Throbbing Gristle - 2001 - The First Annual Report

 

Yeaah! – YEAAH 50  190.32MB FLAC

The First Annual Report sounds less like a debut album than a surveillance tape recovered from the room where Throbbing Gristle was learning how to exist. Recorded in 1975 but left officially unreleased until 2001, it captures Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson before Industrial Records, before the famous slogans, and before the group’s methods had hardened into anything resembling a recognizable genre. The title became a retrospective correction after The Second Annual Report appeared as TG’s first official LP in 1977, but the music refuses the orderly logic implied by annual reporting. It is damp, provisional, crude and intimate, a document of four people discovering that rehearsal could become composition and that recording equipment could function as an instrument of psychological pressure.
The 2001 release gave official form to material that had circulated through bootlegs under titles including Very Friendly and Final Muzak. Its long unauthorized life suited the recording. These pieces never sounded like a polished master waiting patiently for the correct label and catalog number. They sounded intercepted, copied and passed between people who were unsure whether they had found an album, a rehearsal or evidence of something that should not have left the building. Even after proper release, The First Annual Report retains that illicit atmosphere. It does not feel restored to its rightful place so much as admitted into the catalog after decades spent scratching at the door.
The opening “Very Friendly” occupies most of the album and establishes the central tension between narrative and environment. Genesis recounts the 1967 Moors murders committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, describing the killing of Edward Evans in language that alternates between report, accusation and grotesque fascination. The subject is not presented through conventional documentary sobriety. Genesis repeats details, changes emphasis and allows phrases to linger until they lose the protective distance of information. The voice is close enough to feel physically present, yet the delivery has the detached quality of somebody reading from a file whose contents have already damaged the act of reading.
Behind the narration, the group constructs a landscape from primitive electronics, tape, guitar, violin and low mechanical repetition. Chris Carter’s equipment does not supply a stable musical foundation. It creates pulses that resemble faulty laboratory machinery or a motor operating under excessive strain. Cosey’s guitar appears as scraped texture rather than rock instrumentation, while Christopherson’s tape work introduces shifts in depth and perspective. Sounds arrive from behind the narration, drift beside it and occasionally threaten to swallow it. The story remains understandable, but the room around the story keeps changing.
This relationship between speech and sound would become one of Throbbing Gristle’s defining methods. Their recordings rarely use noise as simple accompaniment. The electronics alter the ethical and physical conditions under which language is heard. A spoken description that might remain safely external in a news broadcast becomes invasive when surrounded by low-frequency vibration and unstable repetition. “Very Friendly” does not merely tell the listener about violence. It exposes the machinery through which violence becomes story, evidence, entertainment and private fixation.
The title is a particularly vicious example of TG’s use of ordinary language. “Very friendly” is the kind of phrase used in introductions, advertisements and descriptions of harmless social encounters. Attached to a murder narrative, it becomes both accusation and disguise. The phrase suggests the thin surface of normality under which cruelty can operate. Throbbing Gristle repeatedly returned to that problem: evil not as a theatrical force arriving from outside society, but as an activity conducted through familiar rooms, respectable language and mundane procedures.
The extended duration is essential. “Very Friendly” does not behave like a song moving toward resolution. It creates a state and refuses to end it quickly. Repetition gradually changes the listener’s relationship with the material. At first, the electronic pulse may register as crude rhythm and the narration as shocking content. As the piece continues, those roles blur. The voice becomes rhythmic, while the repeated electronic figures begin to feel narrative, carrying the sensation of an action occurring again and again without progress.
This is Throbbing Gristle before the group had developed the sharper sequencing heard on D.o.A. or the poisoned genre experiments of 20 Jazz Funk Greats. The sound is skeletal, with long stretches in which very little appears to change. Yet the apparent poverty of the recording is part of its force. There is nowhere for the listener to hide inside decorative production. A few frequencies, a voice and a scraping instrument occupy the space with the persistence of stains that cannot be cleaned from the walls.
“Dead Bait” follows as a shorter but equally degraded environment. The title seems to reverse or deform the phrase “baited dead,” joining attraction to decay. Compared with the narrative density of “Very Friendly,” the piece feels more abstract, but it carries the same sense that sound is being examined after ordinary musical function has been removed. Electronics flicker, instruments scrape and fragments of rhythm appear without forming a stable pattern. The group sounds less interested in performing than in testing which actions make the room feel most contaminated.
The track’s looseness reveals how closely early TG remained connected to COUM Transmissions, the performance-art group from which Throbbing Gristle emerged. COUM’s work used bodies, found material, sexuality, waste and confrontation without respecting clear borders between theater, music and visual art. The First Annual Report still belongs to that interdisciplinary condition. The instruments are not treated as instruments with traditional roles. They are objects within an action, capable of producing sound, discomfort and altered attention.
“10 Pence” reduces the scale further. The title names a trivial amount of money, an ordinary coin placed against the album’s extraordinary psychological weight. Throbbing Gristle frequently understood that the most unsettling contrast was not between beauty and ugliness, but between horror and banality. A murder takes place in a house. A body is moved using tools purchased through ordinary commerce. A disturbing recording is duplicated onto consumer tape. Ten pence circulates through the same society that circulates images, reports and fantasies of violence.
Musically, the piece feels like a fragment rather than a completed construction. That incompleteness is revealing. The First Annual Report preserves TG before the group learned how to package every experiment as a decisive statement. Ideas appear, function briefly and stop. The recording contains hesitation, dead space and technical uncertainty. Instead of weakening the album, these qualities make its historical importance audible. Industrial music had not yet become a set of textures that could be selected from a menu. TG were still discovering what might happen if cheap electronics, amplified objects, recorded voices and hostile subject matter were placed together without asking permission from rock music.
“Whorle of Sound” brings that exploratory approach into clearer focus. Its title suggests a spiral or circular system, and the piece behaves like sound caught in rotation. Tones return without arriving at exactly the same point. The limited equipment produces uneven layers whose imperfections create motion. Tape and electronics cannot maintain the seamless stability later available through digital looping, so repetition carries friction. Every cycle arrives slightly damaged.
This damage is the early recording’s deepest resource. Modern listeners can reproduce distortion, saturation and low fidelity with precision, but The First Annual Report comes from a moment when failure was built into the machinery. Tape hiss occupied the same frequency range as quieter details. Connections introduced hum. Overloaded signals flattened themselves unexpectedly. Rather than correcting these problems, TG treated them as evidence that the recording process had a body of its own.
The album’s instruments repeatedly lose their identities. Genesis’s violin does not provide melodic elegance. It becomes a thin wound across the electronic field. Cosey’s guitar does not offer riffs or solos. It supplies friction, wire and pressure. Carter’s synthesizers and homemade electronics create systems that feel barely governable, while Christopherson’s tapes disturb chronology by introducing sound removed from its original moment. Together, the group constructs music from functions rather than instruments: scrape, pulse, repeat, interrupt, magnify and contaminate.
The First Annual Report is sometimes described as the birth of industrial music, but hearing it only as a historical starting point risks domesticating it. The album does not sound like a blueprint confidently announcing a new genre. It sounds like a group realizing that existing genres are irrelevant to the work at hand. Industrial music emerges here not as a style but as an operating method. Record the uncomfortable material. Expose the machinery. Replace musical professionalism with control over context. Treat media distribution as part of the art. Make the listener conscious of participation.
That final point is crucial. “Very Friendly” implicates the listener because listening becomes another stage in the circulation of the murder story. TG do not offer a morally purified position outside sensationalism. They place themselves and the audience inside the same contaminated system. The group is fascinated by the material, and the recording does not pretend otherwise. The discomfort comes partly from recognizing that fascination can coexist with disgust.
This refusal of innocence separated Throbbing Gristle from artists who used transgression merely to prove personal bravery. TG were not simply saying that they could confront forbidden subjects. They were studying why those subjects attracted attention and how institutions converted them into consumable forms. Newspapers, police reports, pornography, medical documentation and popular entertainment all shaped the emotional distance from which violence could be observed. The group’s own records entered that network knowingly.
The 1975 recording also reveals how quickly the four members had established distinct functions without becoming a conventional band. Carter’s technical discipline prevents the electronics from collapsing entirely. Cosey brings a sensitivity to texture, erotic presentation and the physical presence of performance. Christopherson approaches sound through tape, photography and the rearrangement of evidence. Genesis provides language and an unstable theatrical center. None of them is simply the singer, guitarist, keyboardist or technician. Their roles overlap because TG’s real instrument is the situation produced by all four.
By the time The Second Annual Report appeared, Throbbing Gristle had learned how to frame that situation more decisively. “Slug Bait,” “Maggot Death” and “After Cease to Exist” arrived as a deliberately austere Industrial Records artifact, complete with the language of reports, cataloging and organizational procedure. The First Annual Report is less controlled. It allows the listener to hear the room before the institution was fully built.
That is why the album’s belated 2001 appearance mattered. It did not uncover a missing masterpiece superior to the official debut. It revealed the unstable ground beneath it. The First Annual Report shows that TG’s language was formed through repetition, rehearsal, technical weakness and sustained attention to subjects that respectable culture preferred to condemn publicly while consuming privately. The group had not yet perfected its methods, but the essential relationships were already present: violence and administration, sexuality and commerce, recording and surveillance, entertainment and pain.
The album remains difficult because it gives the listener too much time to adapt and then makes adaptation feel morally suspicious. After several minutes, the pulse of “Very Friendly” can become hypnotic. The narration can lose its immediate shock and settle into rhythm. That transition is disturbing because it demonstrates how quickly unbearable material becomes familiar when repeated. TG make familiarity itself part of the horror.
There is no satisfying conclusion. The pieces stop, but the systems they expose continue beyond the recording. Murder becomes archive. Archive becomes bootleg. Bootleg becomes official release. The official release becomes historical evidence, collectible object and entertainment. The title First Annual Report promises that another report will follow because the activity being documented has not ended.
What survives is not merely the earliest Throbbing Gristle album. It is the sound of a method discovering itself in real time. The electronics are crude, the performances uncertain and the recording far from polished, yet every weakness contributes to the claustrophobic intimacy. Nothing has been cleaned enough to become safely historical. The room remains occupied, the tape continues turning, and the voice keeps repeating its report as though 1975 never completely finished.

The Rita / Gamiani - 2022 - Queen / Countess

 

Modern Decadence – MD 038  138.04MB FLAC

Queen / Countess begins with hierarchy turned into surface. The cover places two women above a violent classical image, their faces arranged like rival forms of authority. One looks outward beneath an ornate crown, composed and theatrical. The other looks downward with a darker, more private intensity. Beneath them, bodies fold into one another in a scene where desire, force and submission are difficult to separate. The Rita and Gamiani use those titles, “Queen” and “Countess,” not to build a literal narrative of nobility but to establish rank, spectacle and controlled distance before the cassette even begins. The music then removes nearly everything except pressure.
Released by the Mexican label Modern Decadence in 2022, Queen / Countess is the second split between Canadian project The Rita and Swedish project Gamiani. The C30 format gives each artist roughly fifteen minutes, one continuous piece per side, and the scale is exactly right. Neither side attempts to summarize an entire career or produce a grand harsh-noise monument. Instead, both artists work through minimal static noise, narrowing their materials until tiny differences in friction, density and movement become the record’s entire drama.
The Rita’s “Queen” is built from the severe concentration that has defined Sam McKinlay’s work for decades. The term harsh noise wall is technically accurate, but it can encourage the mistaken idea that nothing happens. “Queen” demonstrates how much activity can exist inside apparent immobility. The surface is dense and continuous, yet it does not feel digitally frozen. Fine grains shift against heavier layers. Small ruptures appear and are immediately absorbed. Some frequencies remain fixed long enough to establish a hard plane, while others scrape across it like fabric dragged repeatedly over damaged skin.
McKinlay’s walls often depend less upon total saturation than upon the character of one chosen texture. The source may be treated until its identity disappears, but its physical behavior survives. Noise crackles, curls, catches and releases according to a hidden pattern inherited from whatever action first produced it. That is why The Rita’s work can feel intensely specific even when no recognizable object remains. The listener may not know what generated the sound, but the surface behaves as if it remembers.
“Queen” has a regal stillness, but there is nothing luxurious about it. The title suggests a figure who does not need to move because the surrounding order already confirms her position. The noise creates a similar impression. It does not chase the listener or announce its authority through dramatic shifts. It simply occupies the full field and refuses negotiation. The piece is powerful because it appears complete from the moment it begins, as though the listener has entered a system that was already operating and will continue after the cassette stops.
Yet the wall is not emotionally neutral. The Rita’s visual and conceptual vocabulary has long drawn upon ballet, fashion, feminine gesture, sharks, cinema and highly particular forms of physical movement. Those interests are not decorations pasted onto generic noise. They shape the way texture is heard. A cracked ballet shoe, stocking, leather glove or underwater surface carries a different tension from anonymous industrial metal. McKinlay’s sound frequently holds elegance and damage in the same frame, finding intensity in disciplined bodies, ruined materials and repeated movement.
That tension is especially useful here. A queen is displayed, watched and transformed into image. Her authority depends upon costume, posture and recognition. The Rita’s noise strips away the identifiable body while preserving the pressure of presentation. The wall becomes a fabric so enlarged that its fibers fill the entire visual field. Decoration turns abrasive. Ornament becomes grain. The ceremonial surface can no longer be viewed from a polite distance because the listener has been placed inside it.
The piece’s minimal development demands a different kind of attention than conventional composition. There is no melody to follow and no accumulation toward a climax. Listening becomes an act of adjusting focus. At one moment, the wall seems uniform and overwhelmingly close. A few seconds later, the ear catches a thinner movement behind the dominant crackle, and the apparent depth changes. The sound does not travel through a series of sections. Perception moves through the sound.
Gamiani’s “Countess” answers with a related but distinguishable form of stasis. The project’s minimal wall noise is often less monolithic in emotional effect, allowing brittle activity and exposed static to create a sensation of fragility within pressure. “Countess” sounds narrower, more nervous and slightly more unstable than “Queen.” Where The Rita establishes a thick ceremonial surface, Gamiani makes the surface seem vulnerable to tearing.
The difference is subtle enough that the split never becomes a crude competition between loudness and restraint. Both sides work within limited frequency ranges and sustained structures. The distinction lies in touch. “Queen” feels packed and self-contained, its internal movement buried beneath authority. “Countess” feels more porous, with small fluctuations reaching the surface and disturbing its apparent continuity. One side presents control as a completed image. The other allows control to tremble.
That trembling gives “Countess” a peculiar intimacy. Static is often described as impersonal because it resembles electrical interference, broadcast failure or empty transmission. Gamiani makes it feel close to the body. The tiny changes can resemble breath caught in cloth, fingernails moving lightly across a rough surface or muscle tension barely visible beneath formal posture. Nothing becomes directly illustrative, but the noise carries the unease of a person expected to remain composed while pressure accumulates.
The title places Gamiani one rank beneath The Rita’s “Queen,” yet the record does not establish a clear hierarchy between the sides. A countess possesses status while remaining subject to a larger order. This makes the second piece feel less absolute. Its authority is conditional, maintained through attention and discipline rather than guaranteed by the title alone. The wall seems aware of its own edges.
Gamiani’s name also brings an older history of erotic literature into the frame. Alfred de Musset’s nineteenth-century novel Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess used aristocratic characters, confession and escalating sexual experience to test the limits of respectable representation. The noise project does not provide a soundtrack to that book, but the association sharpens the split’s interest in rank, feminine image and transgression. Queen and countess are not simply fantasy titles. They belong to a long cultural machinery through which power and desire become staged, narrated and consumed.
The cassette presentation keeps that machinery deliberately small. Harsh noise wall often benefits from limited physical formats because scale becomes contradictory. Fifteen minutes of static can feel enormous, yet it arrives inside a cheap plastic shell held in one hand. The tape moves mechanically from one spool to another, giving apparently motionless sound a visible form of duration. Each side is an enclosed territory, and turning the cassette becomes a transfer of power from queen to countess.
Tape also adds its own low-level material to the pieces. Hiss sits beneath the recorded walls, and minor fluctuations in playback prevent absolute repetition. Even if the source sounds fixed, the medium introduces another unstable surface. Queen / Countess is therefore never perfectly static. Electricity, magnetic tape, motor speed and the listener’s room all enter the final texture.
The split’s erotic charge comes from withholding rather than display. The cover offers faces, costume and tangled bodies, but the audio provides no voices, narrative or obvious bodily sounds. Instead of illustrating the images, the music removes their readable content and retains only friction, pressure and duration. It asks what remains of desire after gesture has been enlarged beyond recognition.
This is where both projects meet most effectively. The Rita and Gamiani understand that harsh noise wall can function less like an attack than a form of obsessive framing. A single texture is held in place until the listener can no longer treat it casually. The longer it continues, the more the ear searches for differences, and the more intimate those differences become. Attention is forced onto surfaces that ordinary listening would discard as interference.
Queen / Countess lasts only half an hour, but it feels complete because neither artist wastes time establishing a conventional arc. “Queen” enters fully formed, maintaining a dense authority whose smallest internal movements become increasingly visible. “Countess” takes that discipline and makes it more brittle, allowing vulnerability to appear within the static. The two pieces do not resolve one another. They remain separate chambers connected by title, imagery and a shared devotion to reduced sound.
The cover’s hierarchy ultimately collapses under that reduction. Crown, rank, costume and historical fantasy are converted into two bands of abrasive matter. Yet the images are not destroyed. They persist as a way of hearing. The listener begins to detect posture in static, fabric in distortion and controlled gesture inside repetition. The noise becomes theatrical without performing a scene.
That is the quiet achievement of Queen / Countess. It takes an extreme form often dismissed as featureless and reveals how much character can be carried by nearly microscopic differences. The Rita’s side stands with the immovable authority of a crowned figure trapped inside her own image. Gamiani’s side bends beneath a rank that must continually be maintained. Between them lies no court, no palace and no spoken command, only thirty minutes of surface under pressure, holding its pose until the tape runs out.

Toshiji Mikawa - 2024 - Encounter when Pigs Fly

 

Grubenwehr Freiburg – GW/FR: 48  445.45MB FLAC

Encounter When Pigs Fly begins with an impossible event and spends nearly an hour making impossibility feel physically unavoidable. Toshiji Mikawa’s two long pieces carry absurd, almost storybook titles, but the music itself has none of the wink normally attached to a flying pig. This is high-frequency harsh noise sharpened until the air seems toxic. Electronics squeal, swarm and fracture across the stereo field while lower currents keep the sound from floating away into pure treble. The cassette’s subtitle-sized concept, a “jungle-poison-nettle theme,” proves unexpectedly exact. These recordings do not resemble a scenic journey through lush greenery. They behave like hostile vegetation closing around the listener, every surface armed with barbs, hairs and chemical defenses. Released by Grubenwehr Freiburg in November 2024 as a C60 cassette, Encounter When Pigs Fly contains two side-long works: “Onaonga Above Forest Limit” and “Gympie Gympie While Bushbashing.”
“Onaonga Above Forest Limit” takes its name from a New Zealand tree nettle known for a sting far beyond the irritation caused by common garden varieties. The title removes the plant from its expected environment and places it above the forest limit, exposed where it should not be able to grow. Mikawa’s noise operates through the same contradiction. The piece feels overgrown and claustrophobic, yet its frequencies often seem suspended in a bare, elevated space. Dense electronic movement crowds the foreground while thin whistles and shrieks cut above it like signals traveling across open rock. The sound is simultaneously tangled and exposed.
Mikawa’s high frequencies are not a decorative glaze placed over a conventional harsh-noise mass. They determine the composition’s nervous system. Long squeals appear to narrow, split and grind against neighboring tones. Smaller bursts flicker underneath, continually changing the apparent grain of the larger field. At moments, the piece seems dominated by one sustained electronic scream, but closer listening reveals dozens of tiny abrasions moving through it. The noise is never truly static. It shivers, scratches and recoils.
That unstable movement is essential to Mikawa’s work. His long history with Incapacitants may encourage expectations of complete overload, but the duo’s force has always depended upon more than sheer density. Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai create noise that behaves almost improvisationally, even at maximum volume. Frequencies collide, redirect one another and produce accidental openings before those openings are crushed again. On Encounter When Pigs Fly, Mikawa preserves that sense of live reaction while working alone. Every sound seems to provoke another response somewhere else in the system.
The first side therefore feels less like a wall than a thicket. A wall has one primary relationship with the body: it blocks passage. A thicket catches clothing, scratches skin and redirects movement in hundreds of small ways. “Onaonga Above Forest Limit” continually snags attention. A piercing tone dominates for several seconds, then a rougher electronic vibration rises beneath it. A thin gap appears, only to reveal another layer operating farther back. The listener cannot locate one stable surface against which to brace.
Mikawa also avoids the dramatic vocabulary of crescendo and release. The piece begins inside active pressure and remains there, changing texture without offering an obvious destination. Harsh noise often becomes predictable when every passage is arranged as a climb toward maximum saturation. Here, saturation is merely one condition among several. The sound may thicken, but it can also become more brittle, more dispersed or more painfully narrow. Intensity is measured through concentration as much as volume.
“Gympie Gympie While Bushbashing” moves the setting to Australia and names another notorious stinging plant. The Gympie-Gympie tree carries fine hairs capable of producing severe pain that may persist long after contact. “Bushbashing” means forcing a route through dense country without the aid of a clear trail. The title turns the second side into an almost comically disastrous expedition: charging blindly through vegetation equipped to punish the smallest touch.
The sound is correspondingly more frantic. Where “Onaonga Above Forest Limit” often creates a hovering, exposed pressure, “Gympie Gympie While Bushbashing” feels tangled at ground level. Electronic bursts collide more abruptly, and the texture seems filled with short, hooked movements. High frequencies still dominate, but they are interrupted by rougher surges and shifting low-end pressure. The piece does not glide through its environment. It hacks, stumbles and becomes increasingly embedded in it.
The plant theme gives Mikawa’s abrasive sound an unusually precise physical metaphor. These frequencies do not strike like blunt machinery. They sting. The sensation continues after an individual tone has disappeared because the ear remains sensitized, waiting for the next sharp contact. A sudden narrow squeal can feel more invasive than a broad blast of distortion. Mikawa understands that pain is not always produced by scale. It can come from accuracy.
This makes Encounter When Pigs Fly distinct from noise that relies upon a massive low-frequency foundation. The cassette certainly possesses weight, but its threat is concentrated higher in the spectrum. Played loudly, the upper frequencies create immediate physical tension around the jaw, forehead and inner ear. Played at lower volume, their shapes become easier to follow, revealing the rapid decisions hidden inside the apparent chaos. The work rewards both bodily exposure and analytical attention, though neither listening position makes it comfortable.
The cassette format suits this material because tape slightly roughens the sharpest edges without neutralizing them. Analog hiss joins the finer electronic activity, making it difficult to determine where the recording ends and the medium begins. The two half-hour sides also impose a useful symmetry. Each plant receives its own enclosed habitat, and turning the cassette becomes a geographic transfer from one poisonous landscape to another. The physical reel movement gives the pieces a visible progression even when their internal motion rejects conventional development.
Grubenwehr Freiburg describes the release simply as “cacophonous and high-frequency harshnoise with jungle-poison-nettle theme,” a description that sounds almost playful until the recording begins applying those words with brutal literalism. The theme could have remained a novelty, but Mikawa uses it to clarify his approach to sound. These are not heroic electronic avalanches descending from above. They are living defensive systems. Every texture appears designed to prevent handling.
The title Encounter When Pigs Fly adds another layer of absurdity. “When pigs fly” normally dismisses an event as impossible, but an encounter suggests that the impossible thing has already arrived and occupies the same space as the listener. Mikawa’s noise repeatedly creates that sensation. Sounds seem to violate ordinary scale and location. A tiny electrical crackle expands until it feels environmental. A distant shriek suddenly occupies the foreground. Several incompatible depths exist simultaneously, turning the stereo field into an impossible habitat.
This spatial confusion is one reason the album never reduces to technical aggression. Mikawa is not only producing abrasive frequencies. He is arranging distances, densities and points of contact. His electronics create a landscape without naturalistic field recordings, melody or descriptive narration. The plants exist through behavior. The noise catches, penetrates, swarms and persists.
Encounter When Pigs Fly does not reinvent Toshiji Mikawa’s vocabulary, but it concentrates that vocabulary around an unusually coherent idea. The two pieces transform high-frequency harsh noise into ecological hostility, finding a meeting point between absurd titles and severe physical sensation. The cassette begins with an impossible encounter, crosses two continents of poisonous vegetation and ends without discovering a safe path through either one.
What remains after the tape stops is the record’s most convincing connection to its nettle theme. The sound does not vanish cleanly. Its sharpest frequencies leave an afterimage in the ear, a phantom irritation that continues after contact has ended. Mikawa turns listening into bushbashing: forward motion without a trail, every apparent opening concealing another hooked surface, and the growing realization that the landscape is not attacking randomly. It was built to resist passage.

Mistletoe - 2025 - Morgenstern

 

Chondritic Sound – none  229.84MB FLAC

Morgenstern begins with the sound of a ritual already in progress. “Kadmon” does not guide the listener toward a ceremonial space or explain what is being summoned there. The hand drum is already repeating, breath is already moving through the room, and the recording seems to have begun only after the ordinary world has been left behind. Mistletoe’s debut CD is built from primitive materials: drums, flute, church bells, voice, tape, and human bone. Nothing requires elaborate technology, yet the album’s ten pieces create a remarkably complete environment. They sound less composed in the modern studio sense than uncovered through repetition, as though each rhythm and drone had been waiting inside the objects until somebody struck, blew, shook, or recorded them long enough to reveal it.
Mistletoe is the work of the same figure behind Pleasure Island and Beyond the Ruins, but Morgenstern establishes its own language immediately. Where electronic industrial music often imagines steel corridors, electrical systems, and mechanical discipline, this record turns backward toward older forms of technology: skin stretched across a drum, breath pushed through a hollow tube, metal bells activated by impact, bone handled as resonant matter. The result is still industrial, but the industry belongs to an earlier order. These are machines from before machinery, tools through which bodies organized time, fear, work, worship, and contact with whatever they believed occupied the darkness beyond the fire.
“Kadmon” takes its name from Adam Kadmon, the primordial human figure found in Kabbalistic thought, humanity imagined before humanity divided into ordinary individual bodies. The title suits the track’s elemental construction. A drumbeat repeats beneath low currents and distant sounds whose sources remain uncertain. The rhythm does not resemble a song being performed for an audience. It feels functional, a pattern maintained because repetition itself is producing an effect. Each return strips away another layer of ordinary attention. The mind first follows the beat, then anticipates it, then begins hearing movements between the impacts that may not have been audible at the beginning.
This is the governing method of Morgenstern. The album’s phrase “repetition leads to realization” is not simply an occult slogan attached to atmospheric music. The compositions demonstrate it physically. Mistletoe rarely overwhelms through density. Instead, a limited set of materials is allowed to circle until perception changes. A bell becomes less like an instrument and more like an opening in the air. Breath loses its obvious human source and turns into weather. A drum stops marking time and begins altering the size of the room.
“Into the Ruins, Part I” moves from the primordial figure into a damaged place. The ruins are not presented as picturesque stones beneath moonlight. They are entered through sound, with hollow resonance, scraped surfaces, and slow percussive movement suggesting architecture whose original purpose has been forgotten. The piece is brief, but it creates a convincing sense of passage. Its sounds seem to come from different depths, some close enough to reveal their rough texture, others weakened by distance. The listener does not stand outside admiring decay. The listener moves between walls that no longer provide shelter.
“The Gift” introduces a more ambiguous form of ceremony. Gifts create relationships. They can express devotion, establish debt, purchase favor, or place the receiver under an obligation that cannot be refused. Mistletoe’s gift arrives through a restrained rhythm and a dark field of tape-treated sound. Nothing identifies the giver or clarifies the terms. The piece carries the unease of an object left at a threshold, valuable perhaps, but dangerous to accept without knowing what acknowledgment will be required.
The album’s rough fidelity is essential here. Morgenstern was recorded during August and September of 2023 as primitive industrial tape music, and its sounds retain the slight blur and compression of that process. Tape does not simply document the instruments. It binds them together. Breath, drum, bell, and room tone enter the same magnetic surface, acquiring common dust around their edges. Transients soften, low sounds spread, and repeated layers begin staining one another. The album feels old without pretending to be an authentic relic from some invented ancient civilization. Its age comes from the medium actively wearing upon the sound.
“Blutsonne,” or “Blood Sun,” compresses that atmosphere into one of the record’s shortest pieces. The title joins illumination to injury, giving the sun a color associated with sacrifice, birth, violence, and life itself. Mistletoe avoids the grand orchestral gestures such a title could invite. The track is spare, concentrated, and slightly sickly. Rather than watching a huge crimson sun rise over a fantasy landscape, the listener seems to experience its light indirectly, reflected inside a small chamber where the air has already become difficult to breathe.
“The Golden Fire” develops the solar imagery while changing its spiritual temperature. Gold can indicate sacred radiance, incorruptibility, wealth, or the dangerous belief that material brilliance proves divine favor. Fire illuminates and purifies, but it also consumes the person who approaches it carelessly. Mistletoe holds these meanings together through a measured ceremonial pulse and tones that hover between warmth and threat. The music suggests revelation, but revelation does not guarantee comfort. To see clearly may mean seeing what ordinary darkness had mercifully hidden.
The title Morgenstern deepens this tension. In German, Morgenstern means “morning star,” a name associated with Venus as it appears before sunrise. Christian tradition also attaches the morning star to both Christ and Lucifer, depending upon translation and context. The word therefore carries illumination divided against itself: dawn and fall, promise and rebellion, celestial guidance and fatal pride. It is also the German name for the medieval spiked weapon known in English as a morning star. The album title can signify a light appearing before day or a metal head built to crush bone. Mistletoe’s music lives inside that contradiction.
The title track lasts less than three minutes, but it acts as the record’s hinge. Bell-like resonance and primitive rhythm create an austere brightness without removing the album’s shadows. The morning star does not end the night. It becomes visible because the night still surrounds it. Mistletoe understands that darkness gains power through contrast. A small bright tone placed inside a broad field of murk can feel more significant than an entire wall of sound. The track does not deliver a triumphant dawn. It offers a sign whose meaning remains unresolved.
“Lucifer’s Summer” follows with one of the album’s most evocative titles. Summer usually suggests openness, abundance, heat, and physical ease. Attaching Lucifer transforms those qualities without simply reversing them. The season becomes overripe, its light too intense, its long afternoons charged with knowledge that cannot be forgotten. The piece carries a languid heat, but its repetition never becomes restful. It feels like remaining outdoors after the temperature has passed from pleasure into danger, when the sun continues shining with an almost personal hostility.
The album was recorded during late summer, and this gives “Lucifer’s Summer” a physical foundation beneath its esoteric language. Heat changes rooms, instruments, tape machines, bodies, and sleep. It slows action while intensifying sensation. Morgenstern often sounds as though it was made during hours when ordinary schedules had dissolved, with the same few actions repeated until they became detached from practical time. The music is not trying to depict an ancient ritual from a safe historical distance. It discovers ritual inside contemporary isolation, consumer recording equipment, and whatever materials happened to be available.
“Into the Ruins, Part II” returns to the earlier location, but the second entrance does not feel identical. The album has passed through blood, fire, and Luciferian sunlight, so the ruins now carry accumulated meaning. Repetition on Morgenstern never means exact restoration. Returning reveals that the listener has changed, even when the sound source appears familiar. The structure may be the same, but the route through it has become darker and more deliberate.
The use of human bone gives the record its most immediately provocative material, yet Mistletoe does not sensationalize it. There are no obvious theatrical cracks or macabre demonstrations meant to assure the listener that a taboo object is present. Bone enters as another resonant substance, distinct from drum skin, wood, metal, and breath but connected to all of them through the body. It is structure after life, the part that may survive when face, voice, and personality have vanished. Using bone as sound places death inside the rhythm without requiring a narrative about death.
This restraint separates Morgenstern from ritual industrial records that rely upon theatrical occult gestures. The album’s titles draw upon Kabbalah, Luciferian imagery, fire, ruins, and the Qliphoth, but the sounds remain materially grounded. Mistletoe does not attempt to convince the listener that supernatural events were captured during recording. The power comes from the opposite direction. Ordinary acoustic actions become strange through isolation and repetition. The ritual is persuasive because its materials remain tangible.
“Valleys of the Qliphoth” is the album’s longest late-stage descent. In Kabbalistic and later occult traditions, the Qliphoth are shells, husks, or impure forces associated with the shadowed inverse of sacred order. A valley already suggests descent and enclosure, a place beneath surrounding heights. Mistletoe creates that descent through one of the record’s more spacious constructions. Percussion and low sound do not crush the listener from above. They establish a route downward, each repeated event sounding farther removed from ordinary daylight.
The piece avoids the common mistake of making evil sound merely enormous. Its atmosphere is not a fantasy battlefield crowded with demons. It is lonely, dry, and patient. The Qliphoth become less like monsters than abandoned structures of meaning, shells from which whatever once gave them life has departed. This connects the track back to the ruins and to the human bone. Morgenstern is fascinated by containers after their animating presence has vanished: buildings without inhabitants, bones without flesh, rituals whose gods may no longer answer.
“The Fallen Emerald” closes the album with another object whose value has been damaged by motion. An emerald suggests green life, vision, hidden knowledge, or the legendary tablet associated with Hermetic wisdom. Fallen, it becomes displaced from whatever setting once made it sacred. The final piece does not resolve the album’s symbolic system. Instead, it leaves one more fragment on the ground. The music feels reflective but not peaceful, carrying the exhaustion of a ceremony completed without confirmation that it succeeded.
Across forty-six minutes, Morgenstern creates a remarkably unified world from ten distinct tracks. Its pacing prevents the ceremonial atmosphere from hardening into a single monotonous drone. Longer pieces establish spaces, while short works act as doors, objects, flashes, or changes in light. “Kadmon” and “Valleys of the Qliphoth” provide the broadest structures, but the smaller pieces are essential because they keep the album moving through a sequence of encounters rather than one endless ritual.
The full-color digipak presentation, issued by Chondritic Sound in an edition of two hundred copies, gives this private music a solid physical home. The label has long understood how industrial, noise, and dark ambient recordings gain additional force through objects that appear deliberate without becoming luxurious. Morgenstern does not need elaborate handmade relics or packages containing soil, ash, and rust. Its source materials already carry sufficient physical history. The compact disc simply contains the sequence and allows its quiet details to emerge without disguising the tape’s grain.
Mistletoe’s debut succeeds because it does not confuse primitive means with primitive thought. The equipment and sources are limited, but their arrangement is exact. Every drum strike changes the surrounding silence. Every breath establishes the presence of a body that remains unseen. Bells retain their history as instruments of worship, warning, timekeeping, and death. Bone turns survival into percussion. Tape converts all of them into a single weathered memory.
Morgenstern ultimately sounds like a ritual performed after certainty has disappeared. The old symbols remain available, but their original systems have fractured. The practitioner enters the ruins, repeats the action, studies the dream, and waits for realization without knowing whether the answer comes from beyond the self or from repetition’s effect upon the mind. The morning star appears before dawn, but dawn is never guaranteed. It may be a guide, a fallen light, or the head of a weapon turning slowly in the dark.

Last Rape - 2021 - Campaign of Madness

New Approach Records – NAR25  284.74MB FLAC

Campaign of Madness begins with a cover that turns threat into composition. A black-and-white photograph shows a woman posed against a dark interior while two male hands enter the frame. One covers part of her torso; the other holds a knife close to her chest. Her face is turned downward, caught between performance, submission and danger. The image does not document an event so much as stage the instant before one, freezing power inside a carefully arranged photograph. Last Rape’s name sits beside it in clean white type, almost resembling the title treatment of an old exploitation film. That collision between elegant presentation and imminent violence establishes the record’s territory before any sound begins.
Last Rape is the wall-noise collaboration of Richard Ramirez and Sean E. Matzus, two artists whose shared history extends through Black Leather Jesus and numerous parallel projects. Campaign of Madness was recorded in June 2019 in the Chestnut Ridge foothills of Pennsylvania and released by New Approach Records in 2021. Its three untitled pieces divide roughly forty minutes into an enormous opening section, a somewhat shorter second movement and a brief conclusion. The absence of descriptive titles keeps the emphasis on duration and surface. Nothing tells the listener what to imagine or how one section should be interpreted. The numbered tracks behave like three rooms inside the same structure.
The first piece lasts nearly twenty minutes, giving the duo enough time to establish pressure without depending upon conventional development. Last Rape works within harsh noise wall, but the wall is not simply a continuous block placed in front of the listener. Its force comes from the relationship between apparent stability and microscopic movement. A broad distorted surface may seem fixed at first, yet prolonged attention reveals irregular activity inside it: rough currents rubbing together, sharper fragments briefly surfacing, lower pressure shifting beneath the more immediate crackle. The sound appears solid from a distance and unstable when examined closely.
That difference is essential. A completely motionless wall can become strangely passive once the ear adjusts to it. Last Rape preserves resistance by allowing the texture to remain abrasive and uneven. The recording does not offer a beat, melody or obvious sequence of events, but it never becomes neutral background. Its grain continually catches the ear. The listener is not carried through the piece so much as held against its surface long enough for small differences to become physically significant.
The title Campaign of Madness suggests organization rather than spontaneous collapse. A campaign is planned, sustained and directed toward an objective. Madness is commonly imagined as disorder, but the record joins it to procedure. The noise does not sound like one uncontrolled outburst. It feels maintained. Electronics continue operating after the initial shock has passed, turning extremity into a system rather than an incident. That persistence is more disturbing than simple chaos because it implies intention behind the pressure.
Ramirez and Matzus have spent years exploring the difference between harsh noise as activity and harsh noise wall as condition. In Black Leather Jesus, junk metal, contact microphones and feedback can produce a crowded physical performance, with multiple participants generating collision in real time. Last Rape reduces that social spectacle. The duo’s wall noise feels more private, concentrated and sealed. The violence has already been processed into texture. There is no visible group of performers to watch, no shouted vocal directing attention and no theatrical climax offering release.
The first section’s long duration allows this enclosure to become convincing. At the beginning, the listener remains outside the sound, identifying distortion and trying to map its layers. After several minutes, that analytical distance becomes harder to maintain. The wall begins functioning like weather or room pressure. Instead of asking what produces the noise, the listener starts noticing how it alters time. Twenty minutes can feel compressed because so few conventional events occur, yet individual seconds become enlarged by the constant abrasive contact.
The second piece, lasting just over fifteen minutes, does not need to introduce a completely new language. Its position changes the meaning of the same basic materials. After the first wall has established the album’s scale, any variation in density or frequency feels amplified. A narrower texture can create greater tension than a louder one because the ear has become sensitized. What might have registered initially as minor surface movement now appears like a crack running across a larger structure.
This is one of the rewards of the three-part sequence. Campaign of Madness does not provide three unrelated examples of wall noise. It creates a gradual education in listening. The first piece teaches the ear to stop waiting for a riff, climax or narrative. The second uses that altered attention, making smaller changes carry more force. By the time the third track arrives, its brief four-and-a-half-minute length feels almost violent in itself. After two prolonged enclosures, sudden compression becomes another kind of attack.
The final section functions less like a conclusion than a concentrated remainder. It does not have enough time to establish the same sense of permanence as the earlier pieces, so its pressure feels immediate and exposed. The album seems to eject the listener rather than resolve its atmosphere. There is no triumphant final blast and no fade toward peace. The campaign stops because the disc ends, not because the conditions it created have been repaired.
The physical edition reinforces this refusal of polish. New Approach Records issued the CD in a super jewel case with Xeroxed, handmade covers, limited to one hundred copies. The combination of professionally manufactured disc and rough copied artwork is appropriate. Campaign of Madness is a finished album, but it retains the appearance of something circulated privately, an artifact assembled by hand rather than smoothed into a generic commercial product. The grayscale image and copied surfaces preserve dirt, contrast and small imperfections that a glossy redesign might have neutralized.
The cover’s knife also provides a useful way of hearing the record. Last Rape does not wield noise like a giant blunt object. Much of the impact comes from proximity and sustained threat. The blade is already close to the body; the image does not need to show the wound. Likewise, the sound often derives intensity from holding an abrasive frequency in place rather than repeatedly increasing volume. Anticipation becomes inseparable from contact. The listener waits for a rupture while already experiencing the pressure that makes rupture possible.
There is an uncomfortable relationship between spectator and image as well. The woman’s pose, the entering hands and the carefully lit scene belong to a visual language built around danger made consumable. Campaign of Madness does not explain or morally organize that imagery. Instead, the wall noise removes the narrative machinery that usually makes such images entertaining. There is no dialogue, plot or resolution. Only pressure remains. The staged threat is translated into duration, leaving the listener with the physical unease after the story has been stripped away.
That reduction is where Last Rape’s work becomes most effective. The project does not require a large conceptual apparatus because its central question is brutally simple: how long can one severe condition be maintained before perception changes? Ramirez and Matzus answer through texture rather than theory. They build a surface, hold it in position and allow attention to become trapped inside its smallest movements.
Campaign of Madness is therefore not a campaign toward madness. It is madness organized into campaign form: three controlled deployments of distortion, each altering the listener’s sense of scale and endurance. The first creates the territory, the second tightens it and the third cuts the connection. What remains is not catharsis but an afterimage, the auditory equivalent of the knife held inches from skin. The threat never needs to complete its motion. Its power lies in being sustained.

 

Saishō 最小 - 2025 - Comme un lion dans une cage

 

Mountain Forest Cabin Dweller – MFCD005  297.18MB FLAC

Comme un lion dans une cage begins with a wind turbine standing alone above red fields, its three blades caught in the act of turning. The image looks faded, folded, and handled, as though it has survived inside a pocket rather than arriving as a clean digital design. The turbine is both machine and symbol: something that circles continuously while converting that repetition into usable energy. Saishō builds the entire sixty-seven-minute piece around the same contradiction. The music turns in place, returning to its loops again and again, yet its circular motion is not entirely futile. Repetition becomes confinement, nervous pacing, work, and eventually the possibility of movement beyond the cage.

The French title translates as “Like a lion in a cage.” The phrase describes somebody trapped inside limited circumstances, pacing because the body still possesses energy that cannot find an exit. Saishō connects that agitation directly to life under work, policing, military power, and ecological collapse. The album begins from anxiety produced by a world that constrains and destroys bodies while presenting those conditions as ordinary. It does not translate that idea into slogans, samples, or an industrial assault. Instead, it makes the loop itself carry the argument. A repeated synthesizer phrase becomes the path worn into the floor by continuous pacing.

Saishō describes the project as lo-fi synth minimalism, and the phrase is exact. The sound is built from limited melodic material, soft electronic tones, modest recording textures, and gradual change rather than dramatic events. Nothing arrives with the grand scale associated with cinematic ambient music. The synthesizer does not imitate an orchestra or open a polished digital horizon. Its tones retain a homemade quality, slightly worn and close to the machinery producing them. The result feels personal without becoming confessional. Anxiety is expressed through structure rather than autobiography.

The piece’s immense duration allows the central loop to become more than a musical phrase. At first, repetition provides orientation. The ear recognizes the pattern, anticipates its return, and begins noticing its small details. After several minutes, familiarity turns into enclosure. The same sequence returns because no alternative appears available. The listener begins to understand the title physically: movement continues, but movement does not automatically create distance.

This is where Comme un lion dans une cage differs from ambient music designed simply to soothe. Its sounds may be gentle, but the underlying structure remains uneasy. The loop can be beautiful while also functioning like a routine that cannot be escaped. Saishō understands that repetition has no fixed emotional meaning. It can comfort, discipline, hypnotize, exhaust, stabilize, or imprison. The same electronic figure can move through several of those states without changing very much at all.

The album’s political dimension emerges through this ambiguity. Modern work is full of loops: waking at the same time, traveling the same route, performing the same motions, answering the same demands, and returning home with enough time to prepare for repetition. Police and military institutions impose other loops through patrol, surveillance, training, borders, and the continuous reproduction of threat. Saishō does not illustrate these systems literally. The music reproduces their temporal pressure, the sensation of remaining active inside a structure whose boundaries have already been decided.

Yet the album refuses pure hopelessness. Saishō states that the starting point is anxiety, but not the destination. The loops slowly evolve, move elsewhere, and suggest that an apparent dead end may contain a route outward. This development occurs without a heroic breakthrough. There is no sudden beat, triumphant melody, or explosion announcing liberation. Change accumulates through tiny alterations in tone, emphasis, layering, and emotional color. The cage does not disappear in one spectacular moment. The listener gradually notices that the path has shifted.

That patient transformation gives the wind turbine its full meaning. Its blades also turn in circles, but their repetition produces power. The same movement that appears trapped from one perspective becomes generative from another. Saishō identifies the release as a solarpunk work, placing it within an imagination of ecological technology, cooperation, and futures built beyond extraction and domination. The turbine on the cover is not a monument to industry. It represents machinery redirected toward survival.

This separates the album from darker forms of electronic minimalism that present collapse as final and aesthetically complete. Comme un lion dans une cage acknowledges dread without worshipping it. The red land beneath the turbine may look scorched, alien, or artificially colored, but the machine remains active against the horizon. The cover does not promise a restored paradise. It offers evidence that another relationship between technology and landscape can be imagined.

The image’s worn texture is equally important. Solarpunk imagery often becomes excessively clean, filled with perfect green cities and frictionless technology. Saishō’s cover looks damaged and imperfect. The future it proposes must be built from a world already creased by use. The turbine stands inside weathered colors rather than glossy optimism. Hope appears not as innocence but as continued construction after innocence is impossible.

The single-track format reinforces that idea. Dividing the album into shorter compositions would provide obvious checkpoints and exits. Instead, the listener enters one uninterrupted duration. Time becomes the primary material, and the gradual changes must be experienced rather than sampled. A brief excerpt can reveal the palette, but not the movement from nervous enclosure toward tentative possibility. The album needs its hour because transformation at this scale must feel earned.

The name Saishō, written with characters meaning “smallest” or “minimum,” fits the method. The project works with minimal means and asks how much emotional and political movement can be created from very little. One loop can hold an entire system of labor. One slowly changing tone can suggest a path out. One wind turbine can carry the visual argument of the whole release. Reduction becomes a way of concentrating meaning rather than removing it.

The lo-fi quality makes the repetition feel human. Perfectly synchronized digital loops can suggest automation operating without fatigue. Saishō’s sound carries enough softness and imperfection to imply touch, time, and vulnerable equipment. The music does not resemble a flawless system reproducing itself forever. It resembles someone using limited tools to make a livable space inside that system. Its modest texture becomes part of the album’s ethics. The imagined escape does not depend upon spectacle or technological domination.

There is also something compassionate in the refusal to punish the listener. A record concerned with work, police, military violence, and ecological collapse could easily reproduce those pressures through harsh sound. Saishō chooses another strategy. The music creates enough calm for thought while preserving the tension inside its loops. It does not deny the cage, but it does not make listening another cage imposed upon the body.

As the piece progresses, circularity becomes less rigid. The listener’s relationship to the repeated material changes even when the source remains recognizable. What first sounded like confinement can begin to resemble persistence. The lion’s pacing is not only a symptom of captivity. It is evidence that the animal has not surrendered its energy. The body continues moving because the cage has not succeeded in making it inert.

That distinction prevents the album’s hope from becoming sentimental. Saishō does not suggest that anxiety is secretly beneficial or that oppressive systems can be escaped through individual attitude. The cage remains real. The music instead asks what can be preserved inside it: attention, imagination, energy, and the ability to recognize change when it begins. The route outward may be collective, ecological, and structural, but it must first become thinkable.

Comme un lion dans une cage turns one long synthesizer loop into a model of that difficult thinking. It circles because the world circles. It repeats because work repeats. It becomes anxious because a trapped body cannot stop measuring its boundaries. Then, almost without announcing the shift, repetition begins generating another possibility. The turbine continues turning. The pattern gathers power. The horizon remains distant, but no longer entirely sealed.

White Noise - 1969 - An Electric Storm

 

Island Records – 984 319-7  194.43MB FLAC

An Electric Storm opens with a human voice dissolving into machinery. “Love Without Sound” begins as psychedelic pop, but the song’s romantic surface keeps breaking apart beneath electronic pulses, accelerated tape, manipulated voices and sounds that seem to have escaped from a laboratory after midnight. The melody is immediate enough to belong on a 1969 single, yet almost everything surrounding it feels detached from ordinary performance. White Noise do not use electronics as ornamentation behind a band. The electronics have consumed the band, leaving traces of bass, percussion and singing suspended inside a studio-built hallucination.

The record appeared at the exact moment when psychedelic music had made the recording studio into an instrument, but White Noise pushed that idea far beyond fashionable phasing and backward guitar. David Vorhaus joined Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, both associated with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, to build songs through tape manipulation, primitive electronic devices, physical splicing and enormous amounts of patient assembly. This was before synthesizers became standardized keyboard instruments available to ordinary rock groups. Sounds had to be generated, recorded, altered, cut apart and physically joined. The album’s impossible spaces were constructed by hand.

That labor remains audible, but An Electric Storm never feels like a technical demonstration. It is too funny, erotic and genuinely frightening to be reduced to a museum display of early electronics. The record understands that unfamiliar sounds become most powerful when attached to recognizable human impulses. Desire, jealousy, vanity, death and fear pass through the machinery, returning exaggerated and partially deformed. White Noise make technology feel less like a futuristic replacement for humanity than a device capable of exposing the strange circuitry already operating inside it.

“My Game of Loving” pushes the album’s erotic side into deliberate excess. Male and female vocals turn seduction into competitive theater while electronic effects bounce between the singers. The arrangement grows increasingly crowded until the song breaks into recorded gasps, cries and laughter, transforming private pleasure into a studio spectacle. Then comes the punch line: snoring. White Noise move from desire to satisfaction to exhausted unconsciousness within a few minutes, making the entire sexual revolution sound both liberating and ridiculous.

The humor matters because it prevents the album’s experimental methods from becoming stiff. “Here Come the Fleas” is nearly cartoon music, driven by frantic voices, abrupt edits and sounds that seem to jump across the stereo field. Its comedy has a manic edge. The song behaves like a children’s novelty record assembled by people who have spent too long listening to microscopic organisms through malfunctioning headphones. Every small event is enlarged, repeated or pushed into an unnatural position.

“Firebird” reveals another side of the same studio imagination. The title may suggest Stravinsky, mythology or a machine rising through heat, but the piece does not settle into one clear picture. Female voices hover above an electronic landscape while percussion and manipulated sound create an unstable sense of flight. It is beautiful without becoming comfortable. The voices seem less like singers standing before microphones than figures passing through a dream whose physical laws keep changing.

The first side is labeled “Phase In,” and the phrase describes its method perfectly. White Noise draw the listener into electronic music through recognizable song forms. There are verses, hooks, jokes and sensual voices, but each familiar element is gradually contaminated. Pop becomes an access point to something far stranger. The machines do not arrive as invaders. They slip into the songs until it becomes impossible to determine where conventional music ends and constructed sound begins.

The second side, “Phase Out,” removes that protection. “The Visitation” abandons compact pop structure for an extended piece of audio theater centered upon death, separation and supernatural return. A motorcycle accident is suggested through movement, impact and abruptly transformed space. Voices call across impossible distances. Electronic tones drift through the wreckage like signals passing between the living and the dead. The piece does not merely describe a haunting. It reorganizes the stereo field into a haunted location.

Headphones reveal how carefully the illusion is built. Sounds travel from one side to the other, approach from behind the voice or retreat into what seems like an enormous distance. A whisper can suddenly become more threatening than a loud impact because the recording gives it an unnatural proximity. White Noise use the listener’s two ears as entrances to a space that cannot exist outside the recording. The studio becomes architecture.

“The Visitation” is especially disturbing because its sadness feels sincere. The album’s earlier comedy has not disappeared, but death removes its carefree elasticity. The voices reaching for one another do not sound like actors performing a simple horror sketch. The electronics create an emotional distance that human speech cannot cross. The dead may return as sound, but sound cannot restore the body. What begins as experimental theater gradually becomes a bleak meditation on communication after irreversible loss.

“Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell” ends the album by turning the studio into a chamber of ritual panic. Drums pound beneath chants, screams, distorted voices and rising electronic chaos. The piece was assembled under pressure when Island Records demanded that the album finally be completed, but its rushed origin contributes to its force. Instead of another intricately polished pop construction, White Noise deliver a crowded eruption that sounds as though the machinery has joined the ceremony and begun producing its own demons.

The screams are theatrical, yet their accumulation eventually exceeds camp. Individual voices disappear into a collective mass while percussion drives the track toward collapse. There is no stable center and no heroic figure conducting the storm. The piece behaves like a recording session losing control, every new layer reducing the possibility that silence will ever return. When the album ends, it feels less concluded than abruptly disconnected.

The movement from “Love Without Sound” to “Black Mass” gives An Electric Storm its extraordinary shape. It begins with pop music made porous by electronics and ends inside a fully electronic nightmare. The listener is phased in through melody, sex and comedy, then phased out of ordinary reality through death and ritual. Few albums move so quickly from playful seduction to genuine dread without sounding like a random collection of experiments.

Delia Derbyshire’s presence inevitably gives the album historical importance. Her work at the Radiophonic Workshop had already demonstrated that tape, oscillators and found sounds could create entire worlds without conventional instrumentation. Yet An Electric Storm matters because those methods are allowed to collide with pop desire and commercial record-making. Derbyshire, Hodgson and Vorhaus do not behave like technicians supplying effects to finished songs. The effects determine the songs’ emotional logic.

The singers are equally crucial. Val Shaw, Annie Bird and John Whitman give the album bodies for the electronics to seduce, multiply, ridicule and disembody. Without their performances, the record might have remained an impressive exercise in tape construction. Their voices provide recognizable personality, allowing the studio processes to alter something visibly human. Every manipulated breath or displaced phrase gains power because an unprocessed body can still be imagined beneath it.

An Electric Storm remains startling because its technology does not sound convenient. Every transformation feels obtained through effort, and that effort gives the effects weight. Modern software can reproduce many of these edits within seconds, but ease does not automatically produce imagination. White Noise had to decide what an electronic pop record could be before a dependable vocabulary existed. The result is not polished futurism. It is a handmade future full of tape joins, dirty laughter, impossible rooms and machinery that still sounds slightly surprised by its own existence.

More than half a century later, the album has not settled into harmless period charm. Its sexual comedy still feels strange, “The Visitation” remains genuinely moving, and the final storm still refuses background listening. An Electric Storm is not remarkable merely because it predicted later electronic music. It remains alive because it understands that technology becomes interesting only when it changes the emotional temperature of human experience. White Noise built machines that could flirt, joke, mourn and scream, then locked all of them inside one thirty-six-minute weather system.

Arthemesia - 2008 - a O a

 

Spikefarm Records – Naula104 / 177267-9  336.42MB FLAC

The cover of a.O.a. resembles the front of a forgotten occult volume rather than a conventional metal album. Its dark green surface carries an enormous interlocked alpha and omega, weathered into the image as though stamped onto cloth centuries ago. A serpent coils through the letters while a black solar disc rises between them, joining beginning and end, animal and cosmos, destruction and renewal. The Arthemesia logo floats above like the crest of a secret order. Before the music begins, the album has already established its central concern: the individual body placed inside a natural and spiritual system much larger than itself.
Arthemesia emerged from the fertile Finnish black-metal underground of the 1990s, originally forming as Celestial Agony before adopting a name derived from Artemisia absinthium, the botanical name for wormwood. Their early history became tangled with musicians who would later pass through Ensiferum, Wintersun, Finntroll, Moonsorrow and other major Finnish metal groups. That lineage can make Arthemesia appear like a junction between better-known bands, but a.O.a. demonstrates why the project deserves to be heard on its own terms. Rather than chasing the heroic folk-metal grandeur associated with several former members, the album turns inward, creating a form of melodic black metal shaped by shamanic imagery, ecological consciousness and progressive structure.
The opening “Of the Owls, of the Wolves and of the Nature: Revisiting the Microcosm” is less an introduction than an immersion. Guitars move through layered melodic figures while keyboards widen the surrounding atmosphere, but the arrangement never becomes a glossy wall of symphonic decoration. The music feels rooted in soil, wind and animal movement. Its melodies do not simply decorate the aggression; they create the terrain through which the harsher elements travel. Blast beats and rasped vocals provide velocity, yet the song repeatedly opens into broader passages where the band’s fascination with nature becomes more than lyrical scenery.
That relationship between the microcosm and macrocosm runs throughout the album. The human being is presented as a smaller version of the universe, containing the same cycles, conflicts and elemental forces. Arthemesia’s music mirrors this idea by allowing individual parts to reflect the larger composition. A short guitar phrase may return later with altered harmony. A rhythm introduced as a violent burst can reappear as a slower ceremonial pulse. Songs expand and contract without losing their internal identity, suggesting that every fragment belongs to a wider pattern.
“Valkoinen Susi,” meaning “White Wolf,” gives that philosophy a more immediate body. The wolf is an obvious figure within black metal, but Arthemesia avoids using it merely as shorthand for savagery or isolation. The white wolf becomes a guide moving between visible and invisible worlds, its pale form standing apart from the forest while remaining entirely of it. The music carries both speed and nobility, with sharp guitar lines cutting through a rhythm section that sounds unusually alive. The drumming does not merely maintain black-metal intensity; it continually redirects the arrangement, pushing transitions forward and giving the song a sense of pursuit.
The vocals remain harsh, but they are surrounded by enough melodic detail to prevent the record from becoming a single emotional color. Clean voices and keyboards appear selectively, functioning as openings rather than permanent layers. Their restraint matters. Arthemesia understands that grandeur becomes weightless when everything is presented as monumental. By leaving room around its most melodic ideas, the band allows those moments to feel discovered rather than announced.
“Patheme” is stranger and more inward. Its title suggests feeling transformed into structure, emotion treated almost as an elemental or philosophical category. The song shifts between aggression and contemplation without dividing itself into obvious opposing halves. Guitar harmonies carry a mournful pull, but the sadness never becomes passive. It moves, changes shape and feeds the heavier sections. Arthemesia’s melancholy is not resignation. It is awareness sharpened until it becomes another source of force.
The title piece functions as the album’s central symbol. a.O.a. is generally understood as Alpha Omega Alpha, reinforcing the cover’s imagery of beginning, ending and return. Musically, the piece gathers the album’s major impulses into one unstable construction: black-metal speed, progressive movement, ritual atmosphere and melodies that seem to reach beyond the usual boundaries of the genre. The band does not abandon recognizable metal structure, but it keeps stretching that structure until the song feels larger inside than its running time should permit.
There is a distinctly Finnish character to the album’s melodies, but not because they imitate folk tunes in an obvious way. The quality comes from their emotional temperature. They are cold without being empty, triumphant without sounding uncomplicated, and mournful without collapsing into despair. Arthemesia treats melody as a form of knowledge. The guitar lines appear to remember something that the lyrics and vocals cannot fully communicate.
“The Noble Elements” makes the album’s elemental philosophy explicit. Earth, air, fire and water are not presented as fantasy accessories. They become models of behavior within the composition. The music can carry the weight of earth, the movement of air, the consuming motion of fire and the reflective depth of water, often within the same piece. Keyboards add atmosphere without smoothing the guitars, while the rhythm section prevents the song’s spiritual language from floating away into abstraction.
This balance distinguishes a.O.a. from much of the melodic black metal produced around the same period. The album is polished enough for every instrument to remain audible, but it never feels sterilized. The guitars retain abrasion, the drums preserve physical impact and the vocals remain embedded in the music rather than sitting cleanly above it. The production gives the album depth without removing its bark.
“Liber Omega (& The Macrocosm Manifest III)” closes the record by widening its perspective completely. Where the opener revisited the microcosm, the finale announces the macrocosm, moving from the individual organism toward the total system. Its extended structure feels earned because the album has spent its entire duration building the vocabulary required for such a conclusion. Earlier melodic ideas, ritual rhythms and philosophical tensions seem to converge without being reduced to a simple reprise.
The song does not end with the feeling that a journey has reached a permanent destination. Omega may signify the end, but the album’s entire design insists that endings become beginnings. The serpent on the cover passes through the alpha and omega rather than stopping at either one. Arthemesia’s final movement therefore feels cyclical, returning the listener to the opening image with a changed understanding of it.
a.O.a. was the band’s second and final full-length album, arriving after years of demos and shifting personnel before Arthemesia dissolved in 2010. Its six-track sequence stands apart from the more direct symphonic black metal of Devs Iratvs, replacing youthful attack with a broader and more cohesive philosophy. The album does not merely add progressive passages and natural imagery to an established black-metal framework. It redesigns the framework around them.
What remains most impressive is the record’s sense of proportion. Its cosmic language could easily have become inflated, but the music continually returns to physical movement: fingers crossing strings, drums forcing air through a room, voices tearing against melody. The macrocosm is never allowed to erase the microcosm. The universe is heard through the band’s smallest decisions.
Arthemesia created an album of occult symbolism and elemental scale without losing the nervous life of a metal record. a.O.a. charges forward, pauses to examine its own shadow, then expands again. Its wolves, owls, forests and celestial symbols belong to one continuous system rather than a collection of atmospheric decorations. The music asks the listener to hear aggression, beauty, nature and consciousness as different expressions of the same force. Alpha enters omega, the serpent crosses both, and the black sun continues rising inside the green cover long after the final note has disappeared.

Arathorn - 2008 - Treue & Verrat

 

Folter Records – FR 047  268.52MB FLAC

Treue & Verrat opens on the morning of the final battle, but Arathorn does not rush immediately toward clashing swords. “Am Tage der letzten Schlacht” begins with acoustic guitar, flute and clean voices, creating the feeling of an old account being recited beside a fire after everyone involved has already died. The atmosphere is solemn rather than victorious. Before the album reaches Siegfried, Hagen or Ragnarök, it establishes that the story belongs to memory. Heroism is present, but it is already shadowed by betrayal, grief and the certainty that every kingdom eventually becomes a song about what was lost.
Released in 2008 by Folter Records, Treue & Verrat was Arathorn’s second album and the project’s first full-length in more than a decade. By then, Arathorn had become the solitary work of Sköll, who handled vocals, guitars, bass, drums and flute. The long silence between records changed the music considerably. The cold black-metal foundation of the 1997 debut had not disappeared, but it was no longer the governing force. Acoustic guitar, clear singing, keyboards and folk melody now occupied the center, with distorted passages entering as dramatic extensions of the narrative rather than the album’s permanent condition.
The title means “Loyalty and Betrayal,” the opposing forces that drive the Nibelungen story. Loyalty binds warriors, families, rulers and lovers together, but those same bonds create the conditions for treachery. A stranger cannot betray someone in the full meaning of the word. Betrayal requires trust first. Arathorn structures the album around that tension, moving from expectation and heroic identity toward conspiracy, murder and apocalyptic collapse. The five songs form a compact narrative cycle, but the record avoids sounding like a theatrical metal production crowded with dialogue and obvious scene changes.
“Siegfried von Xanten” is the album’s enormous central pillar. At more than twelve minutes, it presents Siegfried not simply as a warrior but as a figure whose identity has already expanded into legend. The music shifts between acoustic storytelling and blackened force, allowing different versions of the hero to coexist. Clean vocals and folk passages suggest the remembered Siegfried, preserved through poetry and communal song. Distorted guitars and harsher voices restore physical danger, reminding the listener that legends begin with vulnerable bodies moving through violent events.
The song’s length gives Arathorn room to repeat melodies until they acquire the ceremonial quality of oral history. Flute lines are simple and immediately recognizable, while acoustic guitar provides a steady ground beneath the voices. The arrangements sometimes feel closer to neofolk than metal, but the transition into distorted sections changes the apparent meaning of the gentler material. What initially sounds peaceful becomes ominous in retrospect. Every celebration of Siegfried’s strength also prepares the listener for the scale of the loss to come.
Arathorn’s use of clean singing is crucial. Sköll does not approach the material with the polished, inflated delivery common to symphonic metal. His voice remains grounded and direct, closer to recitation or communal folk singing. Layered voices occasionally create a small choir, but the effect is not designed to make the hero appear superhuman. It places his story within a culture that remembers collectively. These songs feel intended to be carried by voices long after the people described within them have vanished.
“Hagens Verrat” brings the album’s central fracture. Hagen is not an external monster invading a secure world. He belongs inside the same network of loyalty that gives Siegfried his power. His betrayal is effective because he understands the relationships around him and knows where trust has created vulnerability. The music becomes darker and more unsettled, with acoustic passages repeatedly interrupted by heavier movement. The flute remains, but its pastoral quality has soured. Familiar instruments now carry the knowledge that the heroic order has been penetrated from within.
The combination of folk and black metal works best when Arathorn allows one style to alter the emotional meaning of the other. Acoustic guitar does not merely provide calm between attacks, and distortion does not function as a simple signal for violence. The folk passages establish memory, identity and continuity. The metal sections reveal those structures under stress. When the two overlap, Treue & Verrat finds its strongest voice: tradition being preserved at the exact moment it is breaking apart.
“Siegfrieds Tod” is surprisingly restrained. The death of the central hero could have invited the album’s largest and most aggressive performance, but Arathorn instead emphasizes mourning. At just over four minutes, it is the shortest piece and the emotional still point of the record. The music does not attempt to reenact the killing in spectacular detail. It concentrates on the silence left afterward, when the person who seemed large enough to organize the entire world has suddenly become an absence.
This restraint gives the album weight. Treue & Verrat is interested in heroic mythology, but it does not confuse heroism with invulnerability. Siegfried can kill dragons and survive extraordinary trials, yet his story remains governed by one mortal fact: another person can discover where he is weak. Arathorn’s music preserves the grandeur of the legend while refusing to erase the fragility that makes betrayal possible.
The closing “Ragnarök” expands the consequences beyond one death. Although Siegfried and Hagen belong to the Nibelungen tradition rather than the Norse account of the world’s ending, Arathorn links personal betrayal to cosmic destruction. Once loyalty collapses, the damage spreads outward through families, kingdoms and finally the structure of the world itself. The track is the album’s most atmospheric piece, combining acoustic guitar, keyboards and melodic electric lines in a broad final movement.
Unlike the earlier songs, “Ragnarök” includes English alongside German, giving it a slightly detached quality from the main narrative. This older composition feels like a horizon beyond the Nibelungen material, the point where one specific tragedy enters a larger cycle of collapse and renewal. The music gradually widens rather than charging toward a blunt final attack. Guitars carry mournful melodies while keyboards create distance behind them, allowing the album to end with ruined grandeur instead of triumph.
Treue & Verrat is often described as pagan or medieval metal, but its identity lies in the uneasy proportions between its elements. This is not black metal decorated with a few folk instruments, nor is it festive folk metal with occasional harsh vocals. Much of the album is patient, acoustic and reflective. Distortion appears selectively, sometimes so briefly that it feels like the past violently breaking through the act of remembrance.
The production supports this balance. Acoustic guitar and flute are clear enough to carry the melodies, while the heavier passages retain a rough, older black-metal character. The bass remains subdued, and the drums provide momentum without turning every section into a martial charge. Nothing sounds enormous for its own sake. Arathorn’s imagined medieval world is built from modest materials, like a private reconstruction assembled by one person studying fragments rather than a large ensemble staging a historical pageant.
That solitary construction gives the album its peculiar sincerity. Sköll does not appear interested in making mythology fashionable or transforming it into drinking music. The record feels closer to personal study, an attempt to enter the Nibelungen material through repetition, melody and atmosphere. Its rough edges become part of that intimacy. Treue & Verrat does not sound like a flawless resurrection of the past. It sounds like somebody calling toward the past and accepting that only an echo will return.
The album’s deepest subject is not battle but remembrance. Siegfried’s strength matters because it cannot save him. Hagen’s betrayal matters because loyalty existed first. Ragnarök matters because destruction remains part of a cycle rather than the final word. Arathorn turns those ideas into five long-form songs where acoustic calm and blackened violence repeatedly trade places.
By the end, the final battle announced in the opening track has become every final battle: the point where vows fail, heroes become stories and surviving voices decide what deserves to be carried forward. Treue & Verrat stands inside that aftermath, flute and guitar moving through the smoke, preserving both the loyalty and the wound that destroyed it.