Jeph Jerman - 2024 - Burn-im-rag

 

Buried In Slag And Debris. – BISAD 046  213.96MB FLAC

Burn-im-rag begins with a dry scatter of contact sounds that seem too small to support an entire side of vinyl. Something rubs, clicks, rolls, or catches against another surface. A faint environmental bed sits behind it, not silent but spacious enough that every disturbance acquires a precise location. Jeph Jerman does not rush to enlarge these fragments into a wall of sound. He lets them remain stubbornly physical. Each scrape contains the resistance of one material against another, and each short resonance measures the air surrounding it. The recording asks the listener to approach rather than preparing an impact from a distance.
The album contains two pieces, each occupying approximately one side of the LP. “Burn-im-rag 1” runs for eighteen minutes, while the second part continues for just over seventeen. The division suggests a matched pair rather than two unrelated compositions. Both were assembled during autumn 2023 from source recordings collected across twenty-five years in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, California, and Washington. Locations include Black Mesa, Colorado Springs, Cottonwood, the Jemez River, Joshua Tree, Seattle, and Twin Arrows. These sites are separated by hundreds of miles, yet Jerman removes the obvious travelogue markers that would make the album a sequence of scenic postcards. Wind, water, abandoned structures, insects, stone, and handled objects are brought together according to texture rather than geography.
This long collection period gives the record an unusual relationship with time. A sound recorded in 1998 can sit beside one captured in 2023 without being announced as older. Twenty-five years collapse into thirty-five minutes, but the materials retain evidence of different air, equipment, weather, and distance. Jerman does not attempt to make every source sound as though it occurred during one continuous afternoon. Small differences in recording texture remain, allowing the construction to breathe through its seams.
The title Burn-im-rag resembles a damaged instruction, phrase, place-name, or fragment overheard incorrectly. Its punctuation makes the words difficult to settle. “Burn” suggests heat, destruction, clearing, or exposure. “Rag” suggests cloth, waste material, improvised cleaning tool, or something worn down through repeated use. Between them sits “im,” neither fully grammatical nor entirely accidental. The title behaves like the recording: familiar materials placed close enough to produce meaning, but never forced into one stable explanation.
The first side grows through accumulation, though the growth is rarely linear. Loose grains of sound gather, separate, and return in altered combinations. Hard objects strike with little dramatic emphasis. Fibrous textures brush the microphone or another surface. Brief metallic resonances stretch farther than expected, their decays exposing the shape of the surrounding space. Jerman’s editing turns these events into relationships rather than demonstrations of unusual objects.
This is central to his work. Found materials are not interesting merely because they have been rescued from abandonment. Rusted metal, stone, branches, bone, wire, cloth, and architectural debris all possess ready-made cultural associations, but Jerman usually refuses to explain them into narrative. Their value begins with timbre. A deteriorating object changes shape, loses structural certainty, and responds differently when touched. Age becomes audible as looseness, brittleness, roughness, and unstable resonance.
The sound of deterioration is not necessarily loud. Burn-im-rag often works at a modest level, forcing attention toward small distinctions. One dry crack differs from another in length and weight. A soft rustle may reveal several overlapping movements when heard closely. What initially resembles background noise becomes a field of separate actions, each with its own depth.
This restraint prevents the album from becoming an exhibition of field-recording purity. Jerman is not presenting untouched locations and asking the listener to admire their authenticity. The sources have been assembled, edited, and placed in deliberate proximity. A desert recording can meet sound gathered beside a river. An urban room can open onto an abandoned roadside site. The composition exists in the friction between documentary sound and constructed listening.
“Burn-im-rag 1” occasionally approaches rhythm, but the patterns remain unstable. A repeated clack or scrape begins suggesting a pulse, only for another sound to interrupt its spacing. The body anticipates regularity and is denied it. Jerman does not destroy rhythm aggressively. He lets materials produce their own irregular timing, shaped by gravity, hand movement, wind, current, or the uneven surfaces upon which they fall.
The second side begins less like a continuation than another angle on the same pile of material. Its opening feels more exposed, with greater separation between events. Tiny movements appear against a broad environmental hush. The ear begins searching the apparent emptiness and discovers that nothing is actually still. Air shifts. Distant frequencies change. A faint contact sound appears at the edge of perception and makes the entire field feel newly occupied.
This attention to near-silence is different from using silence as dramatic pause. The quieter sections are full compositions in themselves. They allow the listener’s hearing to adjust until sounds previously treated as negligible become structural. A soft movement of debris can suddenly carry more weight than a loud impact because the ear has been prepared to follow its complete life from emergence through decay.
As the second part develops, denser clusters return. Materials tumble or are stirred, producing short bursts of layered friction. Some passages resemble the contents of a drawer being moved gently. Others suggest stones shifting under water, leaves crossing a hard surface, or small pieces of metal suspended from wire. The sources remain ambiguous because Jerman protects their sonic behavior from the limiting certainty of identification.
Knowing that a sound is “a rock” can end attention prematurely. The word replaces the event. Burn-im-rag reverses that habit. A rock, if a rock is present, becomes density, scrape, impact, resonance, and duration before it becomes an object again. The album encourages hearing matter without immediately translating it into names.
The geographic sources still matter, even when they cannot be separated by ear. Black Mesa and Twin Arrows carry histories of land use, travel, Indigenous presence, abandonment, and roadside change. Joshua Tree suggests desert wind and stone. Seattle introduces a wetter urban environment. The Jemez River provides water and movement. Yet the record does not package these locations into an argument about the American West. They survive as different acoustic pressures folded into one portable space.
That refusal of scenery makes Burn-im-rag feel more intimate than panoramic. The listener is rarely positioned before an enormous landscape. The microphone seems close to the ground, near surfaces and objects too minor to dominate ordinary attention. Jerman hears the environment from within its debris rather than from a scenic overlook.
The LP format strengthens this scale. Each side becomes a sustained field that cannot be reduced comfortably to isolated tracks. Turning the record over creates the album’s only major break, a manual interruption that mirrors the handled materials within the sound. Vinyl also gives the quieter textures a physical threshold. Surface noise can mingle with the recording, making it briefly uncertain whether a faint crackle belongs to the composition, the pressing, or the listener’s copy.
This ambiguity is appropriate for work assembled from sounds whose origins are already partially hidden. The record player adds another environment to the environments gathered between 1998 and 2023. Dust, static, stylus movement, room tone, and playback volume join the source material without asking permission.
Grant Richardson’s mastering preserves the differences between fragile detail and harder contact. The album is not pushed into uniform loudness. Small sounds retain room around them, while denser passages gain weight without flattening their internal motion. The dynamic range allows attention to move closer and farther away throughout each side.
The photographs by Jerman and Chris Gibson’s design extend the recording’s interest in surfaces without explaining it. The release belongs to Buried in Slag and Debris, a label name almost comically suited to Jerman’s attraction to overlooked and deteriorating matter. Yet Burn-im-rag is not a celebration of junk for its own sake. Debris becomes valuable because it reveals processes: rusting, drying, breaking, rubbing, weathering, and being carried from one place to another.
The album’s emotional effect develops indirectly. There is no melody instructing the listener toward melancholy and no narrative declaring loss. Still, the twenty-five-year span gives the sounds a quiet gravity. Some locations may have changed beyond recognition. Objects may no longer exist. Weather events passed once and cannot be recorded again. The album preserves them without turning preservation into nostalgia.
Jerman has spent decades moving away from sound as illustration and toward sound as sufficient subject. Burn-im-rag demonstrates how radical that simplicity can remain. Nothing here needs to represent a larger drama. A scrape is permitted to be a scrape long enough for its complexity to become strange.
By the end of the second side, the listener has not been transported to one identifiable place. Instead, the distinction between location, object, recording, and playback has loosened. Twenty-five years of gathered matter have become one temporary listening environment, held together by friction and attention.
Burn-im-rag does not conclude with resolution. The final sounds recede into the same open field from which the album appeared, leaving the impression that activity continues below ordinary notice. Something shifts against something else. Air passes through a structure. A small object changes position and produces a brief sound no one was meant to hear. Jerman catches it, carries it across years and places it beside another fragment until the debris begins speaking in its own patient language.

Jeph Jerman - 2024 - black mesa

 

Rural Situationism – RS0204  147.65MB FLAC

Black Mesa begins with distance behaving like a sound source. A faint current moves through the recording before the ear can decide whether it is wind, insects, electrical activity, loose vegetation, or the microphone’s own contact with the air. Jeph Jerman does not identify the event or isolate it for inspection. He allows several small pressures to coexist until the location emerges without becoming scenery. The mesa is not presented through a dramatic panoramic sweep. It is approached close to the ground, where dry matter shifts, hard surfaces answer one another, and the apparent quiet contains more activity than the first few minutes can comfortably hold.
Released by Rural Situationism in 2024, Black Mesa consists of one twenty-nine-minute piece recorded at Black Mesa, Arizona. The compact disc edition was limited to one hundred copies and housed in a cardboard wallet, an appropriately modest container for a work that refuses to treat the landscape as a monumental spectacle. The label describes its practice through phrases such as “Life is the medium” and “Cultivate the Deep Map,” ideas that align closely with Jerman’s long attention to overlooked materials, wandering, site-specific listening, and the difference between being present in a location and merely collecting its recognizable sounds.
Black Mesa is a place-name with considerable weight. It suggests elevation, geological duration, exposed stone, desert distance, and a horizon that seems to divide the atmosphere into layers. The title could easily encourage an artist to produce an enormous, cinematic field recording, something filled with wind designed to communicate scale. Jerman moves in the opposite direction. The recording’s scale is built from details. A small scrape can define more space than a loud gust. A distant pulse can alter the apparent depth of the entire field. Nothing announces, “This is the desert.” The desert becomes audible through countless minor relations.
The single-track format matters because the piece does not behave like a collection of separate field studies. There are no titles dividing birds from weather, stone from machinery, or morning from afternoon. The listener remains inside one continuous act of attention. Changes occur, but they do not arrive as obvious movements. A texture grows more granular. A distant layer becomes temporarily clearer. Something brushes or shifts nearby, then disappears before identification can settle it.
This uncertainty is not a puzzle designed to conceal sources. Jerman’s work repeatedly challenges the reflex to stop listening once a sound has been named. Identification can reduce a complex event to a noun: wind, wire, insect, rock. Black Mesa keeps those nouns unstable. Wind becomes pressure, irregular rhythm, low vibration, and movement across the stereo field. A hard object becomes attack, density, resonance, and decay. The recording returns sound to behavior.
The environment often seems nearly still, but that stillness is crowded. Desert quiet is not the absence of sound. It is a condition in which distances become easier to hear. A minute event close to the microphone may coexist with another occurring far beyond it, and the empty air between them becomes part of the composition. Jerman is especially attentive to this middle space. The location is not built only from obvious foreground and background. It is built from the changing relationship between them.
At several points the piece seems to lean toward a stable drone. A low, sustained layer begins functioning like a foundation, encouraging the listener to hear the smaller sounds as details placed above it. Then the apparent drone shifts, revealing itself as another environmental process rather than a continuous electronic tone. Stability in Black Mesa is temporary. The earth may appear immovable, but air, temperature, vegetation, animals, and distant human activity continually redraw its acoustic surface.
This makes the recording feel geological without pretending to reproduce geological time. The mesa itself belongs to durations far beyond human perception, yet the microphone catches only temporary events. Jerman places those scales beside each other indirectly. Brief clicks and rustles occur against a landscape whose physical formation cannot be heard changing. The stable mass and the passing incident meet inside the same half hour.
Human presence remains ambiguous. There are sounds that may come from handling, movement, equipment, nearby structures, or objects activated deliberately, but the recording never centers the artist as performer. Jerman does not arrive to dominate the site with an improvisation. His activity, when audible, appears folded into everything else. The person recording is another temporary body within the field.
That humility separates Black Mesa from field recording used as proof of travel. There is no trophy sound announcing that the artist reached a remote location and returned with its essence. A place cannot be reduced to twenty-nine minutes, and the recording does not claim otherwise. It captures one encounter shaped by weather, position, microphone, attention, and the particular moment in which all of those conditions met.
The cardboard-wallet CD reinforces that lack of spectacle. The edition is small, but the object does not turn scarcity into luxury. Rural Situationism’s releases function more like portable site documents, compact physical invitations to listen deeply rather than elaborate collector monuments. Black Mesa can sit quietly on a shelf, its plainness protecting the scale of the experience inside.
Jerman’s history gives the work additional context. His earlier project Hands To was associated with rough texture, found materials, noise, and physical improvisation. Over time, his solo work increasingly brought environmental sound and small acoustic events toward the center. Black Mesa does not represent a rejection of noise. It reveals noise before genre has claimed it. Friction, wind pressure, dry vegetation, distant mechanical hum, and microphone disturbance all contain abrasion, but none must be exaggerated into assault.
The piece can become harsh at modest volume because its surfaces are so exposed. A dry scrape carries no soft harmonic cushion. A brittle contact sound can feel severe when surrounded by open space. Jerman’s restraint makes these moments more physical than a continuous wall of distortion would. The ear encounters the edge directly.
There is also a quiet rhythm throughout the recording, though it never hardens into meter. Repeated environmental gestures create temporary pulses: a recurring rustle, a distant oscillation, small impacts separated by uneven intervals. The mind begins organizing them, then the pattern shifts. This is rhythm without agreement, produced by several independent processes briefly overlapping.
Black Mesa rewards volume adjustment. Played loudly, tiny details become startlingly close and the air itself gains texture. Played quietly, the recording merges with the listener’s room, making it difficult to determine which creak, distant engine, or movement belongs to Arizona and which belongs to the present environment. This blending is not a defect. It extends the site rather than pretending playback can recreate it perfectly.
The listener’s room becomes another layer in the work. Speakers move air in a different location. Outside sounds enter. The original field recording meets walls, furniture, neighborhood activity, and the listener’s own movement. Black Mesa is therefore never heard in isolation. Each playback creates a temporary acoustic bridge between the mesa and somewhere else.
Unlike Burn-im-rag, which assembled source material gathered across many locations and years, Black Mesa remains committed to one named place. That concentration changes Jerman’s method. He is not creating relations between geographically distant fragments. He is remaining with one field long enough for its internal variety to emerge. The recording demonstrates that a single location does not produce a single sound.
The title’s lowercase presentation also suits the work. Black Mesa is not raised into a heroic proper noun dominating the page. It remains a location, a material fact, and an environment existing before and after the release. The recording passes through it briefly.
Toward the end, the piece does not gather its sounds into a conclusion. There is no final event summarizing what has been heard. The field continues, and the recording simply reaches the boundary imposed by its selected duration. This is one of the most honest qualities in environmental work. A place does not begin when the recorder is switched on or finish when the file ends.
Black Mesa leaves the listener with increased uncertainty, but also increased attention. What first seemed empty has become crowded. What first seemed distant has acquired texture. What appeared to be one environment has divided into countless overlapping distances, surfaces, and durations.
Jerman does not explain the mesa. He stays near it, listens, and removes just enough ordinary distraction for its small events to become enormous. The result is not a portrait in the usual sense. It is a temporary opening in attention, twenty-nine minutes during which stone, air, friction, and distance stop functioning as background and become the entire field.

Harry Pussy - 2025 - LOST LOST LOST

 

Palilalia Records – PAL-092  158.67MB FLAC

LOST LOST LOST begins with Harry Pussy entering a professional recording studio in Miami and immediately refusing the reason studios exist. Bill Orcutt and Adris Hoyos had booked the session in 1997 to create music accompanying an interview in Cool Beans magazine, then arrived without their instruments. There was no guitar, no drum kit, and no prepared substitute for the band’s usual attack. Instead of canceling, they used whatever the room offered: distortion, loud breathing, Hammond organ, primitive drum-machine patterns, dub reverb, and fragments of Cuban songs recalled imperfectly under pressure. The result remained unreleased for nearly three decades because even Harry Pussy thought it was too strange.
That history makes the opening five-and-a-half-minute “LOST” especially funny and severe. This is not a rediscovered conventional session documenting abandoned songs or alternate versions. The band has misplaced its own body. Harry Pussy’s familiar violence came from Orcutt’s broken guitar language colliding with Hoyos’s drumming and voice, a setup capable of making rock music sound trapped in a car being dismantled while still moving. Here the instruments responsible for that identity are absent. What remains is impulse without equipment.
The sound does not resemble a band calmly exploring electronic possibilities. It resembles two musicians attempting to continue existing after the floor plan has disappeared. Distortion enters without the stabilizing shape of a riff. Breath becomes percussion, vocal texture, and evidence of physical strain. Organ tones smear across the room, carrying church, garage, lounge, and horror-film associations without settling into any of them. The drum machine supplies rhythm with the emotional warmth of a blinking appliance.
The six titles repeat the word “LOST” with increasing insistence. “LOST,” “LOST LOST,” and “LOST LOST LOST” are not separate descriptions so much as a counting system built from confusion. By the final track, the word has been repeated six times, stripped through overuse until it begins functioning like visual pattern and rhythmic notation. The titles admit that the music cannot be mapped while also imposing the album’s only obvious order.
“LOST LOST” lasts just fifty seconds, a small rupture between longer zones. Its brevity makes it feel less like a composition than a piece of tape discovered during the process of organizing the session. Harry Pussy’s records often made short duration feel explosive, but this fragment does not hit with hardcore efficiency. It flashes into existence, offers incomplete evidence, and vanishes before its materials can agree on what they are doing.
The title track stretches beyond four minutes and gives the album’s anti-music enough room to acquire internal logic. The drum-machine reference to Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On is important, not because Harry Pussy imitate that record, but because they understand its exhausted rhythmic atmosphere. The machine does not create a dance floor. It creates a stale room where rhythm continues after confidence, clarity, and celebration have drained away. King Tubby-style reverb then pulls the surviving sounds into unstable depth, making the studio seem much larger and emptier than it probably was.
Dub traditionally constructs space through subtraction, repetition, echo, and sudden absence. Harry Pussy use those tools without adopting dub’s sensual control. Their echoes feel mismanaged on purpose. A sound is launched into the room and returns as debris. Reverb does not polish the performance. It makes every mistake reproduce.
The Hammond organ provides the most obvious connection to conventional musical history, but Orcutt and Hoyos refuse to treat it reverently. The instrument can imply gospel authority, psychedelic warmth, or barroom grease. On LOST LOST LOST it becomes another unfamiliar object found at the scene. Chords and tones appear without establishing harmonic shelter. The organ’s sustain allows mistakes to remain visible longer, hanging in the air after the hands responsible have moved elsewhere.
Without guitar, Orcutt loses the four-string instrument that had become his weapon and grammar. His Harry Pussy playing was already hostile to normal guitar technique, full of snapped phrases, choking chords, abrupt silences, and blues gestures twisted until they became skeletal. Removing the guitar does not make him less disruptive. It reveals that the disruption existed before the instrument. The method was not a collection of unusual finger positions. It was a way of refusing musical obedience.
Hoyos also operates outside her expected role. Her drumming in Harry Pussy could sound both primitive and impossibly reactive, less concerned with maintaining time than attacking whatever Orcutt had just destabilized. Here the drum machine handles whatever counts as pulse, leaving her voice and physical presence to work against its rigid repetition. Loud breathing becomes one of the album’s defining sounds because it is the opposite of programmed rhythm: irregular, bodily, involuntary, and incapable of perfect repetition.
The half-remembered Cuban folk-song lyrics introduce a different kind of loss. Memory supplies fragments without guaranteeing accuracy. Songs connected to culture, childhood, family, or local environment return incomplete inside a studio dedicated to accurate capture. That contradiction gives the session more emotional depth than its absurd origin might suggest. The recording machine preserves people failing to remember.
Miami matters. Harry Pussy did not emerge from one of the American cities expected to produce a band this aggressively opposed to rock decorum. Their location helped create a music marked by separation, heat, multilingual culture, and the freedom that can come from operating beyond a heavily supervised scene. The Cuban fragments on LOST LOST LOST are not pasted-on regional color. They leak naturally into an improvised session made by people drawing from whatever remained available in the room and in their heads.
The album’s center grows progressively stranger as the repeated titles lengthen and the pieces alternate between compressed episodes and extended environments. “LOST LOST LOST LOST” occupies three minutes, while the fifth track shrinks to a little over two. These durations create a stop-start structure without conventional songs. One zone barely begins to define itself before another arrives using similar materials in a new state of confusion.
The final “LOST” sequence lasts eight minutes and forty seconds, making it the record’s largest and most consequential piece. By then, the initial joke has worn away. The absence of instruments no longer feels like a stunt because the substitute language has become established. Organ, distortion, voice, breath, machine rhythm, and echo have learned how to coexist badly.
That bad coexistence is the heart of Harry Pussy. Their classic recordings were never chaotic because the musicians failed to interact. They were chaotic because the interaction was brutally alert. Each person heard the other and answered in the least stabilizing way possible. LOST LOST LOST preserves that relationship after removing its usual tools. The sounds may be unfamiliar, but the social machinery is unmistakable.
One gesture provokes another. A rhythm appears and is dirtied. A voice enters and refuses to clarify the situation. An organ tone suggests continuity while distortion tears holes through it. The performance remains collective even when the room seems empty.
Released in 2025 by Orcutt’s Palilalia Records, the album finally gives official form to a recording conceived for a magazine interview that never received its intended soundtrack. It arrives as six digital tracks totaling roughly twenty-five minutes, with a cassette edition following the logic of the original era. The release is also a benefit for former Harry Pussy guitarist Mark Feehan, connecting recovered sound to the material reality of someone who helped make the band’s history.
The archival context could have made the album seem like a curious appendix, but LOST LOST LOST is more disruptive than that. It does not explain Harry Pussy through a missing chapter. It complicates the band by proving that their identity survived the removal of guitar and live drums. The record shows that Harry Pussy was not a sound formula. It was an unstable agreement between Orcutt and Hoyos about how aggressively music could refuse completion.
The word “lost” usually promises eventual recovery. Something disappears, a search begins, and the missing object returns with its identity restored. This album rejects that comforting sequence. The tape was recovered, but the music remains lost inside itself. Its references are incomplete. Its tools are accidental. Its rhythms move without arriving.
That is why the three-decade delay improves rather than weakens the recording. In 1997, the session may have sounded like a failed assignment created by a band temporarily deprived of its strengths. In 2025, it sounds like a concentrated demonstration of those strengths. Harry Pussy walk into a studio unprepared, forget the equipment required to be Harry Pussy, and produce twenty-five minutes that no other band could have made.

Francisco López - 2024 - Silent Trains [Korea]

 

Self-Released – none  429.49MBB FLAC

Silent Trains begins with a machine moving at extraordinary speed while almost nothing inside it appears to happen. “Guryegu to Seoul” contains the broad mechanical wash of a Korean high-speed train, but the expected signs of public travel have been reduced nearly to zero. There is no rolling crowd conversation, no music leaking from phones, no child dominating the carriage, and no conductor turning the journey into a narrated event. Francisco López records an enclosed population practicing silence while the train produces a dense spectrum of vibration around them. The people remain present through what they do not add.
The album was created from original recordings made inside South Korea’s KTX trains during 2023. López did not transform the source material, then edited and mastered it at Hundred Islands Studios in 2024. Five journeys form the record: Guryegu to Seoul, Seoul to Gyeongju, Gyeongju to Osong, Osong to Jeonju, and Jeonju back to Guryegu. Together they last more than eighty-one minutes, long enough for rail sound to lose its identity as transportation noise and become an immersive acoustic environment.
The title rests on a productive contradiction. These trains are not physically silent. They generate continuous low-frequency pressure, ventilation currents, structural vibration, electrical tones, track noise, door mechanisms, and occasional changes in speed or surface. What is silent is the human collective. López observed that Korean passengers, lively and talkative in many other social settings, follow an unusually strict unwritten etiquette of quiet aboard high-speed trains. Silent Trains documents the sonic relationship created when human restraint exposes machinery that would otherwise be partially masked.
“Guryegu to Seoul” is the shortest route on the album at under nine minutes. It functions as an entrance into the carriage and into López’s listening method. The train’s sound initially appears uniform, a steady band of low and midrange motion. Close attention reveals that the apparent drone is made of many systems running simultaneously. Air circulates at one frequency, the body of the carriage answers the tracks at another, and subtle tonal shifts suggest acceleration, curves, tunnels, or changes in rail texture.
The passengers are not absent. Tiny movements occasionally puncture the mechanical field: clothing brushes, a seat shifts, an object is handled, or someone adjusts position. These sounds become unusually vivid because conversation has not claimed the foreground. A minor human gesture briefly enters the vast machine atmosphere, then disappears without starting a chain of social response.
“Seoul to Gyeongju” expands the situation across nearly twenty-one minutes. The longer duration allows the ear to stop waiting for obvious events. At first the listener may anticipate announcements, station sounds, or a dramatic transition. Gradually the train itself becomes sufficient. The interior is heard as a large resonant instrument activated by speed.
The low frequencies are essential. López warns that the album contains substantial bass information and nearly inaudible detail that laptop or phone speakers cannot reproduce. Through capable headphones or speakers, the train is not merely heard but sensed as pressure. Deep vibrations occupy the body before the ear fully separates them. The carriage feels suspended within a continuous field of controlled force.
This bodily component distinguishes Silent Trains from a conventional documentary recording. López has never treated environmental sound as a transparent window through which listeners identify a location. His recordings remove visual confirmation and encourage sound to operate as matter. The source may be a Korean train, but the experience is not limited to recognizing wheels, motors, and ventilation. Those elements merge into a virtual acoustic space with its own scale, depth, and movement.
The routes nevertheless provide a quiet structure. Each title names a departure and destination, preserving geography without describing what passes outside the windows. Seoul, Gyeongju, Osong, Jeonju, and Guryegu become points connected by interior sound. The countryside, cities, bridges, and tunnels remain unseen, but changes in the train’s resonance imply a world continuously altering around the sealed carriage.
“Gyeongju to Osong” has a particularly suspended quality. The broad noise floor can resemble an electronic composition built from filtered generators and slowly modulated oscillators. Yet the knowledge that the sound is untransformed changes the encounter. Every tonal drift has a physical cause, even when that cause cannot be identified. Technology composes without intending to compose.
López’s editing does not convert the journey into a dramatic narrative. He preserves long sections where change occurs below the level of immediate attention. This patience allows the listener’s sensitivity to recalibrate. A frequency that seemed fixed is revealed to be fluctuating. A quiet mechanical shimmer begins to occupy the upper register. A distant impact passes through the carriage body and disappears.
The human silence also changes character over time. During the first track it may seem like an unusual absence. By the middle of the album it becomes an active social construction. Dozens of people are continuously choosing not to fill shared space with their voices. Their quiet is collective behavior, maintained without a conductor demanding it.
That restraint produces an accidental collaboration between passengers and machinery. No person aboard intends to make sound art, and the train was engineered for transport rather than performance. Yet their combination creates a complex composition: broad-band mechanical sound surrounded by a voiceless human presence. López recognizes and frames this existing relationship rather than inventing it.
“Osong to Jeonju” lasts almost twenty minutes and deepens the album’s sense of enclosure. The train’s interior becomes difficult to picture at ordinary human scale. Low vibration can suggest an enormous industrial chamber, while thin higher frequencies seem to hang at great distance. The acoustics expand beyond the dimensions of the carriage.
This virtual space is one of López’s recurring concerns. Recorded sound does not have to reproduce the place where it originated faithfully. Playback creates another environment inside the listener’s headphones, speakers, room, and body. The Korean train becomes material for a space that could not exist in precisely the same way aboard the original journey.
Headphone listening intensifies the transformation. Exterior reference points disappear, and the train seems to surround the skull directly. Deep frequencies move below obvious pitch while small details occur at startling proximity. The passenger carriage becomes both enormous and interiorized.
The album avoids the familiar romance of trains. There are no whistles disappearing into the distance, no regular wheel rhythm inviting nostalgia, and no window-seat narrative of landscape passing by. The KTX is heard as contemporary infrastructure: aerodynamic, enclosed, electrically sustained, and engineered to make speed feel uneventful.
That engineered smoothness contains enormous hidden violence. The train crosses long distances rapidly while passengers sit with drinks, phones, bags, and closed mouths. Silent Trains makes the concealed energy audible. Continuous vibration is the sound of force being managed so successfully that the journey feels calm.
“Jeonju to Guryegu” closes the circuit in just over thirteen minutes. Returning to the starting region gives the album a geographical completion, but the sound does not behave like an arrival home. The mechanical environment remains active until the recording ends. No final cadence announces that the study is complete.
Across the five routes, differences are subtle rather than scenic. One train may carry a heavier bass resonance, another a more prominent airflow, another intermittent track vibration. López does not exaggerate these distinctions to create five strongly contrasting compositions. Their similarity is part of the subject. Korea’s rail network produces connected interiors, each standardized yet acoustically unique in small ways.
The 24-bit, 48 kHz format preserves both extremes of the recording. Very low energy remains substantial, while delicate upper textures and distant movements retain definition. The high resolution does not beautify the machinery. It reveals how much activity exists inside what first appears to be one continuous hum.
The album also challenges the assumption that a field recording must supply recognizable incidents. No spectacular event occurs. The value lies in remaining with an ordinary situation until its acoustic complexity opens. Millions of train journeys happen under similar conditions, yet most passengers experience the machine sound as something to mentally erase.
López reverses that hierarchy. The background becomes the entire field, while human activity becomes occasional detail. This shift is not hostile to the passengers. Their silence is what makes the train audible, and their restraint becomes as significant as the machinery’s force.
Silent Trains is therefore a portrait of technology and etiquette occupying the same enclosure. The train produces sound because it must. The passengers withhold sound because they agree, silently, that they should. Between those two systems lies the album’s strange calm.
The journeys move across Korea, but the record never looks out the window. It remains inside the carriage, listening to speed without spectacle and society without speech. Metal, air, electricity, bodies, and distance travel together for eighty-one minutes. The train is anything but silent. Silence is what allows its immense voice to be heard.

En Nihil / Death Squad - 1996 - Split

 

Neural Operations – NO 26  156.02MB FLAC

The En Nihil side begins by removing the floor. A low electronic pressure gathers beneath thin static, distant metallic movement, and tones that seem to drift in from a room whose dimensions cannot be measured. Nothing strikes with the blunt immediacy expected from a split cassette associated with 1990s power electronics. Adam Fritz builds a slower form of hostility, one based on enclosure and uncertainty. The sound does not attack from directly in front of the listener. It spreads through the available space until every direction feels occupied.
Released in 1996 by Spastik Soniks in an edition of one hundred copies, the cassette gives each project one untitled ten-minute side. That stripped structure is exactly right. There are no track names dividing the recordings into concepts and no collection of short assaults competing for identity. En Nihil and Death Squad receive equal physical territory, then use it according to sharply different instincts. The split lasts barely twenty minutes, yet the contrast between its two sides makes it feel larger than many full-length noise albums.
En Nihil was still a young project when this cassette appeared. Fritz had begun recording in the middle of the decade, developing a vocabulary from dark electronics, industrial decay, harsh noise, and long stretches of psychological suspension. His side already contains the patience that would distinguish much of his later work. Rather than stacking sound until the tape becomes uniformly saturated, he leaves unstable openings inside the mix.
These gaps do not provide relief. They produce vulnerability. A low drone may recede enough for faint movement to become audible behind it, suggesting another layer operating at a greater distance. Static catches at the edges. A muffled impact enters without revealing its source. The ear moves toward each detail, only to find that the surrounding darkness has expanded during the approach.
The cassette medium strengthens this atmosphere. Tape hiss forms a permanent weather system around the electronics, softening boundaries while adding its own grain. Low frequencies arrive thickened and slightly unstable. Higher tones acquire a dry, fibrous edge. Even silence carries magnetic movement. En Nihil uses these limitations as part of the piece rather than treating them as damage to be overcome.
The side develops through gradual changes in density. The opening pressure does not simply increase toward a predictable climax. It shifts position. A frequency that initially appears central becomes buried, while another grows more abrasive without becoming louder in any obvious way. This movement gives the recording the sensation of an interior changing shape around the listener.
En Nihil’s hostility is therefore architectural. The side constructs a place where ordinary spatial certainty fails. Sounds appear close without becoming clear and distant without becoming small. The listener is held in a zone where scale keeps slipping. Ten minutes become less a composition than a period of confinement.
The transition to Death Squad requires physically turning the cassette over. That pause matters. The En Nihil side leaves behind an atmosphere of hidden pressure, then the mechanism clicks, stops, reverses, and begins again with a different understanding of confrontation. Death Squad does not preserve the same ambiguity. Michael Nine’s side places the human presence closer to the surface.
Death Squad had already established itself as an intensely confrontational project by 1996. Nine’s work combined power electronics, industrial noise, processed voice, spoken material, psychological examination, and performance actions designed to erase the safety normally separating audience from artist. The recordings were only one component of a larger practice involving video, public access television, printed documentation, and live situations that treated spectatorship as something to be disrupted.
On this cassette, however, there is no visual apparatus to carry the threat. Death Squad must build the encounter entirely through sound. The side begins with electronics that feel more exposed than En Nihil’s carefully layered environment. Signals scrape against one another while vocal material enters as damaged evidence of a person behind the machinery.
The voice is not presented with the clear dominance of a singer standing above an accompaniment. It is slowed, obscured, filtered, and pushed into electrical disturbance. Tone survives more reliably than language. The listener hears command, exhaustion, fixation, or accusation without always receiving complete sentences. This partial intelligibility makes the voice harder to dismiss. Meaning seems near enough to matter but too damaged to settle.
Death Squad’s electronics also behave differently from En Nihil’s. Where Fritz creates depth through gradual accumulation, Nine favors exposed friction between signal and voice. Hum, static, distortion, and mechanical pulse feel tied to an act of communication that keeps malfunctioning. The recording resembles a transmission whose purpose is not to overcome interference but to use interference as part of its message.
This gives the side a documentary quality. It does not sound polished into a timeless abstract work. It feels attached to equipment, room conditions, cassette duplication, and one specific period of American industrial culture. The machinery remains visible in the sound. Connections strain. Levels overload. Vocal processing refuses clarity. The physical recording chain becomes part of the performance.
The split’s strongest quality is that neither artist attempts to match the other. There is no shared theme announced on the cover and no effort to manufacture continuity across both sides. The relationship emerges through opposition. En Nihil creates a nearly uninhabited psychic environment, while Death Squad places a damaged human signal inside hostile electronics.
One side conceals its source. The other makes source and message collide. En Nihil’s piece feels nocturnal, spacious, and inwardly corrosive. Death Squad’s feels like an intercepted statement delivered under coercive conditions. Both reject ordinary musical development, but they reject it for different reasons.
The cassette appeared during a period when split releases functioned as practical underground networks. Two artists could share production costs, exchange audiences, and place their work into mail-order circulation through one compact object. This format encouraged unexpected pairings, but it also allowed related practices to sharpen their differences. The listener did not receive an algorithmic playlist of adjacent artists. The relationship had been made physical, one project permanently attached to the reverse side of another.
Spastik Soniks was Michael Nine’s label, part of the infrastructure he had been building around Death Squad since the early 1990s. The edition of one hundred copies placed the cassette firmly inside private circulation rather than conventional retail. Information moved through catalogs, correspondence, trades, performances, and copied tapes. A project could remain nearly invisible publicly while becoming important within the network that actually encountered it.
That limited circulation added uncertainty to the original object. There was little contextual material to guide interpretation, and both recordings were untitled. The listener had two names, two sides, and twenty minutes of sound. The cassette did not explain where En Nihil ended aesthetically and Death Squad began historically. It demanded direct contact before biography.
The 2020 Neural Operations reissue, limited to fifty copies and accompanied by a digital edition, preserved that minimal structure. The tracks remained “Side A – Untitled” and “Side B – Untitled,” refusing to retrofit the material with descriptive titles. The reissue made the cassette easier to hear but did not pretend that accessibility could recreate the conditions of 1996.
Time has changed both projects. En Nihil developed a substantial catalog of dark ambient, death industrial, and harsh experimental recordings. Death Squad eventually ended, with Nine continuing his work as MK9 and shifting toward sound and visual practices framed through psychology, confession, and therapy. Listening backward can make the split seem like an early intersection between two established histories.
The cassette resists that neatness. It still sounds immediate because its methods depend on unstable physical relationships rather than period-specific fashion. Drone presses against hiss. Voice struggles through processing. Empty space reveals another hidden layer. The tape does not need nostalgia for obsolete equipment to remain effective.
Its short duration also protects it from overstatement. Each project receives enough time to establish a complete condition, but neither stays long enough to exhaust the material. En Nihil closes before its environment can be fully mapped. Death Squad stops while the transmission still appears active. The cassette mechanism imposes boundaries on works that otherwise suggest continuation.
The split is a compact study in two forms of disappearance. En Nihil removes the visible source until only atmosphere and pressure remain. Death Squad damages the human message until the person can be heard but not completely understood. One side loses the body. The other loses the language.
Between them lies the cassette itself, a small plastic shell carrying twenty minutes of magnetic disturbance from one underground network into another. The object turns, the pressure changes, and the listener passes from an empty structure into a contaminated transmission. Nothing resolves. Side B ends, the tape stops, and whatever had been speaking remains caught inside.

Dedicated To Jörg Buttgereit - 2025 - Four Meditations on Eros and Thanatos

 

Freak Animal Records – FA-CD-178  273.13MB FLAC

“Betty in a Bathtub” begins with wet, clogged electronics that seem to have been left decomposing in standing water. The sound is not clean enough to separate into synthesizer, feedback, voice, or object. Everything has already mixed into one heavy substance. Low frequencies churn beneath scraped metal and intermittent vocal pressure, while the trio keeps the movement slow enough for each layer to feel trapped rather than explosive. The track’s title points directly toward Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik, but the music does not retell the film or imitate its soundtrack. It concentrates on the film’s atmosphere of domestic rot, where tenderness, death, sex, and ordinary household space become impossible to separate.
Released by Freak Animal Records in 2025, Four Meditations on Eros and Thanatos is the only known release by Dedicated to Jörg Buttgereit, an anonymous Finnish power-electronics trio formed specifically around this session. The disc contains four long pieces totaling nearly fifty-four minutes. The musicians remain unnamed, preventing the project from becoming a puzzle about familiar scene identities. What matters is the temporary collective and the shared subject. Three people enter a room, activate machinery, and produce four extended responses to Buttgereit’s cinema.
Freak Animal describes the album as a “trio session of muddy filth worship,” language that captures both its method and its physical character. This is not sharply edited industrial music assembled from perfectly separated channels. Sounds bleed. Frequencies obscure one another. Voices sink into distortion. The performances preserve the uncertainty of musicians responding in real time, with each new layer forcing the others to adjust.
“Betty in a Bathtub” takes its name from Beatrice Manowski’s character in Nekromantik, whose attraction to a stolen corpse carries the film beyond ordinary provocation into a diseased version of romantic intimacy. The bathtub is one of Buttgereit’s recurring domestic containers, a place associated with washing and privacy transformed into a chamber where bodily fluids, decay, and desire collect. The track develops with the same enclosed quality. Noise does not spread outward into open space. It circulates inside a sealed room.
The trio resists the temptation to make the piece continuously violent. Some passages thin into low hum, rustling interference, or distant vocal residue. These reductions make the heavier returns feel less like dramatic climaxes than changes in pressure inside the same contaminated atmosphere. The filth remains even when the volume drops.
“Er Macht Dass Menschen Nicht Mehr Leben Wollen” turns toward Der Todesking. The title comes from the child’s explanation of the Death King: “He makes people no longer want to live.” Buttgereit’s film separates suicide into seven episodes, one for each day of the week, with images of a decomposing corpse connecting the stories. Its horror is repetitive, private, and frequently mundane. Death occurs in apartments, bathrooms, cars, offices, and other spaces where ordinary life has already become unbearable.
The twelve-minute piece begins from a thinner electronic field than the opener, but the emptiness is severe. Sustained tones hold position while abrasive details move at the edges. Vocal sounds appear as partial declarations, never stable enough to become a commanding power-electronics monologue. The human voice has already been weakened by the environment surrounding it.
This restraint suits Der Todesking. The film’s despair is not supernatural possession or spectacular punishment. It is the slow removal of reasons to continue. The track does not need to scream constantly because its atmosphere has already accepted the conclusion. Repetition becomes exhaustion, and the electronics seem to remain active after emotional resistance has disappeared.
When louder material arrives, it does not rescue the piece from passivity. It sounds like the nervous system reacting after the decision has already been made. Harsh bursts push through the sustained pressure, then collapse back into the same gray field. The trio uses power electronics without relying on its familiar structure of dominant vocalist, recognizable slogan, and escalating synthesizer assault. Voice and machine appear equally damaged.
“High Heels in Graveyard Dirt” occupies more than twenty-one minutes, nearly twice the length of the other pieces. The title joins elegance and decomposition in one blunt image: footwear made for display sinking into soil filled with bodies. It could belong to several points in Buttgereit’s work, where erotic costume, fetish objects, and physical decay repeatedly occupy the same frame. More broadly, it captures his method of dragging stylized desire through material that refuses to remain glamorous.
The track is the album’s central mass. It unfolds through layers of low industrial vibration, irregular impact, feedback, and voices whose position keeps changing. At times the trio appears to be operating one enormous machine. Elsewhere the sound separates into three people struggling for control over the same space.
Its duration allows the session to become physically exhausting without flattening into one texture. Dense passages are interrupted by exposed movement, scraped surfaces, and brief zones where the electronics seem to lose power. The gaps never clear the air. They reveal how much residue the louder sections have left behind.
The title’s high heels imply a rhythmic step, and portions of the piece repeatedly approach a pulse. Mechanical impacts establish temporary intervals before distortion disrupts them. The body begins expecting another step, then receives a drag, scrape, or empty space instead. Walking through graveyard dirt cannot remain elegant. Each movement meets resistance.
This is where the trio’s anonymity becomes useful. There is no front person guiding the listener through a personal statement. The track feels collective and impure, with authorship submerged inside activity. One member introduces a frequency, another buries it, and a third forces a vocal or metallic gesture through the resulting blockage. The piece grows through interference rather than arrangement in the polished sense.
Buttgereit’s films have often been reduced to their scandalous images: corpse sex in Nekromantik, suicide in Der Todesking, sexual mutilation in Schramm. Those elements are real, but their force comes from the damaged emotional worlds surrounding them. His characters are lonely, compulsive, ashamed, excited, and frequently incapable of separating tenderness from destruction. Four Meditations understands this. The album is filthy, but its filth is heavy with isolation rather than adolescent celebration.
“Cock Nailed to a Board” closes the disc with its most openly brutal title, invoking the bodily punishment and sexual panic associated with Schramm. Buttgereit’s 1993 film enters the fragmented mind of a serial killer whose fantasies, injuries, memories, and daily humiliations collapse into one another. The nailed penis is shocking, but it also embodies the film’s fusion of desire, shame, self-hatred, and physical control.
The final piece is ten minutes of constricted force. Compared with the vast third track, it feels direct and compressed. Harsh tones press against thick lower frequencies while vocal sounds arrive in short, strained eruptions. The trio leaves little room for distance. The recording seems positioned against the body.
Metallic impact becomes especially important here. The title contains a tool, a fastener, flesh, and wood, reducing violence to a practical sequence of materials. The music follows that blunt physical logic. Sounds strike, hold, and vibrate. Feedback behaves like sustained pain after the initial contact.
Yet the piece avoids becoming a cartoon of torture. Its strongest moments are not the loudest but those where a harsh frequency remains fixed long enough to become intolerably ordinary. Pain changes from event into condition. The listener is no longer reacting to the strike but inhabiting what follows.
Across all four meditations, the trio rarely uses recognizable samples from Buttgereit’s films. That decision keeps the album from becoming fan merchandise built from quotations. The dedication operates through method. The musicians take bodily taboo seriously, place erotic and destructive forces in the same room, and refuse to clean the result into tasteful dark ambient.
The word “meditations” is important. These are not soundtrack cues or songs about individual movies. Each piece remains with one image or sentence until it becomes an environment. Meditation here does not mean peace. It means sustained attention without escape.
Four Meditations on Eros and Thanatos succeeds because its tribute is neither respectful imitation nor nostalgic celebration. The anonymous Finnish trio meets Buttgereit at the point where desire loses dignity and death loses distance. Electronics clot, voices drown, metal enters flesh, and beauty walks into soil that will not support it. The disc does not explain why Eros and Thanatos remain bound together. It locks them inside one muddy session and listens as they contaminate each other.

Cock E.S.P. / Death Squad - 1996 - Temporary Paralysis / Residue

 

Neural Operations – NO 25  119.69MB FLAC

Temporary Paralysis begins with Cock E.S.P. sounding less like a band performing than a recording system suffering a short, violent nervous breakdown. Electronics flare, collapse, and return with their edges torn off. Distorted signals crowd one another without forming a stable wall, while abrupt changes in level make the piece feel physically unreliable. Nothing settles long enough to become atmosphere. The track keeps jerking awake, losing control, and dropping back into another patch of damaged current.
Released in 1996 as a C20 cassette by Spastik Soniks, Temporary Paralysis / Residue gives Cock E.S.P. eight minutes and thirty-six seconds on one side and Death Squad ten minutes and thirty-two seconds on the other. The original edition consisted of one hundred copies. In 2020, Michael Nine’s Neural Operations reissued it in an edition of fifty, preserving the blunt two-track structure and making the recordings available digitally. The complete split lasts only nineteen minutes, but each project uses its side so differently that the cassette feels less like a brief collaboration than two incompatible psychological conditions locked inside one plastic shell.
Cock E.S.P. formed in Minneapolis in 1993 around Emil Hagstrom’s interest in Japanese noise, free improvisation, punk damage, absurdist performance, and the creative potential of equipment failure. The project would become known for chaotic concerts involving costumes, props, physical incompetence, damaged electronics, and humor severe enough to resemble hostility. Temporary Paralysis catches the group early, when that larger performance language was still compressed into rough cassette noise.
The title accurately describes the track’s physical behavior. Paralysis implies immobility, but the word “temporary” introduces the possibility of sudden return. Cock E.S.P.’s piece repeatedly freezes and convulses. A signal locks into place, then another burst knocks it sideways. Static accumulates until it resembles a fixed surface, only to split apart under a new overload. The music cannot decide whether it has stopped or is merely preparing another involuntary movement.
This is not precision harsh noise. The instability is the point. Cock E.S.P. have long treated mistakes, weak connections, failed gestures, and unintended interference as more useful than controlled production. Temporary Paralysis sounds built from moments another group might have edited out: clipped inputs, broken continuity, awkward pauses, overloaded midrange, and noises whose source appears to have malfunctioned before being properly introduced.
The humor is present, though it never announces itself with an obvious joke. Cock E.S.P.’s absurdity comes from taking incompetence seriously enough to make it a compositional tool. The track behaves as though the equipment is being operated by people who understand exactly how to prevent it from sounding professional. Each ugly transition feels selected for its ability to embarrass the idea of mastery.
That makes the piece different from power electronics organized around authority. There is no commanding vocalist standing over the machinery and no single message delivered through disciplined repetition. Cock E.S.P. create a democracy of failure. Every sound has an equal opportunity to ruin the recording.
Cassette saturation holds the wreckage together. The tape rounds the harshest peaks, fills the spaces with hiss, and turns separate electrical events into one dirty surface. Digital clarity would expose the individual components more cleanly, but the original medium makes the piece feel handled, copied, and slightly exhausted before playback begins.
Turning the cassette over leads into Death Squad’s Residue, where chaos is replaced by psychological containment. Michael Nine does not fill the side with the same frantic collision. The electronics feel slower, more deliberate, and more closely connected to the voice. Instead of a machine failing publicly, Residue resembles the evidence left after a private event has already occurred.
The title suggests what remains after removal, burning, processing, or emotional expenditure. Residue is not the original substance. It is the stain, deposit, or trace that refuses to disappear. Death Squad’s side works from that condition. The sounds seem to arrive already used, already marked by whatever produced them.
A low electrical field establishes pressure without becoming a conventional drone. Static and mechanical texture move through it, while vocal material appears partially buried. The voice carries human intention, but not complete explanation. Words surface in fragments and then retreat into processing. Tone remains clearer than language.
This damaged intelligibility was central to Death Squad. Nine’s recordings and performances used confession, confrontation, psychology, spoken material, video, and industrial electronics to destabilize the distance between artist and witness. The listener was rarely allowed the comfort of treating the work as pure abstraction. A body and history remained somewhere behind the noise, even when the details were withheld.
Residue is effective because it does not reveal enough. A clearly stated narrative could be evaluated, categorized, or rejected. Death Squad leaves the listener with emotional evidence but incomplete facts. Strain, repetition, fixation, and unease survive without becoming a tidy account of what happened.
Compared with Cock E.S.P., the pacing is severe. Events are permitted to remain in place. A sustained tone can hold long enough for its internal roughness to become audible. A vocal fragment repeats until it feels less like communication than compulsion. Noise does not continually interrupt the structure because noise is the structure through which the message must pass.
The split therefore creates a powerful contrast between accident and aftermath. Temporary Paralysis sounds like breakdown occurring in real time. Residue sounds like the material left once the breakdown has ended and someone has returned to examine the room.
Cock E.S.P. make the recording chain visible by constantly abusing it. Death Squad makes it feel sealed, as though the equipment has become a chamber containing voice, memory, and pressure. One side scatters energy. The other traps it.
Their humor also moves in opposite directions. Cock E.S.P.’s absurdity is disruptive and social, even when heard without the spectacle of a live performance. The track feels capable of knocking over its own equipment and laughing through the feedback. Death Squad offers no equivalent release. Residue treats repetition and damage as evidence of an unresolved interior process.
That difference makes the pairing far more interesting than a split between artists using similar gear. Both belong to the American underground noise network of the mid-1990s, but they approach failure from opposite sides. Cock E.S.P. celebrate collapse as generative freedom. Death Squad studies what collapse deposits in the mind.
The 1996 cassette also marks the beginning of Spastik Soniks as Michael Nine’s primary label operation. Its edition of one hundred copies placed the release inside the mail-order culture that allowed small American noise projects to communicate without broad visibility. Catalogs, letters, trades, copied flyers, and live contacts did the work now performed instantly by searchable pages and streaming platforms.
A C20 was an ideal format for that network. It was inexpensive, quick to duplicate, and long enough to hold two complete statements without encouraging excess. Each side arrives, establishes its method, and stops before explanation can weaken it.
The physical act of turning the tape is essential. There is a pause between conditions. The listener must stop Cock E.S.P.’s seizure, remove the cassette, reverse it, and restart the mechanism before Death Squad’s stain becomes audible. That manual interruption prevents the tracks from blending into one continuous program. The object insists upon their difference.
The 2020 reissue preserves the material while inevitably changing its aura. A cassette once limited to one hundred copies and circulated through a narrow network can now be heard as a documented piece of both artists’ histories. Yet the recordings remain too rough and psychologically unresolved to become harmless archival curiosities.
Temporary Paralysis still refuses competence as a stable value. Residue still refuses to reveal the event that created it. Their methods have aged better than the technology because neither depends upon novelty. Equipment continues to fail. Communication continues to leave traces.
The split ends without synthesis. Cock E.S.P. and Death Squad do not meet in the middle or complete one another’s statement. The cassette holds a seizure on one side and a stain on the other. Between them is the brief silence of the tape being turned, the instant when paralysis has released its grip but residue has not yet begun to speak.

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.