet it avoids presenting tradition as a museum style. Its ingredients are familiar: oscillators, distortion, hostile vocals, crude rhythm, violent imagery. The distinction lies in their arrangement. Chaos Cascade treats the genre as something still capable of becoming unstable rather than a fixed collection of approved gestures.
There is no attempt to modernize the sound through sleek digital production or crossover structure. Dino Velvet develops by deepening the grime. It asks how many textures can coexist inside brutality before the brutality loses shape, then keeps forcing them together without crossing that line.
The collaboration with Pissoir Rouge also makes the record feel social in a perverse way. Power electronics often cultivates isolation, presenting one individual’s obsession as a sealed chamber. Dino Velvet repeatedly opens that chamber to another participant, allowing disgust and aggression to become shared labor.
The result is not camaraderie in any comforting sense. It sounds like two people making a bad situation more efficient. One supplies pressure, the other introduces infection. One builds the apparatus, the other tightens the straps.
By the final tracks, the album has established a vocabulary of grinding pulse, oscillator weight, feedback rupture, and mutilated voice without exhausting it. The sound remains recognizable, but each return arrives with a different balance of elements. Repetition becomes identity rather than stagnation.
Dino Velvet succeeds because its violence has texture. It is not satisfied with being loud, hateful, or ugly. It wants abrasion to have depth, rhythm to feel damaged, and vocals to remain bodily after language disappears. The cover’s machinery may dominate the image, but the face beneath it is still visible.
That remaining face is the album’s most disturbing detail. The subject has not been erased. She is trapped inside the apparatus, glamour and injury occupying the same frame. Chaos Cascade builds the music the same way. Beneath the thundering oscillators, the feedback, and the grinding collaborations with Pissoir Rouge, a human signal keeps trying to survive. The velvet is already caught in the teeth.

Green Tea - 2023 - Children of the Wisteria

 

Satatuhatta – SATATUHATTA-71  358.98MB FLAC

“Hacking at Branches, Hitting Bone” opens with a beautiful mistake of scale. Soft synthesizer color hovers behind the noise, suggesting distant light through leaves, while a coarse electronic blade tears across the foreground. Green Tea does not use ambient sound as an introduction that will eventually be destroyed by harshness. Both states remain active together. The calm layer continues beneath the abrasion, and the abrasion begins revealing its own strange warmth. What should be opposition becomes climate.
Children of the Wisteria is the second full-length Green Tea album by Nick Forté, whose history includes Rorschach, Raspberry Bulbs, and Half Mortal. Released by Finland’s Satatuhatta label in September 2023, it follows the Green Tea debut Snowblower and develops the project’s unusual meeting of harsh noise, ambient drift, psychedelic density, and new age tranquility. The six tracks last just under forty-eight minutes, giving Forté enough room to build complete environments rather than a sequence of brief attacks.
The opening title contains the album’s method in miniature. Branches suggest growth, shelter, and organic complexity. Bone waits underneath. Hacking through one eventually reaches the other, turning an apparently natural scene into anatomy. The track behaves the same way. Broad, almost soothing tones create foliage while distortion cuts downward until something harder appears beneath them.
Green Tea’s noise is dense, but rarely blank. The harsh layers move constantly, separating into grain, feedback, low pressure, and brittle upper-frequency activity. Instead of one gray wall, Forté creates several surfaces occupying different depths. One sound may scrape close to the listener while another glows far behind it. The ear can move through the mix even when the overall pressure remains enormous.
“Twining Vine Supremacy” makes that movement more tangled. Noise coils around sustained tones, repeatedly crossing its own path. The title suggests vegetation achieving dominance not through sudden force but through persistent growth. A vine occupies space by wrapping itself around whatever is already there. Forté’s distortion behaves similarly, climbing across ambient layers without completely covering them.
This is where the project’s psychedelic character becomes most apparent. Psychedelia does not arrive through retro guitar effects or recognizable drug-culture imagery. It comes from unstable perception. Harsh noise that initially seems flat begins opening into depth. New age tones that should feel peaceful become uncanny when surrounded by abrasion. The listener cannot decide whether the music is beautiful material being damaged or violent material producing beauty.
“Wedding Beneath a Wasp Nest” sharpens that contradiction. The title places ceremony directly under suspended danger. A wedding asks participants to trust the future, while the nest above them contains a collective capable of immediate attack. The track does not choose between celebration and threat. Its brighter electronic layer continues while the harsher frequencies swarm around it.
The buzzing textures avoid literal imitation, but they create nervous movement throughout the stereo field. High frequencies cluster, separate, and return. Lower sound supplies weight, preventing the piece from becoming a thin cloud of static. The arrangement feels crowded with activity, yet the underlying atmosphere remains curiously open.
That balance separates Children of the Wisteria from noise albums that use calm passages merely to increase the impact of later eruptions. Green Tea does not treat serenity and violence as alternating scenes. They coexist. The tranquility is not destroyed when the harshness arrives, and the harshness is not removed when the music becomes luminous.
“Patio Mist Euphoria” stretches beyond nine minutes and gives this coexistence its most spacious form. The title evokes domestic leisure, artificial cooling, summer heat, and the slightly chemical pleasure of water being sprayed into warm air. The music hangs in a similar suspended state. Broad drones create humidity while distortion passes through them in sheets.
The track’s euphoria is not clean. It feels overheated, dizzy, and close to sensory overload. Forté understands that pleasure can become disorienting when it lasts too long or arrives too intensely. The mist cools the skin while the air remains heavy. The sound offers relief without removing pressure.
Long duration changes how the harsh material is perceived. A burst of distortion can be experienced as impact, but several minutes of shifting noise become an environment. The body adapts to the volume, allowing smaller movements to emerge. A narrow feedback line changes direction. A low frequency swells beneath the drone. A brief thinning makes the remaining layers appear enormous.
“Tropical Chainsaw” contains the album’s most direct collision of paradise and machinery. “Tropical” promises humidity, color, fruit, vegetation, and escape. “Chainsaw” introduces fuel, teeth, labor, and destruction. Forté joins the words without turning the track into a joke. The music genuinely contains both.
Its harshness is more muscular, with grinding movement cutting across warmer atmospheric color. Yet the chainsaw element never becomes ordinary industrial aggression. The noise appears almost radiant, producing streaks of brightness as it tears through the mix. Destruction becomes another source of color.
The project name Green Tea also carries this dual quality. Forté took inspiration from Sheridan Le Fanu’s story “Green Tea,” in which the drink is connected to altered perception and a terrifying supernatural presence. Something associated with calm, health, and ritual becomes a doorway into hallucination. Green Tea’s music follows that route. Tranquility does not protect the listener from disturbance. It creates the conditions through which disturbance can enter.
Forté’s background in hardcore and blackened rock makes the project’s restraint especially interesting. Rorschach was built from physical urgency, dissonant guitar, and compressed violence. Raspberry Bulbs turned punk repetition into something raw and spectral. Green Tea retains the intensity of those practices while removing the conventional band. Guitar, drum, riff, and vocal confrontation give way to electronic density, but the sense of pressure remains bodily.
The difference is that Children of the Wisteria allows beauty to remain visible. Noise does not need to prove seriousness by rejecting pleasure. Forté lets soft synthesis, drifting drone, and almost spa-like calm enter the harsh field without apology. These elements are not ironic decorations. They are equal materials.
“Underground Orchids – Wisp” closes the album with its longest piece, extending beyond twelve minutes. The title joins hidden growth with near-disappearance. Orchids suggest intricate form, rarity, and cultivated beauty, but these flowers grow underground, away from display. The wisp is even less stable, something seen briefly before dissolving.
The track unfolds accordingly. Its harsh layers retain substantial weight, yet the piece feels less frontal than the earlier material. Sounds drift in and out of focus. Deep textures seem buried beneath the surface while lighter tones move above them like vapor. The album’s garden has become subterranean.
The long closing movement gives Forté room to reduce density without losing intensity. Near-silence never arrives, but certain layers recede enough for others to reveal their shapes. Distortion becomes less a weapon than soil, something dense and granular through which more delicate forms continue growing.
Wisteria is an especially suitable image for this music. Its hanging flowers can look soft and dreamlike, yet the plant is vigorous, heavy, and capable of overtaking structures. Its vines twist around supports, thicken with age, and become difficult to remove. Beauty and domination grow from the same organism.
The “children” of the title may therefore be the sounds themselves: related growths descending from one tangled source. Each track carries a botanical title or image, but the album does not become gentle nature worship. Branches conceal bone. Wasps hang above a wedding. Machinery cuts through the tropics. Orchids bloom where no light should reach.
The Satatuhatta CD presents these contradictions in a compact digipak, a polished physical form for music that repeatedly makes polish unstable. The label’s description of harsh noise floating upon an ocean of tranquilizing new age sound is unusually exact. Green Tea does not place a few ambient interludes between noise tracks. The ocean is always present, even when the surface is burning.
Children of the Wisteria succeeds because it refuses the easy emotional assignments attached to its materials. Harsh noise is not automatically anger. Ambient music is not automatically peace. New age sound is not automatically innocence. Forté mixes them until each begins carrying properties of the others.
The resulting album can feel crushing, restorative, humid, poisonous, and strangely inviting within the same minute. Its beauty has teeth, but its violence has color. The vines continue climbing through the electronics, wrapping themselves around every sharp frequency until noise and tranquility become parts of one impossible plant.

Green Tea - 2024 - Owl Arcana

 

Satatuhatta – SATATUHATTA-88  450.72MB FLAC

“Concrete Talisman” opens Owl Arcana with a contradiction heavy enough to carry the entire album. A talisman is supposed to protect through mystery, belief, and charged symbolism. Concrete protects through mass. Green Tea combines both ideas inside a six-minute surge where luminous synthesizer tones hover beneath harsh electronic pressure, as though a sacred object has been poured into a construction mold and left to harden around the listener. The noise is dense, but the atmosphere is not sealed. Light keeps leaking through it.
Owl Arcana is Nick Forté’s second Green Tea album for Finland’s Satatuhatta label and a direct continuation of the territory explored on Children of the Wisteria. The two records share an attraction to ambient-driven harsh noise, new age color, psychedelic depth, and natural imagery with concealed violence. The difference is perspective. Children of the Wisteria remained close to the ground among vines, branches, insects, orchids, patios, and machinery cutting through vegetation. Owl Arcana leaves the garden floor and enters the night sky. Its eleven tracks follow an owl through forest darkness, nesting, hunting, flight, and an increasingly supernatural ascent.
“Gateway to Deepest Sky” begins opening that vertical space. The title does not describe the nearest visible stars but a sky with depth, something entered rather than viewed. Forté’s broad ambient layers produce the sensation of open distance while distortion moves across them in thick sheets. The harshness does not simply block the view. It becomes weather encountered during the climb.
Green Tea’s strongest music depends upon this refusal to assign fixed emotional roles to sound. Soft synthesizers are not automatically peaceful, and noise is not automatically hostile. A glowing drone can feel ominous when held too long. Distortion can become strangely comforting once its movement surrounds the listener completely. Forté keeps exchanging those properties until calm and violence begin sharing one nervous system.
“Join the Night” makes that exchange feel voluntary. The title is an invitation, not a warning, yet the track’s darkness contains appetite. The owl is not merely a symbol of wisdom seated peacefully on a branch. It is a predator whose silence exists so that another animal will not detect its approach. Green Tea’s ambient beauty works the same way. It draws the listener inward while the harsher frequencies circle beyond immediate attention.
The album’s owl imagery avoids becoming cute or ornamental because it remains tied to physical behavior. Owls see through darkness, rotate their heads with disturbing freedom, digest prey, and later cough up compact pellets of bone, teeth, and fur. They are beautiful animals whose daily life depends upon killing quietly. Owl Arcana treats that combination of grace and brutality as a compositional principle.
“Snowy Eyes” is one of the record’s shorter pieces, but its title immediately suggests the pale face and enormous dark gaze of a snowy owl. The music feels exposed and cold, with bright frequencies cutting through a softer underlying field. Forté does not imitate a call or wingbeat. He translates the bird’s visual intensity into electronic contrast: white glare surrounding black attention.
The album is more spacious than its predecessor, yet the harsh layers can be even more concentrated. Instead of filling every moment with tangled botanical growth, Owl Arcana repeatedly clears openings around its noise. That extra room makes individual frequencies feel larger. A thin electronic whine can cross the stereo field like an object moving through moonlight. A low surge can suggest the forest floor far below.
“Dense Needle Vibrations” returns the record to close physical texture. The needles might belong to pine trees, medical equipment, or sharpened electronic points. Forté allows all three possibilities to remain active. High frequencies prick the surface while thicker distortion vibrates underneath, producing sound that seems both organic and mechanically amplified.
This track demonstrates how carefully Green Tea controls internal movement. The noise is heavy, but it never becomes one stationary wall. Fine layers tremble across broader masses. Abrasive signals briefly rise above the mix, then sink back into it. The piece feels densely inhabited rather than simply loud.
“Nesting in an Altered State” slows the flight and turns shelter into hallucination. A nest should offer stability, yet the altered state makes even rest unreliable. The ambient material becomes warmer and more enveloping, but the harsher elements continue shifting beneath it like branches unable to support a sleeping body.
Forté’s titles are unusually important because they do not merely decorate abstract music after the fact. Each one establishes a physical or psychic problem that the sound then inhabits. Concrete must become magical. The sky must become a gateway. A nest must remain protective while perception changes. The tracks do not illustrate these phrases literally, but their pacing and textures keep returning to the contradiction contained inside each title.
“Desire for Cosmic Change” is the album’s emotional center. At more than six minutes, it has room to expand beyond nocturnal forest imagery into something larger and less earthly. The word “desire” matters because cosmic change is too vast for an individual to command. The track sounds like yearning amplified beyond the scale of the body.
Ambient tones stretch outward while noise arrives in recurring waves, each one seeming to push against the limits established by the last. The piece does not deliver transformation as a triumphant climax. It remains inside the wanting. Change is imagined, approached, and obscured by the force required to reach it.
“Forest Solitude” is the longest track, extending past nine minutes. Solitude here does not mean silence. The forest is full of unseen movement, overlapping distances, and life that becomes audible only after human activity has receded. Forté builds the piece in the same manner. At first the mass seems continuous, but prolonged listening reveals layers moving at different speeds.
One electronic texture resembles wind pressing through branches. Another has the dry grain of insects or leaves. A deeper current forms the ground while brighter frequencies pass above it. None of these sounds needs to be a field recording for the forest to become convincing. The environment is produced through relationships of height, density, motion, and concealment.
The extended duration allows the listener’s hearing to adjust. Noise that initially feels overwhelming becomes habitat. Once that adaptation occurs, small changes gain enormous importance. A new frequency enters and the entire forest seems colder. A layer recedes and distance suddenly opens behind it.
“Worship Talon Scars” introduces devotion through injury. The phrase could describe scars received from the owl, markings treated as evidence of sacred contact. It could also describe worship directed toward the talons themselves, revering the part of the animal designed to seize and puncture. Green Tea’s beauty has always contained this kind of wound.
The track carries a more cutting character, with abrasive surfaces pressing forward and atmospheric color buried deeper in the mix. The softer material has not disappeared, but it must now be reached through damage. The arrangement turns listening into a form of contact where attraction and injury cannot be separated cleanly.
“Angelic Paralysis” pushes the contradiction further. Angels promise transcendence, motion between worlds, and wings. Paralysis removes movement. Forté suspends bright, almost celestial tones inside a dense electronic field that prevents them from rising freely. The track feels radiant and immobilized at once.
This is not heavenly music interrupted by noise. The harshness is what gives the radiance its body. Without resistance, the ambient tones might drift into harmless atmosphere. The surrounding distortion makes every glimpse of light feel earned and temporary.
The closing “Nocturnal Ascension” completes the album’s upward motion without turning it into victory. The owl rises, but the night rises with it. The piece gathers the record’s ambient breadth and abrasive density into one final climb, extending beyond six minutes while layers repeatedly open and close around the listener.
Ascension usually implies escape from physical limitation. Green Tea refuses that ease. The sound remains grainy, heavy, and bodily even at its most spacious. Wings must still move air. Talons remain attached. Whatever reaches the upper darkness carries the forest’s violence with it.
Owl Arcana lasts nearly an hour, considerably expanding the scale of Green Tea’s earlier full-length work. Its eleven-track design gives the album more distinct chambers, yet the sequencing creates one continuous nocturnal journey. The concrete talisman opens the passage, the sky deepens, the listener joins the night, and the owl gradually moves from observation toward mystical transformation.
The record’s new age and ambient elements are sincere, but sincerity does not make them safe. Forté understands that meditative music can alter perception, and altered perception may reveal things serenity normally keeps hidden. Green Tea offers tranquility as an entrance rather than a destination.
Forté’s background in Rorschach, Raspberry Bulbs, and other physically intense music remains audible in the pressure and discipline of these recordings. Green Tea does not sound like a hardcore guitarist relaxing into synthesizer music. The project carries hardcore’s bodily insistence into a form where force can be spread across long duration and hidden inside beauty.
Satatuhatta’s digipak CD gives the album a compact physical home for a sound that continually exceeds its boundaries. The artwork and owl-centered concept provide a clear route into the record, but repeated listening makes the route less certain. The owl may be predator, guide, guardian, witness, or hallucination. Its wisdom cannot be separated from its appetite.
Owl Arcana improves upon Children of the Wisteria by widening Green Tea’s world without abandoning its central discovery. Noise and calm do not have to alternate or defeat one another. They can occupy the same air, each revealing qualities hidden inside the other.
The owl passes silently through branches while the album surrounding it roars. That is the final puzzle. Silence belongs to the predator, not the recording. Green Tea makes the unseen flight audible as immense electronic pressure, then leaves the listener beneath the trees, staring upward after the talons have already passed.

Grunt - 2005 - Installation of Blood and Steel

 

Industrial Recollections – none  323.96MB FLAC

“Swarm of Human Locust” begins with a low electrical churn already gathering bodies inside it. The sound does not rush immediately toward maximum density. It advances through layers of analogue distortion, repetitive pulses, scraped frequencies, and distant vocal pressure until the title’s image becomes physical. A locust swarm is not frightening because of one insect. It is frightening because countless small movements merge into a single dark mass capable of stripping a landscape. Grunt constructs the opening piece the same way. Individual noises remain briefly audible, then disappear into collective hunger.
Installation of Blood and Steel was recorded on April 25, 2005, using an analogue four-track. Its four pieces run for approximately thirty-eight minutes, originally issued by Sweden’s Harsh Head Rituals as a cassette limited to fifty copies. The same label released a vinyl edition in 2007, and Industrial Recollections later returned the material to circulation on CD. Each format changes the surface, but the recording’s central character remains tied to tape: compressed violence, saturated middle frequencies, unstable edges, and sounds forced to occupy the same restricted space.
This is Grunt at a particularly blunt intersection between harsh noise and power electronics. Mikko Aspa does not construct the album around clear verse-like vocal passages or neatly separated electronic backgrounds. Voice, feedback, metal, oscillator, and tape overload are joined into one difficult body. When vocals enter, they rarely sit above the noise with complete authority. They are dragged through it, damaged by the same machinery used to amplify them.
“Swarm of Human Locust” develops through accumulation. A rough rhythmic pattern forms beneath the distortion, not a beat in the conventional sense but a recurring mechanical shove. Each repetition seems to carry more debris. Higher frequencies cut across the pulse, while the voice appears as a hostile human trace within a process much larger than speech.
The title suggests population transformed into plague. Human beings become consuming units, moving collectively, exhausting resources, and leaving absence behind them. Grunt does not need spoken explanation to make that idea audible. The track’s pressure comes from multiplication. Every sound appears to attract another until the recording seems overcrowded beyond structural safety.
The analogue four-track is crucial because it does not offer unlimited space. Layers compete. Frequencies mask one another. Distortion enters not only through deliberate effects but through the recording medium being pushed against its limits. The machine does not stand outside the performance as a neutral witness. It participates by compressing every element into a thickened, contaminated surface.
“Iron Rain over Zion” changes the album’s movement. Recorded live in the studio along with its second part, the piece feels less assembled than activated. Electronics rise and strike in repeated downward gestures, creating the sensation of material falling through air. The title combines military destruction with a spiritually and politically charged location, turning bombardment into an image of historical and symbolic violation.
The sound carries that weight without becoming cinematic. There are no realistic explosions or battlefield samples guiding the listener toward a specific scene. Instead, Grunt reduces bombardment to pressure, repetition, impact, and helpless duration. A descending electronic figure returns while harsher material gathers around it. The listener is not shown an event. The listener is placed beneath a mechanism.
The live studio method gives the track an unstable momentum. Changes feel like decisions made inside the sound rather than edits imposed afterward. A frequency grows too large, another is introduced against it, and the whole structure bends under their combined force. The performance survives through response.
This responsiveness distinguishes the album from a perfectly fixed harsh-noise wall. Installation of Blood and Steel can become extremely dense, but its surfaces keep shifting. One layer moves forward, another retreats, and moments of reduced pressure expose smaller mechanical details. The noise remains severe because it changes, not because it refuses all change.
“Iron Rain over Zion Pt2” continues the same material without functioning as a simple reprise. The first part establishes the storm; the second seems to enter its aftermath while the machinery remains operational. Frequencies feel more exposed in places, allowing individual tones and rough pulses to emerge from the broader mass.
Dividing the performance into two tracks also changes the listener’s sense of duration. The title repeats, suggesting that the event has not ended when the first section stops. Part two denies the relief normally provided by a track boundary. The rain continues. The second side of the image begins where the first should have concluded.
The voice becomes particularly effective when only fragments survive. A clearly intelligible declaration can be evaluated at a distance. Grunt’s damaged vocal delivery leaves intention obvious while refusing full access to language. Anger, contempt, urgency, and exertion remain, but the exact sentence is often swallowed by electronics.
This creates an uneasy balance between command and failure. The vocalist sounds as though he is attempting to dominate the noise, yet the noise repeatedly consumes him. Human will is present, but it is not guaranteed control over the system it has created.
The title track closes the album with its longest and most concentrated statement. “Installation of Blood and Steel” sounds less like a description of sculpture than an instruction for constructing an environment. Steel provides structure, machinery, weaponry, and cold permanence. Blood introduces injury, mortality, warmth, and contamination. An installation joins them inside a space the audience must physically enter.
Grunt’s sound makes that union immediate. Metallic harshness forms the frame, while the vocal and overloaded analogue texture provide the bodily element. The electronics are not clean or futuristic. They feel stained, handled, and forced through material resistance. Steel is already carrying blood before the listener arrives.
The track develops through a heavy repeated foundation. Low and middle frequencies create a grinding base while sharper feedback cuts into it. Unlike the swarming opening piece, this final construction feels more vertical and architectural. The sound rises in layers around the listener.
Yet the installation is not stable. Distortion causes the structure to vibrate and deform. Tones slip out of position. Repetition becomes increasingly oppressive because it does not build toward a liberating release. The machinery continues its task without explaining what completion would look like.
The album’s four titles form a tightly connected vocabulary. Swarm, iron rain, Zion, blood, and steel all describe collective force acting upon bodies and places. Nature, industry, warfare, belief, and flesh are pulled into one system. The imagery is large, but the recording remains physically crude and close.
That tension is one of the release’s strengths. The titles imply mass destruction and symbolic scale, while the actual sound originated through limited equipment and an analogue four-track. Grunt does not need technological sophistication to create enormous pressure. Restricted means become part of the hostility.
The original cassette edition strengthens this contradiction. Fifty small objects carried a recording concerned with swarms, bombardment, and monumental installation. The music suggests vast systems, yet it circulated through a narrow underground network by mail, trade, and personal contact. Its power was contained inside a plastic shell that could fit in one hand.
The 2007 LP gave the material more physical breadth. Turning the record divided the two “Iron Rain” sections while emphasizing the long duration of each side. Vinyl also introduced its own low-frequency weight and surface noise, joining another mechanical process to the recording’s analogue violence.
The later Industrial Recollections CD preserves the complete program with sharper access to its internal layers. The transfer reveals that the album is not one continuous gray block. Feedback, rhythm, voice, low pressure, and tape saturation occupy different depths. Digital clarity does not clean the music. It shows how carefully the dirt was arranged.
Installation of Blood and Steel belongs to a period when Grunt’s work was already established but still intensely direct. The project had moved beyond early primitive noise without replacing physical roughness with polished composition. Structure is present, yet it remains embedded inside overload.
The record’s strongest achievement is making force sound organized without making it orderly. The swarm moves collectively, but no individual controls it. Iron falls according to gravity, but destruction beneath it is chaotic. Steel forms a structure, but blood enters every seam.
When the title track ends, the installation does not feel dismantled. The recording simply withdraws access to it. The analogue machinery stops, the vocal pressure disappears, and the room returns with its surfaces apparently intact. Somewhere behind that silence, the swarm is still gathering, iron is still falling, and blood is drying across the steel.

Grunt - 2025 - Karike

 

Institute Of Paraphilia Studies – none  522.94MB FLAC

Karike begins with a rough, continuous movement that refuses to reveal where the natural world ends and the equipment begins. Dry crackling rubs against electrical pressure. Thin feedback rises through a deeper churn, while irregular contact sounds appear close enough to suggest branches, wire, stones, insects, or damaged metal being handled beside the microphone. Grunt does not separate these possibilities. The first untitled piece creates one environment in which organic matter and manufactured noise have already entered the same circulatory system.
Released through Institute of Paraphilia Studies, Karike contains nine untitled pieces totaling sixty-three minutes. The CD is housed in a DVD-sized digisleeve with a twenty-page photographic booklet, making the visual material an equal half of the release rather than decorative packaging added after the music was complete. Grunt describes the album as a meeting of the natural and unnatural in both sound and image. That meeting gives Karike a character distinct from the metal percussion, vocal violence, and martial pressure associated with many earlier Grunt recordings.
The opening ten-minute piece establishes the album’s scale. It does not advance through a recognizable power-electronics structure of introductory drone, escalating synthesizer, and dominant vocal declaration. Textures enter slowly, overlap, and continue altering one another. A low current creates depth while sharper surfaces move through it like debris carried by wind or water. When distortion thickens, traces of the underlying environment remain audible.
This survival of detail is important. Grunt’s harshness does not erase its sources. It makes them harder to identify while preserving their physical behavior. Something scrapes because it has a surface. Something vibrates because pressure is moving through it. Something crackles because it is dry, unstable, overloaded, or breaking apart. Even the most abstract electronics retain a material logic.
The nine tracks are untitled, removing the thematic instructions that usually guide Grunt’s audience. There are no images of warfare, social sickness, anatomy, sexuality, or political conflict supplied through track names. The listener receives duration and sequence, then must enter each section without a verbal map. This gives Karike an unusual openness while preventing it from becoming neutral. The sounds remain severe, but their severity is no longer attached to one announced target.
The second piece narrows the field. A rough mechanical pulse develops beneath lighter surface activity, suggesting a device attempting to operate among loose natural material. The pattern never becomes clean enough to function as industrial rhythm. It catches, drags, and accumulates friction. Each return seems to carry a little more dirt inside the mechanism.
Grunt has always used primitive means to prevent machinery from sounding futuristic. Electronics are handled as physical objects rather than portals into sleek technological space. Feedback is something that pushes air. A contact microphone reveals impact and vibration. Metal carries rust, weight, and resistance. Karike extends that approach by placing the apparatus closer to materials that appear gathered rather than manufactured.
The album’s booklet reinforces this attention to gathering. The photographic component suggests observation, wandering, and selection: objects and surfaces noticed because they occupy an uncertain position between growth and decay, usefulness and abandonment, landscape and evidence. A fragment becomes significant not because it has been polished into art, but because someone stopped long enough to examine it.
The Finnish title Karike can suggest loose organic debris, the litter of leaves, bark, needles, twigs, and decomposing material that gathers on the ground. It is not pristine nature. It is nature after separation, damage, weather, and death have begun their work. Forest litter may look inactive, yet it contains insects, fungus, moisture, seeds, and ongoing decomposition. The ground is crowded with processes hidden beneath apparent waste.
Grunt’s music behaves like that layer. Each track contains fragments whose original identity has been detached. A metallic scrape, a brittle rustle, a muted impact, or a short electronic tone enters the pile and begins interacting with everything around it. The album does not rebuild these fragments into a clean structure. It lets them remain debris while revealing the activity inside them.
The third and fourth pieces bring voice closer to the surface, though the human presence remains less dominant than on many Grunt releases. Breath, mouth sounds, or strained vocal fragments move among the electronics without assuming command. They can resemble another form of animal activity within the field, a body producing noise because it is exerting pressure, responding to discomfort, or attempting communication.
When language becomes partially audible, it is quickly absorbed again. Karike does not organize itself around statements. Voice is treated as tissue, airflow, vibration, and emotional residue. This makes the human body part of the same organic and artificial mixture as everything else.
The fifth piece feels heavier and more enclosed. Low-frequency movement forms a dense floor while smaller impacts strike above it. The arrangement suggests material being compressed rather than exploded. Pressure continues until individual fragments lose space between them, creating a thick mass that still contains hundreds of tiny edges.
This is a different violence from Installation of Blood and Steel. That 2005 recording built force through bombardment, swarming electronics, analogue overload, and titles filled with iron, blood, and large-scale destruction. Karike works closer to the ground. Its violence comes through weathering, abrasion, decomposition, and machinery entering environments where no machinery sounds entirely appropriate.
The album does not romanticize nature as an innocent alternative to industrial contamination. Natural processes can be indifferent and destructive. Branches break, insects consume, moisture rots, roots split structures, and dead organisms become material for other life. Karike hears nature as pressure and transformation, not peace.
Likewise, the unnatural is not represented only as invasion. Electronic sound can merge with wind, friction, and granular movement until the distinction becomes impossible to maintain. A sustained frequency may begin like an oscillator and end resembling an insect chorus. A harsh scrape may sound metallic until its irregular grain suggests bark or stone. Grunt repeatedly lets the categories exchange properties.
The sixth and seventh tracks are relatively compact, but they do not function as interludes. Their shorter durations concentrate the album’s materials into tighter zones. Repetitive movements become more apparent, and sudden changes in density feel sharper because there is less time for gradual acclimation.
One passage develops from dry clicking and unstable hiss, then expands into a broader electronic surge. Another allows rough low-end pressure to dominate until the surrounding details seem half-buried. Karike’s sequencing feels like turning over sections of ground and finding a different mixture beneath each one.
The untitled presentation makes these transitions more important than individual identities. The record is best heard as a continuous field divided into nine areas. Each track has its own density and motion, but no piece announces itself as the album’s conceptual center. The hour accumulates horizontally.
This structure also resists the usual demand that harsh noise deliver memorable peaks. Karike is less interested in one devastating climax than in sustained contact with unstable material. The listener becomes attentive to smaller changes: a texture drying out, a pulse slipping, a vocal trace entering, or a low tone altering the perceived depth of the entire mix.
The eighth piece brings some of the album’s most pronounced contrast between delicate detail and heavy electronics. Quiet fragments remain exposed long enough to create vulnerability before denser sound enters around them. The harshness feels larger because it has not been continuous. Silence and near-silence prepare space for pressure.
Grunt uses restraint here without moving toward ambient music. The quieter sections remain abrasive in miniature. A faint scrape can carry more discomfort than a loud wall because its source appears close, isolated, and physically specific. The listener cannot hide inside density when only one rough surface is moving.
The final piece lasts nearly eight minutes and gathers the album’s methods without summarizing them neatly. Organic-seeming friction, electrical hum, voice, and denser distortion continue exchanging positions. The music does not rise toward a ceremonial conclusion. It remains in process until the recording stops.
That lack of resolution suits the album’s subject. Debris does not complete itself. It continues breaking down, shifting position, collecting moisture, drying, and entering other systems. The end of the disc marks only the end of observation.
Karike demonstrates how far Grunt can move from familiar power-electronics formulas without losing intensity. The album contains harsh noise, but its harshness grows through attention to surfaces. It contains vocals, but the voice does not rule. It contains natural sound, but nature offers no purity or rescue.
The twenty-page booklet and hour of untitled audio form one extended study of matter after certainty has fallen away. Manufactured objects weather into the landscape. Organic material becomes hard, brittle, and mechanical. Electronics reveal animal movement. Human breath enters the debris and loses its privilege.
Karike remains severe because it refuses distance. Everything is heard close to its point of friction. Leaves, wire, skin, stone, tape, microphone, and electrical current occupy the same unstable ground. Nothing stays clean enough to represent only itself. By the end, the unnatural has taken root, the organic has begun to sound engineered, and the debris continues moving long after the eye has mistaken it for something dead.

Bastard Noise & Bizarre Uproar - 2025 - Galactic Penitentiary

 

Self-released – none  296.39MB FLAC

Galactic Penitentiary begins with a low electronic pressure that feels less like an entrance than the locking of an enormous door. The first nineteen-minute piece does not introduce Bastard Noise and Bizarre Uproar separately, then invite them to trade recognizable gestures. Their sounds arrive already fused into one hostile enclosure. Deep oscillations move beneath scraped feedback, ruined vocal matter, and unstable bursts whose edges appear to strike the walls and return altered. The collaboration does not suggest two artists occupying the same room. It suggests that the room itself has become the instrument, a sealed structure powered by punishment.
Released in 2025 as a self-issued limited CD, Galactic Penitentiary contains two long pieces, each occupying roughly half of the disc. “Galactic Penitentiary 1” runs for nineteen minutes and thirteen seconds, followed by “Galactic Penitentiary 2” at nineteen minutes and thirty-three. Eric Wood and Pasi Markkula are credited as performers, with Si Clark responsible for the design. The symmetry gives the album the feel of two adjoining prison blocks built from the same materials but organized around different pressures.
The cover establishes the scale before the disc begins. Two human skulls float inside a pale circular diagram resembling a cosmic map, mechanical dial, institutional seal, or orbital prison plan. Bastard Noise appears above, Bizarre Uproar below, with the title stamped across the center in dark red. The image reduces the human body to its most durable remains and places those remains inside a system extending beyond ordinary earthly punishment. There is no landscape, horizon, or visible exit. Even death appears contained by the architecture.
Bastard Noise brings a long history of treating electronic noise as ecological and species-level accusation. Eric Wood’s work repeatedly imagines humanity not as the heroic center of existence but as an invasive organism exhausting every system that supports it. His electronics can resemble distressed animal communication, planetary machinery, collapsing infrastructure, and transmissions sent after human language has become useless. The skull emblem associated with Bastard Noise is not merely a death symbol. It is the final image of a species that believed itself indispensable.
Bizarre Uproar contributes a different form of confinement. Pasi Markkula’s project has spent decades developing power electronics as physical degradation, obsession, contaminated sexuality, and deliberately ugly performance. Where Bastard Noise often points outward toward extinction and environmental consequence, Bizarre Uproar drags attention back toward the enclosed human body. Voice, feedback, flesh, repetition, and private compulsion become one damaged circuit.
Galactic Penitentiary works because it does not force those approaches into agreement. The cosmic and the bodily remain in conflict. One layer suggests a prison large enough to hold civilizations, while another sounds trapped against the skin. Immense low frequencies open distances beneath close, suffocating vocal abrasion. The album feels infinite and airless at the same time.
The first piece grows through steady contamination. A broad electronic foundation appears almost stable until harsher elements begin spreading across it. Feedback does not simply sit above the low end. It penetrates the larger mass, producing ridges, tears, and narrow channels through which other signals briefly become visible. Vocal material surfaces in degraded form, carrying strain more clearly than language.
That damaged intelligibility matters. Neither project uses the voice to guide the listener through a coherent narrative. The body can be heard, but the message arrives after processing, saturation, and psychic pressure have removed its authority. A shout becomes texture. Breath becomes evidence. A repeated phrase loses meaning and turns into behavior.
The penitentiary is therefore not only a place containing prisoners. It is a machine that changes whatever enters it. Speech becomes noise. Identity becomes residue. Time becomes repetition measured without progress.
The nineteen-minute duration allows this process to become environmental. During the opening minutes, the listener can still hear electronic events as separate attacks. Gradually the accumulation changes perception. Distortion ceases to feel temporary and becomes atmosphere. Smaller fluctuations begin carrying enormous weight because the ear has adapted to the larger pressure.
Bastard Noise’s low-end movement prevents the environment from becoming flat. The bass often feels alive beneath the surface, shifting slowly enough to be experienced physically before its direction becomes obvious. Bizarre Uproar’s harsher midrange and vocal corrosion then give that planetary body an infected nervous system. The collaboration is not noise stacked upon noise. It is anatomy constructed from incompatible scales.
The title also gives the record a science-fiction dimension without requiring synthesizer melody, spoken narrative, or cinematic effects. “Galactic” expands the prison beyond one government or planet. It imagines punishment as infrastructure built into the universe, a system so extensive that distance offers no escape. Space is normally associated with freedom because it appears limitless. Galactic Penitentiary turns limitlessness into the size of the cell.
The second piece begins from a similarly closed condition but develops with more pronounced rupture. The sound appears to separate into unstable bands: low mechanical weight, corrosive middle frequencies, and higher feedback that flashes like damaged communications. These layers repeatedly collide, briefly opening space before filling it again.
Where the first part constructs the institution, the second seems to move deeper inside it. Rhythmic suggestions appear without developing into a beat. A pulse repeats like automated security, ventilation, machinery, or a life-support system maintaining bodies only so their captivity can continue. The repetition provides motion but no route.
This is one of the album’s cruelest qualities. It keeps moving without producing escape. Sound crosses the stereo field, oscillators change pitch, voices erupt, and density rises or collapses, yet the listener remains inside the same system. Development becomes another function of containment.
The titles associated with the release’s imagery and promotion sharpen this condition: final disposal, human excrement, cold prison, mega grave, millions of murders occurring in the blink of an eye. These phrases treat mass death not as tragic exception but as industrial process. Disposal implies administration. A mega grave is not one person’s burial but infrastructure built for scale. The blink of an eye makes atrocity faster than comprehension.
Bastard Noise’s anti-human themes fit this imagery naturally, but Bizarre Uproar prevents it from remaining an abstract extinction fantasy. Human excrement and bodily degradation bring the cosmic accusation down into intimate matter. The species responsible for planetary destruction is still an animal producing waste, fear, fluids, and damaged speech.
The album’s best moments occur when these levels become inseparable. A low oscillation can suggest spacecraft engines, geological pressure, or the internal vibration of a body held against machinery. A vocal burst might be one prisoner, millions of victims, or the last surviving human transmission. The sound refuses scale.
The nearly equal pieces also create a formal punishment. Each time the listener adjusts to one density, another texture takes control. Relief appears only as a quieter degree of exposure. A reduction in volume reveals thin electrical activity, distant vocal traces, or low pressure that had been hidden beneath the louder mass. Silence never arrives because the prison systems remain operational.
Despite its brutality, Galactic Penitentiary is not indiscriminate. Wood and Markkula understand duration, spectral balance, and the use of interruption. They do not maintain every frequency at maximum intensity for thirty-nine minutes. They leave unstable gaps, allowing one layer to become vulnerable before another closes around it. The sound is overwhelming because it has depth.
The CD format serves that depth well. Bass retains physical weight while high abrasion remains sharply separated. The listener can follow several movements inside what first appears to be saturation. Increased volume reveals more detail, but also makes the music’s architecture more difficult to escape. The cell becomes clearer as it becomes larger.
Galactic Penitentiary is a collaboration in the strongest sense because neither project disappears and neither remains untouched. Bastard Noise’s skull-system electronics become more bodily and diseased. Bizarre Uproar’s private degradation expands into planetary scale. The result cannot be divided neatly into American and Finnish sections, ecological accusation and power-electronics depravity, Eric Wood and Pasi Markkula.
By the final minutes, the distinction between prisoner, prison, and machinery has collapsed. The voices have entered the electronics, the electronics have acquired bodily strain, and the cosmic diagram on the cover begins to resemble a device powered by the skulls trapped within it. The album stops after thirty-eight minutes and forty-six seconds, but the ending offers no release. The door has not opened. Access to the cell has simply been switched off.

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