Pedestrian Deposit - MP3 PACK

 

RUTracker - 1.19GB

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This 1.27 GB Pedestrian Deposit collection presents a project in the middle of a prolonged transformation. Its earliest recordings are compact, hostile and built from the damaged mechanics of turn-of-the-century harsh noise. By the final releases included here, that violence has been divided by silence, cello, field recordings, handmade instruments and carefully measured dynamics. The pressure never disappears. It becomes more deliberate.

Pedestrian Deposit began in 2000 as the solo project of Jonathan Borges. Median, the earliest release in this archive, is a small 2001 artifact whose brief running time already suggests the compressed nature of the early work. Borges used crude electronics, tape manipulation, feedback and hard editing to produce noise that feels constructed rather than merely discharged. The project’s name is oddly appropriate: sound is placed in the listener’s path as an obstruction, something dumped directly into ordinary movement.

The 2003 releases show Borges working through several available forms of underground noise circulation. Recycled Music, Restraint, and the splits with Armenia and The Cherry Point belong to a cassette and CDr economy built from short runs, mail order, personal exchange and duplication. Each release captures a slightly different balance between sustained abrasion and sudden interruption. Even when the material is overwhelmingly loud, the editing remains important. Feedback is cut into shapes. Loops begin to resemble machinery before being displaced. Dense passages suddenly expose thin electrical tones underneath.

Damsel, Foreshadowing with Oscillating Innards, Live Lungmotor, Look, Red Head with Prurient, Volatile and Woman – Evaporating make 2004 the most heavily represented year in the collection. Heard together, they reveal a project producing material rapidly without repeating one fixed design. The collaborations bring Borges into contact with other severe approaches to American noise, but his own identity remains recognizable through abrupt changes in scale, emotional unease and an attraction to sounds that seem both intimate and physically damaged.

Volatile is the largest early statement. Its five tracks were assembled largely between 2001 and early 2003, with fragments reaching back to 1995. “Kogal Fascination,” “Testuria / Naive,” “Vent 2,” “Naomi (In and Out of Consciousness)” and a twenty-one-minute live recording move between harsh electronics, distorted loops, sudden impacts and longer stretches of accumulating pressure. The album does not simply preserve a performance style. It begins to arrange harsh noise dramatically, using duration and contrast to create something closer to psychological movement.

That dramatic instinct becomes clearer on the 2005 releases Come-Hither, Eternal, Morose and Forlorn (Endless Longing), the latter made with Impregnable. Their titles suggest desire, permanence, isolation and emotional dependency rather than the technological or militaristic language common in noise. Pedestrian Deposit’s abrasion increasingly carries a wounded human quality. The sound can still be brutally impersonal, but its structures imply longing, exhaustion and frustrated contact.

Fatale, released in 2006 from material recorded during 2003 and 2004, is a decisive early album. “Svelte,” “Textile,” “You Can’t Help Me” and the eighteen-minute “Mascara” arrange harsh noise beside drone and restraint. The quieter passages are not peaceful introductions to inevitable explosions. They create vulnerable spaces in which small sounds become threatening. When the full pressure arrives, it feels earned through tension rather than added as a compulsory climax.

Severance, Vestige, and the splits with Powdered Wigs and Privy Seals continue that movement. Vestige is especially important as a title and as an album. A vestige is something left after the larger body has vanished, and Pedestrian Deposit increasingly begins treating sound as residue. Scrapes, hums, degraded recordings and distant tones suggest actions that occurred before the listener arrived. Noise becomes evidence rather than spectacle.

The collection changes substantially with Austere. After a two-year hiatus, Pedestrian Deposit returned in 2008 as a duo with Shannon Kennedy, whose cello, violin, bowing techniques and self-designed instruments expanded the project’s physical and emotional vocabulary. Released in 2009 from recordings made between 2004 and 2009, Austere stands between eras. Borges’s electronics retain their severity, but melody, acoustic resonance and extended silence now enter the compositions as equal forces.

The album’s six pieces culminate in the twenty-minute “You Didn’t Break Me.” The title gives the music an unmistakable emotional direction without explaining it. Fragile tones and restrained movement create a condition of endurance rather than victory. When harshness enters, it no longer seems to erase everything around it. Delicate material survives inside the pressure.

East Fork / North Fork develops the duo’s language more fully. Recorded across 2009 and 2010, its four long pieces combine feedback, cello, field recordings, drones and electroacoustic detail. “A Blessing,” “Strife / Meridian,” “A Light Through Sediment” and “Cycle of Combustion” move through carefully controlled extremes. Near-silence can last long enough to change the listener’s breathing before amplified sound enters with tremendous force.

Kennedy’s contribution is not simply beautiful cello placed against ugly electronics. She bows metal, wood and homemade strings, producing rough acoustic textures that can be as abrasive as Borges’s feedback. Borges, in turn, creates drones and tape passages capable of considerable delicacy. The duo repeatedly exchange expected roles. Electronic sound becomes mournful while an acoustic object becomes violent.

Kithless, released in 2012, continues this emphasis on estrangement. Its title suggests being without family, connection or natural belonging. The music moves through isolation without reducing it to one mood. Sparse passages create exposed distance, while eruptions of noise feel like failed attempts to cross it. The project’s power now comes from the entire movement between restraint and overload, not from either extreme alone.

Eleventh Hour and Natural Causes, both released in 2013, demonstrate the precision the duo had developed. Eleventh Hour contains two side-long pieces assembled from recordings made between 2009 and 2013. Somber melody, near-silence, drone, electroacoustic construction and harsh noise coexist within each piece. The transitions can be gradual enough to escape notice until the listener realizes the environment has completely changed.

Natural Causes is shorter and more concentrated. “Impetuous” and “Refuge” present opposing impulses: movement without patience and the search for safety. As throughout Pedestrian Deposit’s strongest work, refuge is never secure. Quiet passages may provide temporary shelter, but they also heighten awareness of whatever may break them.

The Architector, released in 2015, closes the archive at the point where Pedestrian Deposit had become a fully integrated composition and performance unit. The title combines architecture with agency, suggesting a maker who designs structures that others must inhabit. That is precisely what the duo does. Their pieces are not loose collections of dramatic noises. They are constructed spaces with carefully controlled entrances, obstructions, pressure points and exits.

Across these twenty-eight releases, Pedestrian Deposit evolves without repudiating its beginnings. The raw feedback and physical discomfort of the early solo recordings remain embedded in the later compositions. What changes is the amount of space surrounding them. Silence becomes active. Melody becomes precarious. Acoustic objects and electronics lose their fixed identities.

This collection captures that entire development: from short-run noise artifacts and split releases to patient, highly composed electroacoustic work. Its scale allows the transition to be heard gradually. Pedestrian Deposit does not abandon harsh noise. The project teaches harsh noise to wait, breathe, remember and strike only when the structure requires it.

Skullflower - MP3 PACK

 

RUTracker - 2.39GB

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Skullflower’s catalog begins as damaged rock music and ends, at least within this 3.42 GB collection, as something closer to an electrical weather system. The archive runs from the 1988 Birthdeath 12-inch through 2011’s Fucked on a Pile of Corpses, gathering albums, singles, collaborations and limited releases that document more than two decades of continual deformation. Across sixty-three folders, familiar rock components gradually lose their conventional jobs. Guitar stops producing riffs and becomes an instrument for generating mass, friction and hallucinated detail. Drums move from blunt propulsion toward distant ritual. Melody remains present, but it is buried so deeply inside feedback that finding it can feel like uncovering a transmission beneath layers of atmospheric damage.
Skullflower emerged from the British underground surrounding Broken Flag, the label and network associated with Ramleh, Total and other projects that crossed industrial noise with the physical force of rock instrumentation. Matthew Bower became the project’s central and continuing figure, while the early lineup included drummer and vocalist Stuart Dennison, guitarist Stefan Jaworzyn and various musicians connected to the same experimental circle. Unlike groups that abandoned guitars and drums in favor of tapes or pure electronics, Skullflower treated the basic rock-band setup as a machine that could be overloaded until its original language became almost unrecognizable.
Birthdeath and Form Destroyer establish the early method. The riffs are slow, repetitive and heavy, but they do not create the clean physical certainty of ordinary doom metal. Feedback leaks around every chord. The rhythm section advances through a cloud of amplifier damage, and the recordings feel less performed inside a room than dragged out of a collapsing electrical circuit. Form Destroyer is an exact title. The band does not eliminate rock form immediately. It allows riffs, repetition and percussion to remain visible while steadily destroying their stability.
Ruins and Xaman widen the damage. The former incorporates material from the early Broken Flag releases, sometimes in altered form, while Xaman gives the band’s heavy repetition a more ritualistic and psychedelic scale. The music still has weight and forward movement, but the distinction between riff and noise becomes increasingly uncertain. A guitar phrase may begin as a recognizable figure, repeat until it loses its edges, then merge with feedback into a single droning body. Skullflower’s early recordings are powerful because they never completely choose between rock and abstraction. Each side contaminates the other.
IIIrd Gatekeeper, released in 1992, is the collection’s clearest meeting point between those elements. The lineup of Bower, Dennison and bassist Anthony DiFranco produces a sound that remains enormously physical while stretching riffs into distorted, psychedelic environments. The drums pound with stubborn simplicity, the bass provides a dark structural floor, and Bower’s guitar behaves like smoke pouring from machinery. Instead of using solos to rise above the rhythm section, the guitar spreads outward, blurring the entire recording. The album has often served as an entry point into Skullflower because its brutality is still attached to an audible skeleton. The listener can hear where the rock band stands even as the room fills with noise.
Last Shot at Heaven, Obsidian Shaking Codex and the surrounding singles show that skeleton loosening. The titles become increasingly mystical, geological and cosmic, while the music grows less interested in conventional impact. Obsidian Shaking Codex sounds like an object that is simultaneously ancient, volcanic and unreadable, an appropriate description for music in which texture begins replacing sequence. The guitar no longer needs to move from one riff to another. Sustained vibration can become the entire event.
Carved into Roses, Argon, Infinityland and Transformer carry that evolution through the middle of the 1990s. Carved into Roses retains considerable heaviness, but beauty begins appearing more openly inside the abrasion. The title contains Skullflower’s central contradiction: something delicate given form through cutting. Infinityland expands toward psychedelic drift, while Transformer moves farther from recognizable rock into freer drone, unstable improvisation and smeared instrumental color. Contemporary descriptions of the band noted this growing movement away from identifiable genre, with reeds, strings and other textures entering the sound.
By This Is in 1996, Skullflower had nearly dissolved the distinction between composition and continuous atmosphere. The early records sounded like a band attempting to crush a song. The later work of the first period sounds like the residue left after the song has disappeared. Guitar remains central, but it no longer announces itself through chord changes or recognizable technique. It becomes a generator of unstable light, pressure and grain.
The long gap before 2003’s Exquisite Fucking Boredom divides the collection into two broad eras. When Bower revived Skullflower, the project returned without attempting to reconstruct the old group. The new version absorbed lessons from his work as Total, Sunroof! and other projects, emphasizing sustained guitar drone, electronic density and freeform psychedelic noise. Exquisite Fucking Boredom is not a nostalgic comeback. It sounds like Skullflower waking after several years and discovering that its previous rock body has completely melted.
Orange Canyon Mind from 2005 offers one of the revived project’s most spacious statements. Beneath the distortion lies a slow, almost pastoral psychedelic current. The album does not abandon ugliness, but it allows tones to hover and unfold rather than constantly attack. The title suggests landscape altered by consciousness, and the music behaves accordingly. Guitar becomes terrain: cliffs of feedback, valleys of drone and distant melodic forms glimpsed through heat.
Tribulation moves in the opposite direction. Recorded entirely by Bower, it is among the most severe entries in the archive, a sustained field of piercing treble, dense static and guitar noise pushed beyond ordinary instrumental identity. The record is not a flat wall, however. Within the overload are shifting layers, metallic flashes and phantom patterns that change according to volume and attention. Skullflower’s later noise works often produce this effect. The apparent surface is absolute, but prolonged listening reveals internal motion.
Abyssic Lowland Hiss and the extraordinary run of 2008 releases deepen the project’s occult and ritual atmosphere. Circulus Vitiosus Deus, Desire for a Holy War, La Noche de Walpurgis, Pure Imperial Reform, Taste the Blood of the Deceiver and Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Die form a dense cluster of recordings whose titles invoke circularity, blasphemy, persecution and corrupted sacred power. The music increasingly resembles black metal stripped of songs, vocals and rhythmic certainty. What remains is the genre’s freezing intensity and ecstatic repetition, translated into drone.
The triple-disc Circulus Vitiosus Deus is the collection’s great endurance chamber. Its scale allows noise to function as an environment rather than a sequence of tracks. Repetition becomes less a compositional device than a condition of consciousness. The listener is not guided through changes so much as held inside a field until small shifts acquire enormous importance.
Malediction, The Paris Working and Vile Veil continue this movement in 2009. Their titles suggest curses, ceremonial operations and layers concealing what cannot be directly viewed. Skullflower’s music has always benefited from such language because the sound encourages projection. A distorted guitar can resemble voices, bells, wind, machinery or orchestral movement without resolving into any of them. The listener continually discovers forms that may exist only in the act of hearing.
Strange Keys to Untune Gods’ Firmament, released in 2010, concentrates the revived Skullflower at monumental scale. Across two discs, themes are repeatedly buried beneath dense guitar and electronics, occasionally allowing fragments of melody or rhythm to emerge before the noise closes over them again. The title proposes sound as a tool capable of altering divine architecture. These are not keys that unlock a door. They untune the structure holding the heavens in place.
Fucked on a Pile of Corpses closes the dated portion of this archive with a more visceral and openly blackened form of attack. By this stage, Skullflower no longer resembles a damaged rock band in any ordinary sense, yet the project’s earliest principles remain intact. Repetition still generates force. Guitar still becomes larger than the person playing it. Beauty and ugliness still occupy the same frequency.
The collection’s importance lies in hearing that transformation occur gradually. Birthdeath, Form Destroyer and IIIrd Gatekeeper contain riffs buried inside noise. Transformer and This Is allow noise to dissolve the riffs. Exquisite Fucking Boredom and Orange Canyon Mind rebuild the project as psychedelic drone, while Tribulation and the later releases push that drone toward harsh noise, occult atmosphere and black-metal abstraction.
Skullflower never simply changes genres. It subjects the guitar to a prolonged disappearance. Across these recordings, the instrument is crushed, stretched, multiplied and burned until it no longer behaves like a guitar, yet its physical presence remains unmistakable. The result is one of the strangest long arcs in British underground music: rock transformed not by abandoning volume, but by entering volume so completely that form, performance and identity begin to evaporate.

Dropdead / Crossed Out - 1993 - Split 5''

Crust Records – none

The five-inch format was already a peculiar object when this split appeared in 1993. Smaller than the standard seven-inch single, awkward to manufacture, easy to overlook in a record bin and too physically slight to resemble a major release, it seemed perfectly designed for music that refused ordinary proportions. Dropdead and Crossed Out needed less than seven minutes to fill it. The resulting record is not miniature in effect. It compresses seven songs into a hard black disc that behaves like a clenched fist.
Dropdead’s side contains “New World Slaughter,” “Sheep” and “Still You Follow Blindly.” Crossed Out answers with “Supremacy,” “Selfserve,” “Neglect” and “Suffocate.” The split was issued in 1993 through a cooperative network of small labels, including Crust, Selfless and Rhetoric, during the brief period when Crossed Out was still active and Dropdead had just released its first full-length LP. Both bands were working at extreme speed, but their music approached that speed from different directions. Dropdead sounds like political hardcore stripped down until only momentum and accusation remain. Crossed Out sounds heavier, more ruptured and physically diseased, forcing grindcore velocity against slow, collapsing blocks of bass and guitar.
“New World Slaughter” begins without allowing the needle any time to settle. Dropdead tears directly into the song, with Bob Otis’s voice riding above a compact blur of guitar, bass and drums. The production is raw but unusually clear for music moving this quickly. Individual strikes remain audible inside the rush. Brian Mastrobuono’s drumming does not merely create speed; it gives the song a continuous forward shove, while Ben Barnett’s guitar turns a handful of chords into a serrated rhythmic surface.
The title places the song within Dropdead’s wider political vocabulary. Their early recordings repeatedly confront war, animal exploitation, state violence, authority and the willingness of ordinary people to participate in systems that destroy them. The lyrics are brief because elaboration would weaken the attack. Dropdead does not construct a detailed argument and then decorate it with punk music. The music is the argument’s physical form.
“Sheep” is even more compressed. Its accusation is familiar within anarchist hardcore, but Dropdead’s performance keeps it from becoming a slogan printed on autopilot. The entire song feels impatient with the existence of obedience. The rhythm accelerates as though trying to escape the behavior being condemned. Otis does not sound like a distant political commentator. He sounds personally disgusted by the surrender of judgment.
“Still You Follow Blindly” finishes the side by extending that idea. The title could function as the conclusion to “Sheep,” but the song has its own sharp shape. Dropdead’s strength lies partly in how quickly the band can make each short track feel complete. Introductions, verses and endings are reduced to a few necessary gestures. Nothing remains long enough to become comfortable.
Crossed Out’s side is darker and less aerodynamic. “Supremacy” begins with the sensation of something heavy being dragged into motion. Dallas Van Kempen’s vocals are deeper and more suffocated than Otis’s bark, while Tad Miller’s drums keep colliding with abrupt tempo changes. The band can explode into blast beats and then collapse into a crawling passage before the listener has adjusted to either speed.
That contrast became one of Crossed Out’s defining contributions to what would soon be called powerviolence. The term described a loose group of bands that pushed hardcore into extremely short songs, violent tempo changes, blast beats and distorted low-end pressure. Crossed Out existed only from 1990 to 1993, played approximately sixteen shows and left behind a demo, a seven-inch, two principal splits and compilation tracks. The limited output became part of the band’s force. There was no long period of refinement or decline. Crossed Out appeared, produced a compact body of hostile music and stopped.
“Selfserve” captures the band’s refusal of smooth momentum. The song keeps interrupting itself, moving between rapid discharge and blunt rhythmic punishment. The guitar does not form a bright hardcore buzz. It sounds thick and obstructive, while the bass occupies enough space to make the tiny record feel physically overloaded.
“Neglect” is built around similar collisions, but the title gives the violence an emotional direction. Crossed Out’s songs rarely explain themselves at length. A word or short phrase identifies the condition, and the music supplies the rest: abandonment, resentment, pressure and the inability to communicate through anything gentler.
“Suffocate” is an appropriate ending because Crossed Out’s side repeatedly reduces the available air. Even during the fastest passages, the music does not feel liberating. Speed becomes another form of confinement. The track ends before the pressure can be released, leaving the side with the sensation of a door slammed shut.
The split works because the bands do not sound interchangeable. Dropdead is sharper and more declarative, its songs cutting forward through political urgency. Crossed Out is murkier, heavier and more internally fractured. Dropdead attacks the world. Crossed Out makes the world feel physically unbearable. The five-inch allows no room for either approach to dominate for long. One side erupts, the record is flipped, and another form of compression begins.
A personal memory gives this particular upload another dimension. The file is not taken from the uploader’s original copy, but the record recalls the pleasure of buying a five-inch in a physical record store in 1995. At that time, vinyl itself could appear nearly obsolete to people outside punk. While the uploader toured with bands and gave relatives records made by the artists he traveled with, some responded with surprise: “They still make those?”
They did, although many of the most interesting records were appearing in forms that made little commercial sense. Labels pressed five-inch and eight-inch splits, flexi-discs, one-sided records and tiny editions assembled by hand. The inconvenience was part of the attraction. A five-inch was not simply music reduced to a smaller circle. It was evidence that underground punk could create its own formats, distribution systems and ideas of value.
Finding this split in 1995 therefore meant more than acquiring seven songs. The object carried rarity without the sterile atmosphere of luxury collecting. It was rare because very few people thought a five-inch hardcore record should exist at all. It could be bought in a store, held in one hand and carried home with the awareness that the object belonged to a living network of bands, labels, tours, record shops and listeners.
That period can now appear distant because nearly every recording is potentially available without the object that first carried it. Hearing a digital copy preserves the music but changes its scale. The original record required handling. Its small surface emphasized the absurd amount of aggression cut into it. The sides ended almost as soon as the needle had begun moving inward. Turning it over was part of the listening rhythm.
The fondness attached to buying the record in 1995 is not nostalgia for a supposedly purer era. It is memory of participation. Bands toured, people traded addresses, records arrived in stores, relatives wondered why vinyl had not disappeared, and a five-inch split could feel like a small message from a world operating according to its own rules. It was a pleasure to be alive inside that exchange.
Dropdead continued for decades, maintaining its political focus and abrasive economy. Crossed Out became one of those short-lived bands whose influence expanded after the activity ended. This split catches both at a perfect intersection: Dropdead at the beginning of a remarkably durable history, Crossed Out near the end of an exceptionally brief one.
The record lasts only minutes, but it contains an entire underground logic. Use the smallest available format. Remove everything unnecessary. Divide the space between two bands. Press the result even if most people believe records are already dead. Thirty years later, the five-inch still feels stranger than the music industry surrounding it, and the seven songs still sound far too large for the object holding them.

Skullflower - (1994) Ponyland 7''

Sympathy For The Record Industry ‎– 275

Skullflower’s Ponyland arrives wearing the wrong face. The cover belongs visually to the cheerful American universe of teenage comic strips: rounded lettering, bright colors, clean black outlines and a smiling blonde whose exaggerated innocence has already crossed into adult parody. The artwork is credited to Larry Welz, creator of Cherry Poptart, the erotic underground comic later known simply as Cherry. Welz built Cherry from the visual vocabulary associated with Archie comics, retaining the wholesome suburban surfaces while replacing their endless romantic hesitation with explicit sexual appetite. On the front of a Skullflower record, that polished cartoon invitation becomes another form of distortion.
Released by Sympathy for the Record Industry in 1994, Ponyland contains two unusually substantial tracks for a seven-inch. The title piece occupies more than seven minutes, while “Fake Revolt” runs slightly over five. The record turns at 33⅓ RPM, allowing nearly thirteen minutes of Skullflower’s scorched psychedelic noise to be compressed onto a format more commonly associated with quick punk singles. The result feels physically small but musically overgrown.
By 1994, Skullflower had already moved beyond the blunt noise-rock assault of Form Destroyer and IIIrd Gatekeeper. Matthew Bower and the changing group around him still used guitar, bass and drums, but the instruments were losing their conventional boundaries. Riffs no longer needed to lead songs from one section to another. They could be repeated until they dissolved into vibration. Feedback was not a layer placed over the performance. It was the atmosphere in which the performance occurred.
“Ponyland” begins with a heavy, circling guitar figure whose repetition immediately establishes weight without providing a stable center. The riff seems to drag itself forward through layers of amplifier haze. Stuart Dennison’s drumming gives the piece a loose, battered momentum, but the rhythm never settles into the dependable drive of ordinary heavy rock. Each strike feels partially absorbed by the surrounding distortion.
The guitar sound is enormous without becoming cleanly monumental. It splinters at the edges, producing smaller tones that hover around the central movement. These secondary sounds are part of Skullflower’s peculiar richness. Beneath the obvious roar, phantom melodies and stray harmonics appear for a few seconds, then disappear back into the mass. What initially sounds like a single overloaded surface gradually reveals multiple layers moving at different speeds.
The title creates its own contradiction. Ponyland suggests a child’s imaginary kingdom of bright animals, gentle landscapes and harmless fantasy. Skullflower supplies a territory of trudging rhythm, electrical fog and guitar tones that seem to have been left outside in corrosive weather. Yet the music is not entirely opposed to the title. Beneath its damaged surface lies a strange, narcotic beauty. The repeated figure has the simplicity of a children’s melody enlarged until it becomes threatening.
That tension is intensified by Welz’s cover. Cherry was an adult offshoot of Archie’s visual world, designed around the collision between innocent cartoon grammar and explicit desire. Before internet pornography made sexual imagery instantly abundant, an underground comic could carry an unusual charge simply because it appeared where it was not supposed to. A drawing in a comic shop or record sleeve could become a sudden physical event. The image was fixed, scarce and attached to an object that had to be found, purchased and hidden or displayed.
Time changes that charge. Images once capable of producing immediate excitement may later become historical markers, reminders of an earlier body and an earlier visual culture. The contemporary abundance of animated and illustrated pornography can make attraction to drawings seem either entirely normal or strangely incomprehensible, depending on the viewer. Welz’s artwork quietly connects those periods. Cherry demonstrates that erotic attachment to cartoon bodies did not begin with online anime culture. It belonged to underground print long before digital access made the phenomenon enormous and visible.
Skullflower’s music performs a related corruption of familiar form. Just as Cherry takes the smiling language of mainstream teen comics and pushes it into adult territory, Skullflower takes rock instrumentation and subjects it to excess until its expected meanings become unstable. Guitar, bass and drums remain recognizable, but they no longer promise songs, solos or release. The familiar body is present while behaving incorrectly.
“Ponyland” develops through accumulation rather than conventional progression. Small changes in pressure become major events. A guitar tone rises slightly above the central churn. The drums briefly become more forceful. A new layer of feedback enters and changes the apparent shape of the room. The track never announces these alterations as separate sections, but its internal landscape is constantly moving.
The effect is psychedelic without the decorative signals usually associated with psychedelic rock. There are no sparkling studio effects, elaborate solos or colorful changes of mood. Skullflower reaches altered consciousness through repetition and density. The riff remains in place long enough for perception to begin changing around it. What sounded blunt during the opening minute becomes oddly detailed by the fifth.
“Fake Revolt” is shorter and more agitated. Its title suggests rebellion reduced to pose, an imitation of disruption that leaves the underlying order untouched. Skullflower’s performance offers no clean heroic resistance. The guitars grind and flare while the rhythm lurches beneath them, producing music too damaged to function as an anthem.
The track has a harsher, more compressed shape than “Ponyland.” Instead of opening into a broad drone, it presses its elements together. Guitar frequencies scrape across one another, and the percussion appears to struggle for space. The sound resembles a band still playing after the architecture around it has begun collapsing.
The two pieces make an effective seven-inch because they present different balances within the same method. “Ponyland” stretches repetition toward hallucination. “Fake Revolt” tightens the sound into abrasion. One side feels like a landscape gradually becoming toxic; the other resembles the argument that takes place after everyone realizes the landscape cannot be repaired.
Sympathy for the Record Industry was an appropriate label for this object. Its catalog mixed garage rock, punk, damaged pop and records that treated rock-and-roll history as material for affectionate sabotage. Ponyland sits oddly but comfortably within that world. Skullflower was far more abstract and severe than much of the label’s output, yet the record still carries the physical vocabulary of an underground rock single: a seven-inch disc, lurid artwork and two tracks divided by the necessary act of turning the object over.
The front illustration was colored by Evan Mack, preserving the bright commercial finish of Welz’s line work. That brightness matters. A darker or more obviously grotesque image would merely confirm the music’s hostility. The cheerful erotic cartoon makes the record more unstable because it refuses to explain the sound correctly. It promises amusement, fantasy and immediate pleasure. The music supplies duration, friction and pleasure distorted almost beyond recognition.
This mismatch is not accidental decoration. Skullflower’s releases frequently place occult, grotesque, abstract or culturally displaced images beside music that remains impossible to summarize visually. Ponyland is especially effective because the cover activates associations that change with the viewer’s age and history. It may appear funny, arousing, embarrassing, nostalgic or merely strange. The music does something similar, shifting between heaviness, boredom, trance, irritation and beauty according to how long and how closely it is heard.
Ponyland belongs to the fertile middle of Skullflower’s original run, when the group still sounded like a physical band but was rapidly dissolving into the drone and freeform noise that would dominate later work. The record’s two tracks preserve that unstable balance. Drums and riffs remain, yet neither can control the widening field of feedback.
The seven-inch looks like an adult cartoon novelty and sounds like rock music forgetting how to behave. Larry Welz transforms the visual innocence of Archie into erotic parody. Skullflower transforms the recognizable body of rock into a slow electrical fever. Ponyland places those two distortions together and allows neither to explain the other.

SPK - MP3 PACK

 

RUTracker - 2.92GB

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SPK’s catalog does not develop so much as violently replace itself. The group that made the Factory, Mekano and Meat Processing Section singles sounds as though it is broadcasting from inside a psychiatric ward, slaughterhouse and collapsing electrical plant at the same time. Five years later, Machine Age Voodoo places polished electronic percussion, saxophone, female vocals and dance-floor hooks under the same initials. By the end of the decade, Graeme Revell is producing ritualistic ambient music and electronic orchestration that points toward his later career composing film scores. This 3.05 GB collection gathers the albums, singles, official live recordings, bootlegs, compilations and video soundtracks needed to hear those mutations without forcing them into one tidy identity.
SPK formed in Sydney in 1978 around Revell and Neil Hill, who had both worked in psychiatric settings and were influenced by the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, a radical German patients’ group that understood mental illness partly through social and political conditions. Even the name SPK was kept unstable. It could mean Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv, Surgical Penis Klinik, System Planning Korporation or several other invented expansions. The changing initials suited a project suspicious of fixed identity, medical authority and the institutions that decide which forms of behavior are acceptable.
The 1979 singles are crude declarations of intent. Factory, Mekano and No More reduce rock music to pounding percussion, distorted electronics, shouted commands and metallic repetition. “Slogun” turns language into ideological blunt force, while “Factory” makes industrial labor sound less like productive order than compulsory psychic damage. These recordings do not describe machinery from a safe artistic distance. They make the recording itself behave like machinery with exposed moving parts.
Information Overload Unit, released in 1981, expands that attack into a full environment. Recorded from material developed during 1979 and 1980, it combines synthesizers, tapes, bass, guitar, primitive rhythms and heavily treated voices. Titles such as “Suture Obsession,” “Stammheim Torturkammer,” “Epilept: Convulse” and “Ground Zero: Infinity Dose” create a vocabulary of surgery, imprisonment, neurological crisis and institutional violence.
The album is difficult not because it is formless, but because its forms are sick. Rhythms repeat without becoming reassuring. Electronic pulses resemble diagnostic equipment operating beyond its proper range. Voices appear as commands, symptoms or distant human remains trapped behind the machinery. SPK’s early music continually collapses the distinction between patient and institution. The listener cannot tell whether the noise represents a damaged mind, the system attempting to treat it, or the violence produced when the two are locked together.
Leichenschrei sharpens that method. Its title translates as “corpse scream,” and the album feels more spatial and ceremonial than its predecessor. Industrial percussion, concrete sound, shrill electronics and long low-frequency passages are arranged with greater control. The brutality is no longer simply discharged. It is staged.
Pieces such as “Maladia Europa,” “Desolation,” “Cry from the Sanatorium” and “Napalm (Terminal Patient)” treat Europe itself as diseased territory. The body, the hospital and the political system become versions of the same enclosure. Metal strikes echo through large empty spaces. Voices emerge and disappear without becoming stable narrators. The album often sounds archaeological, as though some later civilization were replaying fragments recovered from an institution where treatment, punishment and experimentation had become indistinguishable.
SPK’s live recordings make that material even less comfortable. Live at the Crypt, The Last Attempt at Paradise and the many bootlegs collected here document performances in which the visual element was inseparable from the sound. The group used films, medical imagery, animal remains, metal, fire and confrontational actions to prevent the concert from becoming passive entertainment. The Despair and Two Autopsy Films material preserved in this archive extends that strategy into video.
The bootlegs from Garibaldi’s, Al’s Bar, Danceteria, SO36, Chicago and other locations are not clean historical documents. Their damaged cassette sound is part of their value. Percussion smears into room noise, voices disappear beneath distortion and electronics overload the recording equipment. The tapes capture SPK not as a perfectly reproducible repertoire, but as a dangerous event moving through different spaces.
Auto-Da-Fé and the enormous Dokument III0 1979–1983 collection help organize this early period. The latter spreads singles, album tracks, live recordings and alternate material across six LPs in the version represented here, showing how quickly SPK’s methods changed during its first years. Songs recur in different states, sometimes as studio constructions and sometimes as barely controlled live eruptions.
Then comes “Metal Dance.” The title is almost a joke about the transformation underway. Industrial sound, once built to destroy the expectations of rock performance, becomes danceable. The metal remains, but it is reorganized into rhythm. The single retains hard percussion and mechanical imagery while introducing a cleaner pulse and a more legible structure.
Machine Age Voodoo completes the break. Released in 1984 and led vocally by Sinan Leong, the album moves toward synth-pop, dark dance music and electronic funk. “Junk Funk,” “Machine Age Voodoo” and the expanded language surrounding the album replace the diseased basement atmosphere of Leichenschrei with bright studio surfaces, sequenced rhythms and commercial precision.
For listeners devoted to early SPK, the change can feel like betrayal. The group that attacked institutions and spectacle appears to have entered a major-label studio and become spectacle itself. Yet the album is more interesting when heard as another SPK mutation. The machinery has not disappeared. It has become attractive. Control no longer arrives as screaming medical authority; it arrives through the polished seduction of rhythm, image and consumer design.
That does not make Machine Age Voodoo secretly identical to Information Overload Unit. It is a genuine rupture. The early group’s physical ugliness, ideological menace and unstable collective identity have been replaced by Revell’s increasingly centralized production and Leong’s composed vocal presence. The difference is exactly why the full archive matters. SPK cannot be understood by preserving only the phase that best fits the accepted history of industrial music.
Zamia Lehmanni: Songs of Byzantine Flowers changes direction again. Released in 1986, it abandons most of the dance-rock framework for dark ambient composition, ritual percussion, sampled voices and orchestral electronics. The album feels suspended outside ordinary chronological time. Its imagined Byzantine flowers are less botanical than ceremonial, cultivated in an environment of stone, incense, ruined empire and artificial memory.
The record reveals that the atmospheric passages buried inside Leichenschrei were not incidental. Revell had always been interested in building psychological architecture from sound. On Zamia Lehmanni, that architecture is no longer filled with screaming metal and institutional panic. It becomes vast, mournful and strangely beautiful.
Digitalis Ambigua: Gold and Poison and the 1987 performance documented on Oceania continue this late-period movement. The title Digitalis Ambigua refers to a flower associated with both medicine and toxicity, an ideal image for SPK. The same substance can heal or kill according to dose, context and authority. That ambiguity had been present from the beginning in the group’s treatment of psychiatry, technology and social order.
The final material is smoother and more composed, but it remains concerned with unstable transformation. Acoustic suggestion, electronic atmosphere and ritual rhythm replace the early factory impact. Revell would soon become a successful film composer, and these releases make that development understandable. SPK had gradually moved from songs into environments, then from environments into cinematic spaces.
The singles and alternate mixes collected here provide connective tissue between the major albums. “See Saw,” “Chambermusik,” Dekompositiones, “Metal Dance,” “In Flagrante Delicto,” “Breathless” and “Off the Deep End” catch the project in smaller transitional forms. Some preserve the abrasive cut of early SPK. Others expose the increasingly polished electronic body of the later group.
Taken together, the archive is not the story of a band gradually improving one sound. It is the story of an unstable name passing through several incompatible bodies. SPK begins with psychiatric revolt, industrial noise and anti-musical confrontation. It moves through performance art, dance-floor electronics, dark ambient ritual and orchestral sound design.
The constant is not genre. It is the suspicion that systems alter the people living inside them. Hospitals, factories, political movements, record labels, dance clubs and cinematic machinery all produce their own forms of behavior. SPK’s music repeatedly enters those systems, absorbs their sounds and emerges changed.
That is why the commercial turn does not erase the early records, and the late ambient work does not resolve them. Every phase remains contaminated by the others. The dance music carries machinery inside it. The ritual music retains the hospital corridor. The early noise already contains the future film composer arranging terror through space.
Across seventy-four folders, SPK continually abandons the listener’s preferred version of SPK. That refusal is the real continuity. The initials remain, but the organism beneath them will not stop mutating.

Toshi Ichiyanagi - 1969 - Opera From The Works Of Tadanori Yokoo 2xLP

 

The End Record – TY-1001-1002

Opera “From the Works of Tadanori Yokoo” does not begin by asking what an opera should sound like. It asks how many incompatible versions of Japan can be forced onto the same record before the surface begins to rupture. Popular ballads, electronic noise, spoken voices, psychedelic guitar, sentimental orchestration, tape manipulation and sudden stretches of abstraction pass through one another as if several radio stations, theater productions and private memories have been tuned to the same frequency.
Toshi Ichiyanagi created the work in 1969 around the art and cultural presence of Tadanori Yokoo, whose posters and illustrations were already transforming commercial imagery, traditional Japanese motifs, American pop, erotic suggestion and political unease into overloaded visual fields. Yokoo’s images rarely offered a single stable center. Rising suns, trains, celebrities, waterfalls, family photographs, religious symbols and advertising graphics collided in colors intense enough to become almost hallucinatory. Ichiyanagi’s opera translates that density into sound.
The result is not an opera in the traditional sense. There is no continuous plot, cast of characters or sequence of arias leading toward resolution. The title instead describes a larger theatrical operation. Yokoo’s work becomes the subject, scenery and organizing disturbance. Ichiyanagi treats the record itself as a stage on which different layers of postwar Japanese culture appear, overlap and vanish.
The opening ballad material immediately establishes this unstable relationship with popular music. Enka-style singing carries the emotional weight of longing, sorrow and romantic defeat, using melodies that would have been instantly legible to Japanese listeners. Yet the songs do not remain securely inside that familiar style. Tape effects, interruptions and changes in context make the sentiment feel both sincere and strangely exposed.
Ichiyanagi does not simply mock popular balladry from the superior position of the avant-garde. He allows its emotional force to remain intact while placing it beside sounds that reveal its theatrical construction. The vibrato, swelling accompaniment and melodramatic language become part of a broader collage of desire. A song can be moving and artificial at the same time. In fact, its artificiality may be one reason it is moving.
This double vision runs through the entire work. Familiar sounds are not destroyed outright. They are repositioned until their meanings become uncertain. A traditional-sounding phrase may be followed by electronic distortion. Spoken language may enter like narration, advertising or overheard conversation. Rock instrumentation appears with the force of contemporary youth culture, only to dissolve into tape noise or ceremonial atmosphere.
“Ken Takakura Sings on Akasaka” invokes one of Japanese cinema’s most recognizable masculine figures. Takakura’s screen image was built around restraint, loyalty, endurance and the solitary honor of the yakuza hero. Within Ichiyanagi and Yokoo’s world, that image becomes another cultural object available for duplication and distortion. Masculine purity, popular entertainment and national mythology blur together.
“Man’s Pure Heart” continues this fascination with sincerity as performance. The phrase suggests moral clarity, but the music does not provide a clean emotional space in which purity can survive. Voices, instruments and electronic processes keep contaminating one another. The idea of an untouched heart becomes almost impossible within a culture saturated by cinema, advertising, recorded music and political spectacle.
That saturation is central to the album. Ichiyanagi had spent years in New York, studied at Juilliard and the New School, encountered John Cage’s ideas, and participated in the international Fluxus environment before returning to Japan. He brought back an understanding that composition could include indeterminacy, physical action, electronics and ordinary sound. Yet this record does not feel like an imported American experiment pasted onto Japanese material. It uses those methods to examine a specifically Japanese collision between tradition, postwar modernization and mass media.
The electronic sections are especially important because they do not function merely as futuristic decoration. Ring modulation, altered tape and dense overlapping sources destabilize the human voice. Singing becomes texture, speech becomes rhythm and recognizable instruments lose their edges. Technology does not produce a clean modern future. It produces mutation.
The rock elements operate similarly. The appearance of Yuya Uchida and the Flowers connects the album to the emerging Japanese psychedelic scene that would soon develop into Flower Travellin’ Band. Their contribution brings amplified physicality into a work already crowded with theatrical and electronic information. Guitar, drums and vocals do not simply modernize the opera. They add another form of cultural excess.
“The Flowers,” the album’s enormous concluding territory, stretches this mixture toward a more immersive form. Depending on the edition, the piece may be divided into separate indexed sections, but it functions as an extended environment rather than a conventional song. Psychedelic rock, improvisation, electronic treatment and vocal material gather into a mass whose internal boundaries are difficult to locate.
The title may refer to the participating group, but it also fits Yokoo’s recurring use of flowers as symbols of beauty, death, decoration and overwhelming visual abundance. These are not delicate objects placed neatly in a vase. They spread across the composition, entangled with electricity and cultural debris.
As the piece develops, the distinction between planned composition and collective eruption becomes increasingly uncertain. Sounds seem to enter from outside the frame. Some passages possess the momentum of a live rock performance, while others feel detached from ordinary time. Tape manipulation can make an action repeat or appear displaced from its source. The recording continually reminds the listener that an event has been captured, cut and reconstructed.
This makes the album’s physical presentation especially significant. The original edition was issued as an elaborate double picture-disc set designed by Yokoo, turning the records into visual artworks before they were played. The object did not merely contain an opera about his work. It became another Yokoo work, with the grooves literally embedded inside his imagery.
Picture discs are usually associated with spectacle, collectability and the transformation of music into merchandise. Here that quality becomes part of the concept. A record about mass culture arrives as an unusually desirable mass-produced object. Art criticism and commercial seduction occupy the same sleeve.
That contradiction prevents the album from settling into a simple anti-commercial position. Yokoo worked across fine art, illustration, posters, advertising and popular entertainment. Ichiyanagi moved between institutional composition, performance art and recorded experimentation. Neither artist operated outside culture looking inward. They were participants rearranging its materials from within.
The year 1969 gives the work additional pressure. Japan was experiencing student protest, rapid economic expansion, political conflict and an enormous transformation of everyday visual and sonic life. American influence existed beside older traditions, while television, film, records and advertising accelerated the production of new identities. Opera “From the Works of Tadanori Yokoo” does not explain those conditions. It reproduces their overload.
Its humor is inseparable from that overload. The sudden contrasts can be absurd, and the exaggerated emotional language of the ballads occasionally seems to grin at its own intensity. Yet the humor never turns the album into parody alone. Beneath the collisions is a real fascination with how people construct themselves through available images and songs.
Yokoo’s art repeatedly turns personal history into public spectacle. Childhood memory, family photographs and local imagery become entangled with movie stars, nationalism and international pop. Ichiyanagi does something similar with sound. Private emotion is sung through commercial forms. Cultural memory arrives through recordings. The individual voice becomes almost impossible to separate from the media that has taught it how to speak.
This is why the work remains so difficult to classify. It can be described as electronic music, psychedelic rock, tape collage, Fluxus-related performance, experimental opera or an artist record. Each description is accurate, but none survives contact with the entire album.
Its deepest form may be the portrait, although the person being portrayed is never isolated. Yokoo appears through the culture he absorbed and transformed. Ichiyanagi composes not a biography but an atmosphere surrounding the artist: sentimental songs, cinematic masculinity, technological noise, theatrical exaggeration and psychedelic expansion.
More than fifty years later, the album still sounds overloaded because it was built to resist clean historical preservation. Its sources keep rubbing against one another. The popular music refuses to become merely ironic. The electronics refuse to remain academic. The rock refuses to behave like a separate genre. Even the picture discs refuse to be only packaging.
Opera “From the Works of Tadanori Yokoo” is an opera with no stable stage, a portrait whose subject keeps disappearing into mass culture and a record that treats contradiction as its primary instrument. Ichiyanagi does not translate Yokoo’s images into music so much as recreate their method: gather everything, intensify the colors, destroy the hierarchy and allow beauty to emerge from collision.

Treasury Of Puppies - 2022 - Mitt Stora Nu LP

 

Discreet Music – 07

Mitt Stora Nu sounds as though it was recorded in a home where every ordinary object has begun developing a private emotional life. A guitar drags itself across the floor. An organ stares through a window. Voices describe small events with the gravity of prophecies, while tape hiss, field recordings and cheap electronics turn the surrounding rooms faintly unreal. Treasury of Puppies never announces where songwriting ends and sound collage begins. The nine tracks move between spoken poetry, skeletal rock, damaged folk music, ambient drift and miniature radio theater as though these were all natural parts of the same domestic language.

Treasury of Puppies is the Gothenburg duo of Charlott Malmenholt and Joakim Karlsson. Their 2020 debut had already established an unusual method: spoken and occasionally sung texts placed over indolent guitar, synthesizer, flute, clarinet, glockenspiel, field recordings and tape manipulation. Mitt Stora Nu retains that handmade vocabulary while giving it broader emotional and structural range. The earlier work often felt like fragments recovered from an eccentric private broadcast. This album still has that intimacy, but several pieces expand into slow, complete environments rather than stopping at the point of an intriguing sketch.

“Jag såg ditt ljus,” or “I Saw Your Light,” opens with less than two minutes of fragile illumination. A simple instrumental shape appears through soft noise while the voice remains calm and almost conversational. Nothing is pushed toward a dramatic conclusion. The track introduces the album by making attention itself feel important. A small light has been noticed, and noticing it is enough to sustain the song.

“Rotten Apples of Love” brings the duo’s peculiar rock-and-roll instincts closer to the surface. The title combines decay with romantic abundance, suggesting affection that has remained stored past the point of sweetness. Guitar moves slowly beneath the vocals, carrying the exhausted glamour of a song heard through the wall of an empty club. Treasury of Puppies understand that a rock gesture does not need force to remain recognizable. A chord, a posture and a few words can preserve the entire ghost of the form.

The duo’s delivery is crucial. Their voices rarely rise into conventional performance. Lines are spoken or sung with restrained expression, leaving the listener uncertain whether the subject is mundane, tragic, comic or all three. This flatness is not emotional absence. It allows words to remain unstable. A sentence might be an instruction, a memory, an accusation or a quotation removed from its original setting.

Throughout the album, Malmenholt and Karlsson paraphrase and rearrange language associated with writers including Mare Kandre, Edith Södergran and Edgar Allan Poe, while Britney Spears enters the same textual atmosphere without being treated as a joke. The contrast fits Treasury of Puppies perfectly. Canonical poetry and commercial pop are not arranged in a hierarchy. Both provide phrases that have entered human memory and can be detached, repeated and given another emotional temperature.

“Bränna, känna” turns the rhyming Swedish verbs for burning and feeling into a compact statement of the album’s method. Sensation and damage remain close together. The track develops through slowly repeated tones, voice and a dragging pulse that never becomes a full beat. Its restraint creates tension because every sound seems capable of vanishing before the thought has been completed.

“Skriv när du är hemma,” meaning “Write When You’re Home,” is the album’s longest piece and one of its most emotionally expansive. The phrase is ordinary, the kind of instruction sent after someone leaves at night, but it contains care, anxiety and the possibility that the message may never arrive. Treasury of Puppies stretch that small sentence into a wide, suspended landscape. Long tones and sparse instrumental movement make the familiar request feel almost monumental.

The duo often records with older machines designed for speech rather than music. That limitation becomes part of the album’s character. Voices and instruments occupy a narrow, imperfect space, carrying the grain of answering machines, cassette recorders and portable dictation devices. The sound does not aim to reproduce a room transparently. It preserves the machinery through which the room was remembered.

“Koka en vit orm,” or “Boil a White Snake,” returns to the duo’s gift for phrases that resemble instructions from an impossible household manual. The track is brief, playful and slightly alarming. Its imagery belongs to fairy tale, occult recipe and childish invention at once. Treasury of Puppies do not explain the white snake or why it must be boiled. The unexplained command becomes more vivid because it remains sealed.

“Dödens soffa,” the “Sofa of Death,” is the record’s crooked rockabilly miniature. A primitive pulse and skeletal guitar produce the image of a band reduced to a few stubborn bones. The track is funny without becoming novelty music. Its sofa is both a ridiculous piece of furniture and a plausible final destination, the place where exhaustion, television, boredom and mortality quietly merge.

That collision between humor and dread runs throughout Mitt Stora Nu. The record has been described as “life-affirming downer music,” a phrase that captures its refusal to separate melancholy from pleasure. The duo’s world is gloomy, but it is not hopeless. Making a song from a broken phrase, a slow chord or the sound of an old recorder is itself an act of attachment. The music continues paying attention even when what it observes is damaged.

“Vidriga simulerade ängel,” or “Disgusting Simulated Angel,” pushes artificial holiness into the album’s homemade technological environment. An angel is already an image of mediation, a messenger between different realms. Making it simulated introduces the possibility of counterfeit transcendence: light generated by a machine, grace reconstructed through electronics, a divine presence that may be only another recording.

The title track translates approximately as “My Great Now.” The phrase enlarges the present until it becomes almost architectural. Treasury of Puppies build the song patiently, allowing organ-like tones, guitar and voice to gather into one of the album’s fullest arrangements. Yet the grandeur remains peculiar and private. This is not a universal present announced to a crowd. It is one person’s enormous now, made from whatever thoughts, rooms, losses and objects happen to occupy it.

The title also describes the album’s relationship with time. Old recording devices, borrowed literary language and faded musical styles are pulled into a present that does not erase their age. Rockabilly, post-punk, radio drama, ambient music and sound poetry coexist without becoming retro exercises. They are materials still available now, carrying their histories like dust on furniture.

“En blick i blicken,” roughly “A Glance in the Gaze,” closes the album by folding vision back upon itself. Looking becomes something observed. The track feels small after the expansion of the title piece, but its modest scale is appropriate. Treasury of Puppies rarely resolve their environments. They leave behind an image, a tone or an unfinished line that continues moving after the recording stops.

The physical edition reinforces the album’s private-world quality. Released by Gothenburg’s Discreet Music, the LP came with an insert and was pressed in an edition of one thousand copies. Giuseppe Ielasi’s mastering preserves the lo-fi materials without flattening their depth. Hiss, room tone and rough recording textures remain audible, but the quieter layers retain enough separation to make the album feel carefully assembled rather than accidentally murky.

Mitt Stora Nu is experimental music without the stiffness of an experiment being demonstrated. Its oddness feels lived in. Malmenholt and Karlsson do not construct a laboratory around their sounds or insist that every unusual decision be admired. They make songs from the materials nearest at hand, then allow those songs to remain crooked.

The album’s nine tracks create a world where sadness can wear a leather jacket, poetry can emerge from a cheap voice recorder, and a sofa can acquire the authority of death. It is intimate without becoming confessional, playful without becoming weightless and carefully composed without losing the feeling that it might have been discovered by accident. Treasury of Puppies turn their great present into a small room, open the door and leave every object inside quietly humming.

Wolfkrieg / Via Dolorosa - 2015 - Reikon (Anima) - Runes Of New Order 7''

 

Misty Land Productions – ML002

This 2015 split gives Wolfkrieg and Via Dolorosa barely ten minutes to construct a complete ideological and musical environment. There is no introductory ambience, extended ritual, or long descent into atmosphere. Each project receives one side of a five-track-sized object reduced to two substantial pieces: Wolfkrieg’s “Runes of New Order” and Via Dolorosa’s “Reikon (Anima).” The limited seven-inch format turns the record into a concentrated exchange between two approaches to militant black metal, one driven by guitar movement and harsh propulsion, the other more ceremonial, programmed, and deliberately monumental.
Wolfkrieg opens with “Runes of New Order,” a title that immediately establishes the project’s attraction to symbols, historical rupture, and authoritarian rebirth. The song begins from a dense guitar figure whose melody is partially concealed by the raw recording. Rather than building from silence, it arrives already moving, with the percussion pushing behind a riff that feels circular rather than progressive. The music does not travel toward a destination. It repeatedly inscribes the same pattern, as though the “runes” of the title are being cut into the track through repetition.
The production is rough but not shapeless. Guitar occupies most of the available space, spreading across the center while the drums remain thinner and more distant. Vocals enter as another corroded layer, less a clearly articulated narrative than a hostile presence pressed into the instrumental surface. The words may be difficult to distinguish, but the emotional direction is unmistakable: declaration, discipline, and confrontation.
Wolfkrieg’s strongest element is the guitar. The central phrases carry enough melody to keep the track from collapsing into undifferentiated raw noise, yet they never become triumphant in the polished sense associated with melodic black metal. The lines sound weathered and unstable. Notes seem to scrape against the limits of the recording, creating a rough halo around the riffs.
The drums perform a functional rather than spectacular role. Their purpose is to keep the music advancing while the guitar establishes atmosphere. Blast-driven passages increase pressure, but the track does not depend entirely on speed. Its harsher effect comes from the persistence of the riff and the lack of emotional relief. Even when the rhythm shifts, the song remains locked within the same severe climate.
“Runes of New Order” is compact enough that its changes feel like alterations within one continuous attack. The song does not pause to display separate ideas. Instead, the arrangement thickens and loosens around the main pattern. This gives the track the character of a single statement rather than a miniature suite. Wolfkrieg uses the restricted side effectively: establish the symbol, repeat it until it acquires weight, then end before repetition turns into exhaustion.
Via Dolorosa’s “Reikon (Anima)” is nearly two minutes longer and immediately feels more staged. The title combines the Japanese word commonly translated as “spirit” or “soul” with the Latin anima, creating a doubled image of an inner essence. The duplication suggests that the track is interested less in individual psychology than in constructing an idealized spiritual identity through ritual, history, and force.
The programming is more visible on this side. Where Wolfkrieg’s track sounds like a band fighting through a raw recording, Via Dolorosa creates a controlled martial frame. Percussion arrives with mechanical regularity, allowing the guitars and vocals to behave theatrically above it. The result is colder and more deliberate, with less of the unstable live friction heard on the first side.
Longinus’s vocals possess a declamatory quality. He does not simply scream from inside the instrumental mass. His voice seems positioned before it, delivering the track as proclamation. Nebel’s guitars and programming establish the surrounding architecture, while v.o.n. Brahma FSS supplies bass. The division of roles produces a piece that feels composed around ceremony rather than spontaneous collision.
“Reikon (Anima)” moves between abrasive black-metal sections and broader passages that imply grandeur. Keyboard-like textures and programmed rhythm give the song a symphonic outline without the full orchestral excess of conventional symphonic black metal. The arrangement is sparse enough that each element retains a hard edge. The electronics do not soften the guitar. They make the environment feel more artificial and controlled.
The track’s pace allows its atmosphere to become heavier than Wolfkrieg’s quicker attack. Repeated phrases accumulate with the stiffness of a procession. The music suggests banners, uniforms, stone, and choreographed movement, but those impressions are generated by rhythm and arrangement rather than any actual field recording or elaborate sound design. The song creates spectacle from limited materials.
That spectacle is also where the record’s ideological character must be confronted. Both projects belong to areas of black metal where authoritarian, ethnonationalist, and fascist imagery can operate as more than theatrical provocation. The titles, label affiliations, visual presentation, and surrounding scene are not neutral decorations. They shape how the music communicates and what kind of power it attempts to make attractive.
Musically, the split repeatedly converts submission into grandeur. Rigid rhythm becomes discipline. Repetition becomes certainty. Harshness becomes purity. The listener is invited to experience authoritarian order as an aesthetic sensation before encountering it as an argument. This is one reason such music requires more than a purely technical description. A riff does not become fascist by itself, but riffs, symbols, lyrics, imagery, and networks can work together to give destructive politics an emotional body.
That does not mean the recording is without musical distinction. Wolfkrieg’s side is raw, compact, and driven by memorable guitar movement. Via Dolorosa’s contribution uses programming and vocal staging to create a colder ceremonial scale. The split works because the two tracks are not interchangeable. Wolfkrieg supplies agitation and abrasion; Via Dolorosa supplies controlled procession.
The seven-inch format sharpens the contrast. After four minutes, Wolfkrieg’s turbulent side ends and the record must be physically turned. Via Dolorosa then begins from a more deliberate position, as though the disorder of the first side has been reorganized into ritual. The sequence creates an accidental narrative: force appears first as eruption, then returns as system.
The foldout cover and limited pressing of 300 copies place the release firmly within the small-label economy of underground black metal. Four labels participated in producing the record, dividing expense and distribution across an international network. Such cooperation allows highly specific material to circulate without broad commercial demand. The object’s scarcity is not incidental. Limited production strengthens the sense of membership surrounding it, turning ownership into evidence of access to a closed cultural channel.
The problem is that scarcity can also protect ideology from ordinary examination. Material circulates among people already familiar with its codes, while outsiders encounter fragments without context. The music may then be defended as private symbolism or aesthetic extremity even when the surrounding references are explicit. Reikon is most honestly heard by holding both levels together: the actual construction of the songs and the political atmosphere those songs choose to inhabit.
As a recording, the split is efficient. Neither project wastes its side. “Runes of New Order” compresses melodic raw black metal into four minutes of persistent abrasion. “Reikon (Anima)” uses nearly six minutes to build a colder, more theatrical structure from programmed percussion, harsh vocals, and symphonic suggestion. Together they create a severe little object whose sound is more carefully differentiated than its shared ideological environment might initially suggest.
The record’s title order may vary between listings, but its internal opposition remains clear. Wolfkrieg carves the rune. Via Dolorosa constructs the ceremony around it. The first side sounds like an order struggling to be born through noise. The second sounds like that order imagining itself already eternal.

White Heaven - 1994 - Next To Nothing

 

Noon Disk – NOON CD-9401

Next to Nothing begins with a piano figure that sounds as though it has been circling an empty bar long after closing time. “Midsummer Stroll” does not explode into the redlined psychedelic violence associated with much of Japan’s underground rock. It moves with loose, nocturnal confidence. Go Hirano’s piano establishes a languid vamp, the rhythm section follows at an unhurried pace, and You Ishihara enters with a deep, controlled voice that seems more interested in suggestion than confrontation. Then the guitars begin bending the edges of the room.
White Heaven had already established a formidable sound on Out and Strange Bedfellow, combining garage rock, blues, heavy psychedelia, and the amplifier damage surrounding groups such as High Rise and Fushitsusha. Next to Nothing retains that intensity but distributes it differently. The album is lighter on its feet, more spacious, and more willing to let silence, piano, and restrained rhythm carry tension. Its violence appears selectively, making each flare of guitar feel larger.
The lineup is crucial. Michio Kurihara, whose lead playing shaped the debut, returned to join guitarist Soichiro Nakamura, who had played on Strange Bedfellow. Instead of crowding the songs with competing leads, the two guitarists create depth. One may hold a skeletal chord pattern while the other releases a thin ribbon of feedback or a suddenly brilliant solo. Their parts sometimes seem almost detached from the band, hovering above the quieter arrangements before cutting directly through them.
“Midsummer Stroll” demonstrates this balance immediately. The title suggests bright daylight and leisurely motion, but the song feels like a walk taken after midnight through streets still holding the day’s heat. Ishihara’s baritone carries an unmistakable trace of Jim Morrison, particularly in its combination of detachment and theatrical gravity, but White Heaven does not simply imitate The Doors. Hirano’s piano and the low, prowling rhythm evoke that influence while the guitars lead the piece into a more fractured Japanese psychedelic language.
“Shadow of the Sun” is similarly built around contradiction. Its title places darkness inside the source of light, and the music has a subdued brightness that never becomes reassuring. The opening movement is almost delicate, with the instruments leaving generous space around Ishihara’s voice. Guitar tones glimmer at the edges, gradually increasing in heat without destroying the song’s restraint.
White Heaven’s great skill here is allowing atmosphere to become structure. These tracks do not require frequent chord changes or complicated arrangements because the emotional environment keeps changing. A piano phrase repeats, but the guitar’s position around it alters. The voice maintains its calm while the band becomes more unstable. What first seemed relaxed begins to feel haunted.
“Strange Bedfellow” originally appeared as the title of the previous album and returns here in another form. It carries more direct rock momentum than the opening tracks, but the band still resists a simple charge forward. The groove remains slightly crooked, and Ishihara delivers the lyrics with the cool authority of someone watching the song unravel without attempting to stop it.
The phrase “strange bedfellow” suggests forced intimacy between incompatible things, an appropriate description of White Heaven’s entire method. Blues and free noise share the same space. Underground abrasion sits beside lounge-like piano. Masculine rock swagger is weakened by uncertainty and melancholy. The band never smooths those elements into a tasteful fusion. Their friction gives the album its personality.
“Look of Love” occupies the center of the record and expands beyond nine minutes in its long version. The title might suggest a conventional romantic song, but White Heaven turns it into a prolonged examination of desire, projection, and distance. The rhythm remains patient while guitars appear in waves, sometimes glowing softly and sometimes opening into sharper psychedelic distortion.
Kurihara’s playing is especially powerful because he rarely treats a solo as an athletic display. His notes seem chosen for color, pressure, and placement. He can hold one tone until it becomes almost painful, then release a short melodic phrase that changes the emotional meaning of the entire passage. Nakamura’s guitar helps maintain the song’s body beneath these movements, allowing the lead to float without losing contact with the band.
Ishihara remains remarkably composed while the music grows around him. His vocal style is not the desperate scream commonly associated with Japanese underground psychedelia. It is low, suave, and slightly removed. That distance can make the songs more unsettling. He sounds less like somebody trapped inside the storm than somebody who expected it to arrive.
“Wednesday” is the shortest track and one of the album’s most concise. Its title is aggressively ordinary, naming the middle of the week rather than invoking cosmic transformation or occult revelation. The music shares that modest scale, but White Heaven makes the everyday feel faintly unreal. Piano and guitar give the track the atmosphere of a memory whose importance cannot be explained.
There is something particularly effective about placing “Wednesday” after the extended drift of “Look of Love.” The album contracts suddenly. What had been a broad psychedelic landscape becomes a smaller room, a brief day, or an isolated thought. White Heaven understands that scale is relative. A three-minute song can feel intimate and strange after nine minutes of suspension.
“Out There” closes the album by directing attention toward an undefined exterior. The phrase could refer to freedom, alienation, another person, or whatever waits beyond the limited space of the present. The song gathers many of the record’s central elements: piano-led movement, Ishihara’s measured voice, restrained rhythm, and guitar that gradually turns atmosphere into disturbance.
The guitars never completely abandon the song, but they pull against its boundaries. Feedback blooms around the arrangement, and melodic fragments begin losing their clean outlines. The effect is not a triumphant finale. The album seems to drift beyond visibility, leaving its final destination unresolved.
Next to Nothing was originally an extremely scarce object. Noon Disk issued only 250 copies, making it one of those Japanese underground records whose reputation could spread far beyond the number of people able to own it. Scarcity suited the album’s private, late-night atmosphere, but it also kept one of White Heaven’s most distinctive works hidden behind collector prices and incomplete circulation.
What distinguishes the record is its refusal to equate psychedelic music with constant overload. White Heaven had the ability to create overwhelming guitar noise, but Next to Nothing makes restraint equally important. The band leaves enough room for every instrument to cast a separate shadow. Piano becomes more than decoration, the rhythm section moves with quiet elasticity, and the two guitarists alter the temperature without covering every available surface.
The Doors influence is easy to hear, particularly in the piano and Ishihara’s voice, but the resemblance never explains the entire album. White Heaven takes that nocturnal organ-and-baritone atmosphere and passes it through Tokyo’s underground, where psychedelic rock had developed its own relationships with volume, improvisation, repetition, and silence. The result feels familiar from one angle and entirely displaced from another.
Next to Nothing stands between the harder attack of White Heaven’s early work and the wider, dreamier spaces they would explore later. It is a transitional album without sounding incomplete. Every song shares the same dim light, yet each arranges the room differently.
The record’s title is an act of understatement. The music often appears to be made from almost nothing: a repeated piano phrase, a slow beat, a low voice, a guitar note suspended in air. White Heaven demonstrates how much can happen inside that apparent emptiness. The closer the listener moves toward nothing, the more crowded it becomes.

White Heaven - 2023 - Strange Bedfellow

 

Black Editions – none

Strange Bedfellow is the sound of White Heaven discovering that psychedelic rock does not need to become formless in order to feel dangerous. The band’s 1991 debut, Out, often seems to be fighting its own songs, with Michio Kurihara’s guitar tearing open arrangements that can barely contain him. On Strange Bedfellow, White Heaven tightens the structures without taming the atmosphere. The riffs are clearer, the rhythms more direct, and the songs more immediately memorable, but something unstable still moves beneath every surface.

The album was originally released by P.S.F. in 1993 in a pressing of only 700 copies. For three decades it remained one of those Japanese underground records whose reputation travelled farther than the physical object. Black Editions returned it to print in January 2023, newly remastered and presented in an elaborate American vinyl edition. This is not an expanded archive with demos or alternate versions. It is the original eight-track album given enough physical and sonic space to reveal how carefully it was built.

The lineup had changed since Out. Kurihara was no longer present, and Soichiro Nakamura became the album’s guitarist, joined by vocalist You Ishihara, bassist Koji Shimura and drummer Ken Ishihara. Nakamura also plays Mellotron on the closing track, “Mandy Blue.” The shift matters because Strange Bedfellow is not organized around the blazing lead-guitar eruptions that dominated the debut. Nakamura’s playing is leaner and more integrated into the songs. He can still generate scorched psychedelic noise, but he often prefers clipped chords, fuzzed melodic figures and brief flashes of feedback that sharpen the arrangement instead of overwhelming it.

“Silver Current” opens with immediate motion. Bass and drums establish a firm, almost garage-rock drive while Nakamura’s guitar throws sparks across the rhythm. Ishihara enters with his characteristic deep voice, sounding calm enough to make the band’s agitation feel even stranger. He rarely competes with the instruments for volume. His baritone seems to stand slightly apart from the song, observing it while the rest of the group accelerates.

That vocal distance is one of White Heaven’s defining qualities. Ishihara can suggest Jim Morrison without turning into imitation. He shares Morrison’s low theatrical gravity, but his delivery is less expansive and more withdrawn. He does not sound like a frontman attempting to dominate the room. He sounds like someone speaking from the dark end of it.

The directness of “Silver Current” establishes the album’s difference from Out. White Heaven is still working with American garage rock, blues and late-1960s psychedelia, but the influences have been compressed into tighter songs. Strange Bedfellow has been described as the point where Ishihara’s songwriting and arrangements came to the front, moving the group toward a more dynamic and carefully focused sound. That judgment fits the record. The songs feel composed rather than discovered through excess, yet their control never becomes ordinary professionalism.

“Blind Promise” slows the movement and exposes more empty space. The rhythm section holds a dark, patient groove while guitar appears in restrained bursts. Ishihara’s voice becomes the central weight, carrying the song without forcing it toward a dramatic climax. White Heaven understands how to make restraint feel threatening. The absence of a major explosion does not reduce tension. It allows tension to remain unresolved.

“Fallin’ Stars End” returns to a harder drive, but its energy is not triumphant. The title suggests celestial movement reaching exhaustion, and the music carries the same mixture of velocity and collapse. Nakamura’s guitar has a dry, corroded edge, avoiding the cleaner brilliance associated with conventional psychedelic lead playing. The notes seem to burn out while they are still being produced.

Side one closes with “My Cold Dimention,” whose misspelled title gives the song an additional sense of estrangement. The track moves through a colder, more inward atmosphere, with the band allowing the spaces between notes to become part of the arrangement. Bass and drums remain controlled while guitar creates a thin electrical weather around Ishihara’s voice. The song does not describe a physical place so much as construct one: isolated, dimly lit and emotionally sealed.

“The Way We Were” begins the second side with a title borrowed from the language of memory and sentimental retrospection, but White Heaven does not offer nostalgia in a warm form. The past here feels inaccessible. The band plays with a measured pulse, and Ishihara’s delivery suggests that whatever is being remembered has already become impossible to recover.

The song illustrates the album’s peculiar emotional balance. Strange Bedfellow is not conventionally melancholy, yet nearly every track carries some form of distance. Desire appears after the object has moved away. Beauty arrives through distortion. Memory is present, but it cannot be entered again. Even the more energetic songs seem aware that momentum will eventually run out.

“Coloured Mind Drops” is one of the album’s strongest psychedelic constructions. Its title sounds like the name of a forgotten single from 1967, but the music avoids cheerful period recreation. Guitar tones gather around the rhythm in shifting shades, and the song develops through repetition rather than elaborate studio decoration. White Heaven’s psychedelia is physical. It comes from how long a riff is repeated, how feedback changes its edges, and how the listener’s perception begins to alter within the same small set of materials.

The album’s title track places incompatibility at the center. A strange bedfellow is someone or something encountered through an uneasy alliance, and White Heaven’s music is full of such pairings. Garage-rock economy sleeps beside freeform noise. Blues phrasing shares space with Japanese underground abrasion. Ishihara’s controlled voice is surrounded by instruments that seem ready to break loose. The songs are disciplined, but the atmosphere remains feral.

“Mandy Blue” closes the album by opening its widest space. Nakamura’s Mellotron introduces a faded orchestral color, giving the track a dreamlike distance from the harder guitar songs. The instrument does not create lush symphonic grandeur. Its slightly unreal texture makes the piece feel like a memory constructed from aging tape.

The closing track also points toward the quieter, more atmospheric territory White Heaven would explore on Next to Nothing. The aggression has not disappeared, but it has been absorbed into mood. Instead of ending with a final blast of guitar, the album withdraws into color, voice and suspended emotional residue.

The 2023 remaster is important because Strange Bedfellow depends upon separation. The bass needs enough body to support the songs without swallowing the guitar. Ishihara’s voice must remain clear while preserving its nocturnal distance. Nakamura’s fuzz and feedback require roughness, but not a single flattened block of distortion. The new edition presents the record with greater clarity and physical weight while retaining the dusty, shadowed character of the original recording.

Black Editions treats the album as a major object rather than a minor reissue. The heavy tip-on jacket uses ink-pigment foil stamping, metallic spot colors, gloss laminate and matte finishes, with a new folding insert inside. Those materials could have turned the release into collector-pageantry detached from the music, but here the elaborate presentation serves a record that spent thirty years physically unavailable to most listeners. The reissue gives Strange Bedfellow a body equal to the reputation it accumulated in absence.

What distinguishes the album is how naturally it occupies the space between direct rock songwriting and psychedelic dissolution. White Heaven does not choose one side. The songs establish their riffs, melodies and emotional identities clearly, then allow distortion, repetition and atmosphere to destabilize them.

Strange Bedfellow is therefore not simply the restrained follow-up to Out or the transitional record before Next to Nothing. It is a complete statement built around controlled friction. Every song knows where it is going, but the road remains dim, damaged and slightly unreal. The 2023 edition does not reinvent that journey. It finally makes its shape visible.