Goldenrod - 2009 - Korova Scumhaters

 

Industrial Recollections – IR-STR-SQ  371.70MB FLAC

Korova Scumhaters does not behave like a conventional collaboration in which two established identities politely alternate contributions. Streicher and Smell & Quim are thrown together under the temporary name Goldenrod, and the resulting hour feels less like dialogue than chemical contamination. One body of sound enters another, produces an unstable reaction, and makes it impossible to determine where the Australian project’s heavy analogue pressure ends and the British group’s grotesque electronic theatre begins. Two untitled pieces occupy approximately one cassette side each, removing the usual assistance of song titles, declared themes, or instrumental credits. The listener is left with duration, texture, escalation, collapse, and the accumulating personality of equipment being pushed beyond sensible employment. It is noise made before the laptop became an infinitely renewable factory of distortion, when an hour of hostile sound still carried the fingerprints of mixers, oscillators, pedals, damaged tapes, amplifiers, physical objects, and imperfect international exchange.
Goldenrod was conceived as a short collaboration campaign built around Streicher and source material supplied by other international noise artists. Korova Scumhaters joins Streicher with Smell & Quim, while the other known Goldenrod cassettes involved Macronympha and Odal. That structure makes the project more interesting than an ordinary split release. Instead of giving each participant a private side, the materials are made to coexist inside one identity. Goldenrod therefore becomes a fictional organism assembled differently each time. Streicher provides the recurring nervous system, but its muscles, abrasions, bodily fluids, and behavioral defects change according to the collaborator. On Korova Scumhaters, the organism acquires the diseased humor and unruly physicality of Smell & Quim without surrendering Streicher’s preference for primitive, direct, low-end analogue force.
The title appears to open a corridor toward A Clockwork Orange. Korova is the milk bar where Alex and his droogs consume drugged milk before setting out on their night’s activities, a place where childish nourishment, stylized language, consumer décor, and organized violence are fused into one pop-cultural environment. “Scumhaters” adds another contradiction. The word might describe moral crusaders purging social filth, violent scum who hate everyone outside their group, or people whose hatred has become a form of contamination indistinguishable from the thing they claim to oppose. Noise culture has always been attracted to this instability of position. The record does not hand the listener a safe moral platform from which to observe ugliness. It presents aggression as atmosphere and leaves the source of that aggression unresolved.
The first half develops through crude accumulation rather than elegant composition. Heavy electronic rumble establishes a floor that never feels entirely secure, while sharper abrasions, broken signals, and unstable pulses scrape against it. The sound has enormous weight without becoming a perfectly sealed wall. Gaps remain in the structure, and through those gaps come irregular fragments that suggest voices, malfunctioning machinery, damaged recordings, or objects being handled too close to a microphone. The uncertainty is important. A clean modern harsh-noise production can create a magnificent uninterrupted surface, but Goldenrod’s materials retain awkward joints. Components grind against one another without fitting. Distortion does not erase the machinery producing it. The listener can sense cables, levels, magnetic saturation, loose connections, and the unavoidable room surrounding the equipment.
Streicher’s work has been described as “Oi Noise,” a meeting of power electronics, industrial sound, harsh noise, and the confrontational directness associated with skinhead subculture. The description fits Korova Scumhaters less as a genre label than as an account of posture. There is no interest in technological elegance. The electronics advance with the blunt insistence of a chant whose words have been burned away, leaving rhythm, pressure, and collective hostility. Low frequencies repeatedly threaten to become a march, but the music refuses the discipline necessary to maintain one. Patterns deform, surfaces collapse, and every possibility of order is dragged through Smell & Quim’s more chaotic imagination.
Smell & Quim contribute a very different history of provocation. Their best work has always combined brutal noise with British grotesquerie, performance art, pub humor, sexual absurdity, theatrical disgust, and a refusal to separate the ridiculous from the genuinely dangerous. They have spoken of wanting noise to retain song-like development, including beginnings, middles, endings, themes, and variation even when no conventional song is present. That instinct can be heard throughout this recording. The long sides do not simply switch on and remain at one level. They lurch through episodes, allowing one texture to rot before introducing another, occasionally exposing a fragment of near-rhythm or recognizable human activity before burying it again. The humor is not delivered through punchlines. It exists in disproportion, ugly timing, sudden deflation, and the suspicion that the performers may be enjoying the equipment’s indignity as much as its violence.
This makes Korova Scumhaters physically oppressive but not humorless. Certain sounds possess the shambling gait of machinery assembled by people who distrust instructions. Repetition becomes increasingly absurd as a damaged pattern continues far beyond usefulness. An abrasive electronic scream may be followed not by an even greater climax but by something flabby, mechanical, or strangely domestic. Noise often becomes unintentionally comic when treated with excessive seriousness, and Smell & Quim understood how to make that comedy intentional without reducing the force of the work. Their contribution prevents Goldenrod from becoming a perfectly controlled ideological monument. The structure keeps slipping in mud, exposing its backside, and continuing the attack from the ground.
That instability matters when considering Streicher’s imagery and chosen identity. Ulex Xane has stated directly that the project name derives from Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist and publisher of Der Stürmer, and that the name was chosen to engage questions involving ideology, history, morality, censorship, perception, and freedom of speech. The reference cannot be treated as harmless decoration. It deliberately imports the contamination of propaganda and historical atrocity into the listening experience. The difficulty is that invoking such material does not automatically explain what the invocation accomplishes. Is the imagery being examined, exploited, inhabited, parodied, or used as a weapon against the audience? Power electronics often refuses to answer because uncertainty itself produces the desired tension. That refusal can generate serious confrontation, but it can also become camouflage behind which conviction and provocation are allowed to trade masks.
Korova Scumhaters does not solve that problem, and a review should not solve it on the artists’ behalf. The music can be heard independently as an exceptional document of mid-1990s analogue noise, but the surrounding language affects its temperature. Hostility is not merely sonic once a project consciously summons fascist history, subcultural aggression, and fantasies of purification. The listener must decide how much ambiguity remains productive and when ambiguity begins protecting the artist from accountability. What keeps this particular release interesting is the presence of Smell & Quim, whose absurdity corrodes the possibility of receiving Goldenrod as a coherent authoritarian statement. The collaboration does not become ethically innocent, but it becomes internally unstable. Grotesque comedy, physical wreckage, ideological ugliness, and genuine sonic invention occupy the same contaminated enclosure.
The second untitled half feels less like a sequel than another entrance into the same wrecked complex. Low-end movement remains central, but the balance between sustained pressure and fragmented interruption changes continually. Sections of near-stasis allow hum, tape grain, and residual vibration to become audible before heavier material returns. This alternation gives the recording a bodily rhythm. Contraction is followed by temporary release, which only makes the next contraction feel more severe. The cassette-side duration is essential because thirty minutes provides enough time for crude sounds to acquire psychological depth. An abrasive loop initially heard as a mechanical event gradually becomes a mood, then an architectural feature, and finally something so familiar that its disappearance is disturbing.
The original cassette medium contributes to this effect. A C60 imposes two approximately thirty-minute territories and a compulsory interruption between them. The listener must turn the object over, briefly handle the plastic shell, and restart the mechanism. That division is preserved on the CD as two untitled tracks, but the 2009 transfer also reveals the cassette’s continuous material presence. Tape compression binds separate frequencies into a congested mass. Hiss occupies the quieter passages. Overload smears impacts and helps unrelated sources adhere. Small fluctuations in level or stability prevent repetition from becoming digitally perfect. The cassette is not merely the container in which this music first happened. It participates in the sound as a slow, magnetic adhesive.
Zero Cabal originally released the tape in 1995, during an extraordinarily fertile period for international mail-based noise. Collaborations could be assembled from cassettes sent across oceans, each generation adding degradation, misunderstanding, and new intervention. The distance between Australia and Britain was not eliminated by instant file transfer. It became part of the work. Packages traveled slowly, source tapes arrived carrying their own noise, and the finished edition reached only a small number of listeners before the label ceased activity. Such projects were built from faith in strangers and the possibility that a padded envelope might open a new creative territory. The network was inefficient, but its inefficiency produced artifacts with histories embedded in their sound.
Industrial Recollections recovered the Goldenrod cassettes in 2009 without cutting or reorganizing the material, transferring the original sides into a digital format while retaining their full duration. This was not the glamorous resurrection of a universally acknowledged classic. It was a rescue operation aimed at material that had barely circulated in the first place. That distinction is important. Reissue culture often confirms an existing canon, but Industrial Recollections also preserved recordings whose disappearance would have left almost no public absence. Korova Scumhaters survives because someone considered an obscure, ugly cassette worth carrying forward.
The result remains crude, nasty, unresolved, and remarkably alive. It documents a period when noise collaboration could function as international correspondence, identity experiment, ideological contamination, and physical audio destruction at once. There is no polished synthesis between Streicher and Smell & Quim. Their differences continue grinding throughout the hour, producing a work stronger because it never becomes comfortable inside its temporary name. Goldenrod sounds less like a band than a parcel opened after thirty years, its contents still leaking, humming, and arguing with one another. Anyone who owned the original Zero Cabal cassette, participated in the source-tape exchange, or knows how the three Goldenrod collaborations were assembled is warmly invited to add the missing history.

Karen Power - 2024 - ...We Return To Ground 2xCD

Other Minds – OM 1034-2  481.35MB FLAC

 The ellipses surrounding …we return to ground… are essential. They suggest that the album begins before we arrive and continues after the recording ends, placing human music inside a much longer activity already underway. Water moves beneath surfaces, insects vibrate the air, ice fractures under pressure, mud releases trapped gases, and animals communicate across frequencies human hearing may overlook. Karen Power does not approach these sounds as picturesque material waiting to be arranged by a composer. She treats them as active participants possessing durations, densities, rhythms, and forms of organization that do not require musical improvement. Quiet Music Ensemble enters cautiously, not to translate the environment into a familiar language but to discover how human instruments might coexist with events that were never produced for an audience.

The double album gathers three large-scale works composed across eight years: “…we return to ground…,” “sonic pollinators,” and “instruments of ice.” Together they document a changing relationship between Power’s field recordings and the ensemble. The environmental sounds are not static tape accompaniments over which musicians perform completed parts. They function as what Power calls an aural score, simultaneously heard by the audience and used by the players as information, provocation, structure, and invitation. A cracking sheet of ice can suggest articulation, a swarm can establish density, and underwater popping can determine the patience with which an instrumental sound enters. The performers are not simply following notation. They are listening to another world and deciding how little they need to add.
Quiet Music Ensemble is ideally suited to this work because its name describes a discipline rather than a volume level. John Godfrey’s electric guitar, Seán Mac Erlaine’s saxophones and clarinets, Roddy O’Keefe’s trombone, Ilse De Ziah’s cello, and Dan Bodwell’s double bass can produce immense physical presence, but the musicians repeatedly resist occupying the foreground. Their playing grows from close attention to texture, breath, friction, resonance, and silence. A bowed string may initially be indistinguishable from an insect wing or ice under tension. A wind tone can resemble air passing through a cave. Electric guitar becomes a faint electrical climate rather than a declaration of identity. The ensemble’s restraint is not passivity. It is an active refusal to dominate.
The title piece begins with minute popping and clicking sounds recorded beneath the surfaces of different bodies of water, from bogs to sea caves. The microphone enters environments most listeners would never think to hear, revealing tiny populations and physical processes hidden within apparently quiet water. These sounds carry an intimate physicality through headphones. They arrive close to the ear, yet their causes remain difficult to picture. A pop might be a bubble, a small creature, water moving through stone, or pressure releasing from decaying plant matter. Power allows that uncertainty to remain productive. Scientific identification may deepen the experience, but mystery is not a deficiency requiring correction.
For several minutes, the ensemble barely appears. When the instruments begin to surface, they do so as another layer of habitat. Scratched strings and low bow pressure enter around the recordings rather than above them. The cello and bass test the edges of audibility, while Godfrey’s guitar adds electronic shadows that seem to come from inside the water rather than from a separate performance space. Mac Erlaine and O’Keefe contribute breath, muted resonance, and distant calls without converting the piece into a conventional dialogue between “nature” and “culture.” That opposition gradually loses meaning. Air travels through lungs and brass tubes; bows create friction against strings; underwater animals pulse and scrape; microphones convert physical vibration into electrical energy. Everything heard is a body acting upon another body.
The title “…we return to ground…” can be heard ecologically, spiritually, and literally. Every organism eventually becomes soil, mineral, food, pressure, or memory. Yet the piece is not a funeral march for the planet. Power has resisted imposing a predetermined environmental message upon listeners, preferring to direct attention toward sounds and let each person draw conclusions. This restraint makes the ecological implications stronger. The work does not need to announce that tiny aquatic environments deserve care. Once those environments have been heard as complex, inhabited spaces, indifference becomes more difficult. Listening creates relation before ideology arrives.
“sonic pollinators” moves from submerged life into the vibrating air of Irish insects. Its field recordings emerged from a project connected to Ireland’s pollinator habitats, but the composition avoids the soft pastoral image of bees floating through a sunny meadow. The opening can feel alarmingly close, with buzzing magnified until an insect seems to occupy the interior of the listener’s skull. Individual bodies pass near the microphones, recede, gather into clouds, and produce changing bands of frequency. The sounds are beautiful, comic, irritating, and threatening at once. Power preserves all of those possibilities rather than reducing insects to symbols of natural harmony.
The ensemble’s relationship with the swarm is remarkably subtle. Sustained cello and bass tones do not simply imitate buzzing; they create another density against which the insects can be heard differently. Clarinet, saxophone, and trombone enter as respiratory systems among winged systems, extending breath into the air already activated by countless smaller movements. At moments, it becomes impossible to know whether a high frequency belongs to a live instrument, an insect, or electronic treatment. That confusion feels less like a studio trick than a temporary loosening of species boundaries. Human performers are not pretending to become bees. They are recognizing that instrumental music and insect communication both organize air through vibration.
The forty-minute duration allows “sonic pollinators” to move beyond novelty. A short recording of bees might be charming or unsettling, but prolonged exposure changes the scale of perception. The swarm ceases to be an effect and becomes an environment with its own internal weather. Periods of relative calm are interrupted by thick surges in which buzzing rises into a near-electronic mass. The musicians respond without competing for intensity, often reinforcing the lower edges or introducing thin lines that make the swarm seem even larger. When the field recordings suddenly reveal crickets or less aggressive insect activity, the shift can feel almost humorous, as though the enormous airborne machine has completed its performance and ordinary evening life resumes.
“Instruments of Ice,” the earliest of the three works, pairs Quiet Music Ensemble with quadraphonic recordings of Arctic ice. The title reverses the usual hierarchy. Ice is not the setting in which human instruments play. Ice itself is instrumental: cracking, rubbing, separating, collapsing, resonating, and releasing pressure across enormous distances. The recorded sounds can resemble gunfire, tearing fabric, bowed metal, thunder beneath a floor, or the slow destruction of architecture. Their scale is unstable. A tiny fracture heard closely may sound catastrophic, while an event involving a massive field of ice can arrive as a distant groan.
Power’s recordings make the material nature of ice impossible to ignore. It is commonly imagined as visual emptiness, a white surface associated with stillness and silence. Here it is continuously active. Ice contains trapped air, shifting water, internal strain, friction, temperature change, and the memory of its own formation. The musicians respond by extending those energies. Low strings provide long tensile pressure; trombone and reeds generate breath-heavy tones that resemble large animals calling through the frozen environment; guitar electronics occupy the border between acoustic vibration and geological rumble. The piece does not ask the ensemble to represent the Arctic. It gives the players a recorded Arctic presence strong enough to change how they use their instruments.
The final section grows gradually into the album’s most imposing convergence. Sustained brass, reeds, cello, and bass gather around intensifying ice sounds until human and environmental forces form one thick body. This is not an orchestral climax imposed upon field recordings. The ice has already demonstrated its own capacity for drama. The ensemble enters that drama, amplifying certain tensions while remaining vulnerable to the enormous sonic scale around it. Distortion begins to affect the boundaries between sources. Eventually the density evaporates, leaving gurgling, breath, residual vibration, and the sense that the largest event has moved elsewhere rather than truly ended.
Across all three works, Power avoids one of the central traps of environmentally themed composition: using field recordings as evidence of moral seriousness while allowing traditional musical structures to retain complete authority. Her environments do not appear for a few seconds so that instruments can interpret them more beautifully. They are given enough time to resist interpretation. Their rhythms are irregular, their frequency ranges may be uncomfortable, and their changes do not correspond to human expectations of development. Quiet Music Ensemble’s achievement lies in accepting those terms without disappearing entirely. The musicians bring human breath, training, memory, and touch into the habitat, but they do not demand that the habitat become a concert hall.
The recording process extends that ethic. Alexis Nealon’s engineering retains minute details without sterilizing them, while John Godfrey’s mixes preserve depth and uncertainty between the ensemble and Power’s environmental materials. Seán Mac Erlaine’s mastering allows quiet events to remain quiet while still giving the larger swells physical force. The double-CD format is particularly appropriate. At nearly one hundred and ten minutes, the album asks for sustained presence rather than casual sampling. Each piece is long enough to change the listener’s hearing before the next environment begins.
Other Minds is also a fitting home for the project. The label’s history has repeatedly connected experimental composition with expanded listening practices, sound environments, technology, improvisation, and forms that sit outside ordinary genre boundaries. …we return to ground… belongs to contemporary classical music, field recording, electroacoustic composition, improvisation, and sound art without becoming fully owned by any of them. Its deeper category may simply be attention.
The album’s achievement is not that it makes nature musical. Nature was already sounding. Nor does it claim that human beings can erase themselves and hear the world without interpretation. Microphones are placed, recordings selected, durations shaped, and musicians invited into carefully constructed situations. Power’s composition lies in making those decisions without closing the materials around a single meaning. She creates conditions in which sounds can meet while retaining their difference.
By the end of “instruments of ice,” returning to ground no longer sounds like defeat. It suggests returning to material reality after centuries of imagining humanity as something separate from water, insects, weather, animals, and geological change. The album does not ask listeners to admire nature from a safe distance. It places us inside its pops, wings, groans, pressures, and hidden communications, where listening becomes participation. Anyone who has heard these works in their original quadraphonic settings, worked with Power’s aural scores, or recognizes particular species and environments within the field recordings is warmly invited to expand the habitat surrounding this extraordinary release.

Organoid - 2016 - 10 Years Of Crime And Perversion CDr

 

Operator Produkzion – OPERPRODUKT125  319.56MB FLAC

A ten-year retrospective usually implies a long procession of albums, personnel changes, technical refinements and stylistic detours. Organoid’s 10 Years Of Crime And Perversion documents something stranger: a concentrated eruption, followed by years of suspended animation, then the reopening of the evidence locker. The project was established in 2006 in Barnaul, Western Siberia, produced its principal recordings around 2007, became inactive after 2009, and returned in 2016 through this anthology. The title therefore measures existence rather than continuous productivity. Those silent years belong to the work too. They turn the disc into an excavation of a briefly active project whose recordings continued circulating through tiny labels, compilations and private collections after the original machinery had stopped. Operator Produkzion did not merely reissue an album here. It reconstructed Organoid’s entire known body of work as it then existed, combining the two 2007 releases Pervertronics and Hysteria with three compilation appearances. What might once have looked like scattered CDr debris becomes a coherent, self-contained anatomy.

Organoid was reportedly founded through its creator’s devotion to American and Italian schools of noise and power electronics. That lineage matters because this is not free-form noise presented as a spontaneous electrical accident. It belongs to a tradition in which sound, title, imagery and implied psychology are locked together as one hostile apparatus. The American strain can be heard conceptually in the project’s fixation upon criminal pathology, predation, urban dread and obsessive case-study detail, while the Italian inheritance suggests the sealed-room atmosphere of projects that treated electronics as a form of private compulsion. Yet Barnaul is not merely an exotic location added to imported genre conventions. Western Siberia gives this material its own imaginative distance from the scenes that originally inspired it. The music feels transmitted from outside the expected cultural capitals, assembled in isolation and pushed into circulation through the Russian underground’s network of handmade discs, mail exchanges and compilation invitations. It is power electronics as a remote laboratory, built from foreign precedents but left to mutate in colder soil.

The label’s description of Organoid as “wild bass-driven” power electronics identifies the music’s essential physical strategy. Rather than depending entirely upon a blinding sheet of upper-frequency static, these pieces derive much of their menace from weight. Low frequencies swell, churn and press against the listener, while harsher signals scrape across their surface. The result is less like being sprayed with electronic debris than being enclosed inside a badly ventilated machine. Distortion is not decorative dirt around a composition. It is the composition’s atmosphere, its architecture and frequently its emotional argument. Even when rhythmic movement appears, it does not grant the release the security of a beat. Pulsation functions more like pressure repeatedly applied to the same vulnerable point. The recordings retain the crude immediacy expected of mid-2000s underground CDr production, but their bluntness should not be mistaken for an absence of design. Organoid repeatedly understands when to thicken a signal, when to leave an ugly frequency exposed, and when repetition has crossed from pattern into fixation.

Pervertronics is the more compact and flagrantly confrontational of the two original releases. Its five tracks move through reportage, confinement, sexual terminology, endangered childhood and a cover of the Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up!” The sequence feels deliberately contaminated by different kinds of sensational language. “The Reporting From A Place Of Events” evokes the detached vocabulary of television news arriving after violence has already occurred. “Cellar Of Pleasures (Be Not Afraid Of Me Baby!)” places reassurance beside captivity until the supposedly comforting phrase becomes threatening. “Cunt Orgasm” reduces sexuality to an aggressively isolated bodily mechanism, while “Children B.A.U.E.” introduces an abbreviation whose meaning remains withheld, leaving the title suspended between bureaucratic classification and private code. Organoid’s treatment of “Smack My Bitch Up!” is especially revealing. The original Prodigy track converted a deliberately inflammatory phrase into mass-market big beat; Organoid drags it back out of the arena and into the basement. Familiarity is stripped away, leaving the phrase’s ugliness exposed inside a harsher and less socially forgiving vocabulary.

Hysteria widens the project’s emotional range without making it more comfortable. Titles including “Murderlust,” “Smell Of Woman (Night Hunter),” “Eternal Unreturning (Interlude)” and “Bloody Units (Live)” move from explicit appetite toward something more psychological and spectral. The presence of an interlude is important. It indicates that Organoid was not simply piling interchangeable attacks onto a disc, but considering pacing and the emotional usefulness of interruption. A quieter or less densely aggressive passage within power electronics does not necessarily offer relief. It can create anticipation, allowing the listener to notice the empty room around the sound. “Bloody Units,” identified as a live recording, adds another dimension. Studio power electronics can feel hermetically sealed, but live documentation admits the unstable air of performance, where volume enters an actual room and confronts bodies rather than microphones. Hysteria consequently feels less like a collection of provocations than a disturbed interior cycle. Its subject is not only crime as an event, but the mental repetition through which fantasy, fear, arousal and violence become entangled.

The three compilation tracks extend that world beyond the original two CDrs. They appeared on Your Talk May Kill Your Comrades, Swalka and Generals Tachibana Kamitori Festival I, placing Organoid within several overlapping micro-networks rather than a single stable label identity. Compilation culture was crucial to underground noise during this period. A project could have very little widely available documentation yet still travel internationally through one track copied, traded, reviewed or inserted into a handmade edition. “Like Fly In Spider Web,” Organoid’s contribution to the SOI Tapes collection Your Talk May Kill Your Comrades, is an especially effective title for this process. It describes helpless entanglement, but it also unintentionally describes the underground itself: artists and listeners caught inside a web of obscure names, duplicated discs, addresses, private correspondence and references leading toward still more references. On the original compilation, Organoid appeared beside projects including Comforter, making this anthology’s later memorial dedication feel less ceremonial than personal. The scene was not an abstract genre category. It was a chain of actual exchanges.

Material centered upon crime and sexual violence always raises the question of what the artist is doing with its subject. Power electronics frequently refuses to supply a clean moral caption. That refusal can be intellectually productive, cheaply exploitative, or some unstable combination of both. Organoid’s strength lies in making the listener experience the unpleasant proximity between public condemnation and private fascination. Modern culture claims to be repelled by criminal pathology while endlessly reproducing it through news coverage, documentaries, courtroom narratives, lurid paperbacks and algorithmic entertainment. The project removes the explanatory language and leaves behind appetite, repetition and impact. Its images and titles do not provide victims with biographies or offer a social program. They risk turning suffering into iconography, and that risk should remain visible rather than being excused as automatic artistic freedom. Yet the work also refuses the comforting fiction that exposure to darkness begins with underground music. Organoid takes material already embedded throughout respectable culture and concentrates it until the audience can no longer consume it casually.

The cover crystallizes this problem. A masked woman occupies the center of a coarse black-and-white design, posed within a barred or tiled enclosure while holding what resembles a cable, strap or implement. Her exposed body offers immediate erotic information, but the covered face removes ordinary identity and expression. She becomes performer, captive, aggressor, commodity and anonymous symbol at once. The image neither confirms consensual theater nor establishes literal victimhood. Its uncertainty is the mechanism. Beside it, the project name and anthology title are printed with the visual force of a warning label stamped onto damaged concrete. The artwork promises transgression in the familiar language of fetish imagery, yet it also makes the viewer aware of how quickly a human figure can be converted into a surface carrying someone else’s fantasies. Like the music, it supplies too little narrative to settle the relationship between representation and endorsement. The listener must remain inside that ambiguity rather than escaping through a prefabricated interpretation.

The anthology is dedicated to Andrey Alexeev, founder of Comforter and SOI Tapes, who died in May 2016. That dedication transforms the release. Beneath its criminal themes, sexual language and brutal electronics lies an act of remembrance. Alexeev’s role in the Russian noise underground included creating channels through which projects such as Organoid could appear, circulate and become part of a collective history. Reassembling the complete Organoid discography after his death preserves not only one musician’s recordings but the network that enabled those recordings to exist publicly. This is one reason the humble CDr remains such an appropriate format. It is record, duplicate, message and memorial object. It resists the notion that cultural importance must be verified by large production numbers or institutional recognition. A scene survives because somebody keeps the files, remembers the catalog numbers, identifies the compilation appearances and decides that a decade-old burst of sound deserves another body.

The 2016 resurrection was not the final word. Related recordings from 2007 and 2008 later surfaced on the 2017 Bitsevsky Maniac CD through Finland’s Filth & Violence, including “Like Fly In Spider Web,” “Children B.A.U.E.” and “Smell Of Woman (Night Hunter).” That later release connected Organoid’s Siberian crime electronics to one of the most uncompromising contemporary power-electronics labels, suggesting that the period of inactivity had preserved rather than extinguished the project’s potential. Heard from that perspective, 10 Years Of Crime And Perversion is both tomb and doorway. It closes the first Organoid era by gathering every surviving fragment, while its act of recovery generates the conditions for further activity. Listeners possessing the original Mind Control editions, compilation CDrs, inserts or knowledge of Organoid’s equipment and personnel are invited to help clarify the remaining history. Underground archives become accurate through accumulated testimony, one remembered package, copied disc and damaged sleeve at a time.

Lasse Marhaug - 2007 - Tapes 1990-1999 4xCD

Pica Disk – PICA001  2.06GB FLAC

 A four-CD retrospective assembled from cassette releases could easily become an indiscriminate storage container, particularly when its subject produced somewhere between sixty and seventy tapes during the decade being surveyed. Tapes 1990–1999 avoids that problem because Lasse Marhaug does not treat his archive as a warehouse of equal objects. He spent three weeks during September 2006 transferring the surviving cassettes, then selected forty-three pieces that could function as both a history and an immense composition. Arranged chronologically across nearly five hours, the set permits us to hear a teenager in an isolated part of Northern Norway discover that a home stereo, turntable, microphone and cassette deck could constitute an entire musical world. It then follows him as improvised interruption becomes controlled violence, as accidental textures become compositional material, and as one person’s bedroom experiments connect with an international network of noise artists. The result is not simply a collection of scarce recordings. It is the sound of an artistic language forming itself in real time.

Marhaug began without a local noise scene, nearby concerts or conventional instrumental training. His route into this music passed through underground metal magazines, mail correspondence, homemade publications and tapes exchanged with people he had never met. He has recalled that the first noise performance he witnessed may have been one of his own. This geographical separation is fundamental to the early recordings. They do not sound like the work of someone following an established local school or imitating techniques observed onstage. They sound like messages assembled from incomplete information, transmitted outward in the hope that someone elsewhere might recognize the signal. Marhaug’s earliest influences included noisecore and extreme metal groups such as 7 Minutes of Nausea, Fear of God and Autopsy before he encountered many of the canonical industrial and Japanese noise artists later associated with his work. That origin helps explain the combination of primitive attack and playful editing heard throughout the first disc. The young Marhaug possessed metal’s appetite for extremity, but instead of building songs around guitars and drums, he attacked the recording process itself.
The 1990 opening piece, taken from the self-released Zonked Scum Demo 1, was made when Marhaug was approximately sixteen. It begins the anthology not with an embryonic version of his later harsh-noise style, but with an ominous environmental construction: an extended storm of air, distant mechanical movement and barely identifiable sound interrupted by a fragment of voice. The atmosphere is important. Even at this stage, Marhaug is not merely recording loud signals. He is arranging depth, distance and dramatic interruption. The pieces that follow under names including Herbert Mullin, Herb Mullin and Egoproblem embrace abrupt collage, distorted speech, metal percussion, damaged turntable material, television fragments and pause-button editing. “Delirium Acutum” rushes through speed changes and media debris, while “Urethra” turns small mechanical and coin-like sounds into a darkly comic procession. “Skinpeel” emphasizes junk percussion, “Out” reduces activity toward sparse static, and “On-Off” places crackling eruptions over what resembles running water. These recordings preserve the pleasure of discovering that any sound can be detached from its source and made to behave differently.
Herbert Mullin was not intended as a detailed conceptual identity. Marhaug borrowed the name from the American murderer who claimed his killings prevented earthquakes, largely because the name sounded peculiar to a teenager reading about serial killers. He eventually abandoned it, along with several other project names, after recognizing that his own name was the one identity he could not outgrow. That decision parallels the musical development captured here. The earliest work tries on methods, titles and disguises with rapid enthusiasm. By the middle of the decade, the experiments have begun to converge into a recognizable personal grammar. Yet the first disc remains one of the set’s richest sections precisely because Marhaug has not decided what a Lasse Marhaug recording is supposed to be. Low-frequency clouds, miniature eruptions, butchered media quotations, voice fragments and handmade percussion coexist without obedience to a genre template. These pieces possess the jumpy intelligence of correspondence art, photocopied zines and improvised packaging. A cassette could contain anything because its manufacture required no institution’s permission.
By the second disc, covering recordings from 1996, Marhaug’s sound has acquired tremendous physical density. “Music on Tape,” “White Inferno,” “Feed Feel Part 2,” “Free” and “Noise Ninja” no longer resemble collections of discrete found objects so much as environments in which sound has become pressure. The editing remains active, but it takes place inside much larger masses. Frequencies scrape across one another, signals cross the stereo field, and low-end movement gives the impression that the recording is displacing air even at domestic volume. “White Inferno” is an appropriate title because the piece is less a wall than a field of glaring, unstable energy. “Noise Ninja” compresses aggression into a focused beam, continually altering its internal grain without surrendering intensity. Marhaug had found a way to produce music whose apparent excess was supported by careful decisions about pacing, thickness and stereo placement. Noise here is not the absence of control. It is the control of sounds that constantly threaten to escape.
The disc culminates in the twenty-eight-minute “Monster,” made using source material supplied by American noise group Macronympha and originally released as a collaborative tape on Marhaug’s TWR Tapes. Its duration permits the sound to become an ecosystem. Roars, muffled voices, metallic repetitions, submerged pulses and immense static formations pass through one another without resolving into a conventional sequence of themes. The collaboration also demonstrates how cassette exchange allowed distant artists to work together before digital file transfer made such processes instantaneous. Physical source material could be mailed across an ocean, copied, transformed and returned as another object. Every generation introduced hiss, compression and small changes, but those supposed defects became part of the collaboration. The tape network was both distribution system and instrument. It did not merely carry the music after completion; its copying speeds, mechanical inconsistencies and material decay helped determine what the music became.
Disc three, centered upon 1997, opens the structure again. The harshness remains, but Marhaug resumes his earlier fascination with corrupted references and unlikely collisions. Unidentified jazz fragments are bent into mutant loops, old voices surface beneath electronic damage, and “The Girl Who Always Eats Chocolate” allows traces of antiquated popular culture to flicker through the distortion. “Wish You A Merry Christmas” takes a form of music designed for communal familiarity and subjects it to prolonged metallic repetition until celebration becomes industrial labor. Elsewhere, pieces such as “Multimood,” “Rotterdam,” “Sleeping City Sickness,” “In Arabian Icecream” and “Ladyrock” suggest a new confidence with duration and contrast. Marhaug can now move between overwhelming density and strange comic detail without making the lighter material feel like novelty relief. Humor is one of the qualities often erased when harsh noise is described only through metaphors of pain and destruction. This music can be violent, but it is also exuberant, curious and frequently funny. Marhaug’s aggression has the energy of someone delighted by what sound can be persuaded to do.
The final disc gathers material from 1998 and 1999, when the crude discoveries of the decade had become an unusually flexible compositional practice. “More Guts Than Brains” bursts outward with almost blinding brightness, while “Pulse Chicken,” “High Hello” and “Development Hell” continually rearrange the relationship among texture, rhythm and impact. “Side B” overlays broken beat-box movement with crushed bass and rapid cut-up activity, refusing both the regularity of electronic dance music and the formlessness commonly projected onto noise. Even when no conventional drum sound is present, Marhaug can make distortion itself pulse, stumble and accelerate. The brief “I Like Violence” reduces the decade’s physical impulse to a title and a one-minute seizure, but the set’s major late statement is the Bad Kharma collaboration “Miss Plastic Murgatroid’s Red Metal Wet Dream.” For nearly twenty minutes, metal contact, oscillation, piercing frequencies and shifting rhythmic pressure produce a psychedelic industrial landscape that feels simultaneously improvised and fiercely directed. The final “Red Tape Rot 2” returns the anthology to its material foundation: magnetic tape as carrier, residue and slowly deteriorating body.
Marhaug has said that assembling this collection revealed how little his fundamental preferences had changed. His technique improved, but the sounds that excited him at fifteen continued to excite him years later. Tapes 1990–1999 supports that observation without suggesting artistic stagnation. Development here does not mean abandoning early desires in favor of a more respectable vocabulary. It means learning how to hear those desires more precisely. The teenager discovers noise as unrestricted possibility; the later artist learns to shape that possibility without domesticating it. Across the four discs, one can hear him become increasingly sensitive to internal motion, frequency balance, negative space and the moment when repetition transforms into rhythm. The core attraction remains constant: sound liberated from the obligation to describe anything beyond its own physical and imaginative life.
The 2007 box also performed a second act of transformation. Material originally issued in tiny handmade editions was transferred into a custom silver-printed box with a twenty-four-page booklet containing photographs, reproduced cassette covers and texts by Tommy Carlsson and Tore Honoré Bøe. Tommi Keränen’s mastering gives the selections enough shared clarity to function as a continuous retrospective without erasing their differing origins. The set therefore preserves cassette culture while acknowledging that preservation requires changing formats. Magnetic tape ages, machines disappear and private editions become inaccessible. Digital transfer cannot reproduce every condition of the original object, but it can rescue the music from becoming a rumor known only through discographies and fading memories.
It was equally significant that this monumental act of recovery became Pica Disk’s first release. Rather than inaugurating his new label with a concise contemporary statement, Marhaug began by accounting for the fragile objects that had made his career possible. Pica Disk would subsequently become known for carefully produced archival editions and large collections devoted to music at risk of being overlooked. Tapes 1990–1999 established that philosophy immediately: if a necessary record is missing, make it; if the material is scattered, gather it; if the historical object is disappearing, build another object strong enough to carry its memory forward. The collection is therefore a personal history, a document of early Norwegian noise and a demonstration of what responsible self-archiving can accomplish.
Nearly five hours of abrasive sound may look like a test of endurance, but endurance is not the set’s most interesting demand. The real task is to remain alert to difference. Every hiss possesses a particular temperature, every distorted voice occupies a different depth, every metal impact alters the dimensions of the imagined room. The anthology teaches the listener how much variation can exist within materials conventionally dismissed as undifferentiated noise. It also preserves the youthful conviction that one does not need professional equipment, institutional approval or even a nearby community to begin creating culture. A cassette deck in a remote bedroom can become a studio, a label, a printing press and a communications network. Tapes 1990–1999 is the surviving map of that transformation, drawn in magnetic dust, damaged speech, scrap metal and electrical weather.

Gelsomina & Squamata - 2007 - Junkyard Behemoth

 

Freak Animal Records – freak-cd-038  403.90MB FLAC

The most important fact about Junkyard Behemoth is hidden beneath its apparent format. This is not simply a split album in which Gelsomina occupies one portion and Squamata answers from the other. Both participants recorded material separately and contributed sounds that could be incorporated, rearranged and transformed by the other. The four finished pieces remain individually credited, but their raw matter has already crossed the border between identities. Gelsomina’s twenty-three-minute opening composition may contain Squamata’s machinery; Squamata’s three pieces may carry fragments originating in Gelsomina’s circuitry. Authorship survives, but purity does not. Each artist receives contaminated material and constructs a different organism from it. The album’s title is therefore more than an image of industrial wreckage. A behemoth has been assembled from abandoned components, and nobody can completely determine which bones belonged to whom before the creature stood up.
That exchange gives Junkyard Behemoth a conceptual strength extending far beyond its four-track structure. Noise collaboration often means two people performing simultaneously, each adding more volume until individual gestures become indistinguishable. Here the relationship appears more archaeological and parasitic. One artist sends evidence of an action, perhaps feedback, manipulated electronics, struck metal, mechanical vibration or an already processed recording. The second artist receives that evidence after the original event has ended. He cannot respond to the performer in real time, but he can dissect the remains, amplify certain details, erase others and place the material inside an entirely different environment. Collaboration becomes a form of posthumous communication between sounds. The source is alive when recorded, dead when exchanged, then animated again through editing. What emerges is neither a faithful preservation nor a conventional remix. It is acoustic organ transplantation.
That process belongs naturally inside the Finnish noise underground of the mid-2000s. Gelsomina and Squamata were not isolated names randomly paired by a label. Both circulated within a physical network of artists, concerts, cassette exchanges, small record shops and privately organized performances. Squamata was a Turku duo formed by AE and AO in 2003, while Gelsomina was the harsh-noise and power-electronics project of Pekka Perä-Takala, usually credited as Pekka PT. The artists shared a documented private performance in Turku on September 29, 2006, later issued as a DVDr, and Junkyard Behemoth appeared in early 2007. The chronology does not prove that one event directly produced the other, but it places the album within sustained proximity. These people knew one another’s methods through rooms, equipment, mail and repeated exposure, not merely through names printed in catalogs. Their collaboration belongs to a scene with bodies and addresses.
Turku’s Some Place Else shop and performance space was one visible node in that environment. Between 2004 and 2007 it operated not only as a record store but as an experimental meeting point, hosting Finnish artists including Gelsomina and Squamata alongside international visitors. Spaces like this mattered because noise culture was still substantially material. Recognition did not depend upon a continuous online personality, follower count or promotional campaign. A project existed through a handful of cassettes, a performance attended by twenty people, a photocopied notice, an appearance on a compilation, an envelope mailed abroad, or a CD stocked by one sympathetic shop. Reputation accumulated as sediment. Junkyard Behemoth emerged from this compact ecosystem at the exact moment when physical underground networks and expanding digital circulation were beginning to overlap. Its edition was tiny, but the files could eventually escape the numerical limits of the pressing.
The release also occupies a particularly fertile point in the Freak Animal Records catalog. It appeared as FREAK-CD-038, following Grunt’s Seer of Decay and immediately preceding Bizarre Uproar and Gelsomina’s Assisted Self-Sterilization. Pure’s Fetor followed soon afterward. This sequence captures the label operating as more than a distributor of interchangeable extremity. Each release investigates a distinct relationship among sound, physical degradation, bodily imagery, obsession and control. Junkyard Behemoth contributes an industrial ecology to that run. Its central subject is not solely human aggression, sexuality or psychological collapse, although all remain latent within the music. It asks what happens after manufactured objects have lost their economic function. The junkyard becomes civilization’s external memory, a place where machines remain materially present after society has declared them finished.
A discarded object is not silent. Springs retain tension. Sheets of metal flex in wind and heat. Empty tanks become resonating chambers. Motors, cables, chains, pipes, grilles and frames can be struck, scraped, dragged or electrically reactivated. Industry may consider these items exhausted because they can no longer perform their assigned jobs, but noise discovers a second career hidden inside failure. The washing machine drum that no longer washes becomes percussion. The damaged amplifier that cannot reproduce music accurately becomes a producer of unstable voltage and distortion. The bent sheet that has lost structural usefulness becomes a gong with an irregular frequency spectrum. Junkyard Behemoth treats obsolescence not as disappearance but as liberation from original purpose. Once an object is no longer expected to behave properly, its unwanted acoustic life becomes available.
This idea helps distinguish the album from noise that pursues abstraction through electronics alone. Gelsomina and Squamata certainly employ feedback and processing, but the descriptions surrounding the release repeatedly emphasize scrap metal, machine crackle, concrete clatter, low-frequency thunder and physical performance. One hears not merely signals but resistance. The material appears to push back against the performers. Metal is heavy, awkward and capable of injuring the person attempting to control it. Feedback likewise behaves according to a relationship among microphones, speakers, amplification and space. It can be guided, but it cannot be wholly commanded. Both acoustic scrap and electronic feedback therefore produce negotiations between intention and instability. The musician initiates a system whose response exceeds the initial gesture.
Gelsomina’s “The Mercy Seat Is Melting” consumes nearly half the disc. At 23:42, it is not simply the first track but the album’s principal chamber, the furnace through which the listener must pass before reaching Squamata’s more divided sequence. Its title immediately places punishment, judgment and physical dissolution in the same frame. “The Mercy Seat” carries biblical associations with the covering of the Ark of the Covenant, a site where divine presence, judgment and atonement meet. In twentieth-century music, the phrase is also inseparable from Nick Cave’s song about a condemned prisoner approaching execution in the electric chair. Gelsomina adds one destabilizing verb: melting. The seat of judgment no longer remains architecturally or morally solid. Authority liquefies along with the condemned body. Electricity does not merely pass through the prisoner; it overheats the institution administering the sentence.
That title gives the music a theological and technological ambiguity. Is mercy itself melting away, leaving only punishment? Is the execution apparatus becoming too hot to preserve its form? Or is the boundary separating criminal, witness, judge and machine collapsing into the same molten substance? Harsh noise is uniquely equipped to sustain these questions because distortion confuses source and consequence. A scream, an overloaded circuit and a piece of tearing metal may occupy adjacent frequency ranges. Once heavily processed, the listener cannot always determine whether a sound began in a human body, an electrical system or an inanimate object. Identity burns off. What remains is pressure, vibration and the awareness that something is being transformed beyond recovery.
Pekka PT’s Gelsomina work was unusually receptive to source manipulation and cinematic association. Other releases drew upon material supplied by collaborators, invoked filmmakers including Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Cronenberg and Peter Greenaway, or combined abrasive electronics with psychological and visual references. This made Gelsomina more than a project devoted to undifferentiated sonic force. Its harshness could function as montage. Sounds collided the way dissimilar images collide in experimental film, creating meaning not through linear explanation but through proximity. A voice fragment placed beside shrieking feedback changes the emotional identity of both. A metallic repetition beneath low-frequency turbulence can suggest labor, captivity, ritual or malfunction without becoming a literal representation of any one of them.
“The Mercy Seat Is Melting” brings that montage instinct into the scrapyard. The documented materials of the album, feedback, metallic force and exchanged recordings, are fused into an extended process rather than presented as a catalog of separate effects. The piece’s duration matters because melting requires time. Destruction by impact is immediate and legible; destruction through heat is gradual, deforming the object while it remains recognizable. The listener is permitted to hear structures endure, buckle and disappear into surrounding density. Repetition does not stabilize the track. It increases temperature. Each recurrence returns with more accumulated damage, as though the recording medium itself were being forced to carry a load beyond its tolerance.
Gelsomina’s project name creates an additional, possibly unintended tension. Gelsomina is also the name of the fragile central character in Federico Fellini’s La Strada, a performer sold into the service of a brutal strongman and carried through a landscape of cruelty, comedy and spiritual desolation. There is no need to insist that every Gelsomina recording directly illustrates Fellini’s film, but the association hovers around the name. The contrast is powerful: a word connected in cinema with vulnerability and wounded innocence fronts music capable of extraordinary violence. Junkyard Behemoth intensifies the contradiction. Its Gelsomina does not stand outside the machine as a passive victim. The project enters the machinery, processes it and returns as something larger and less humanly readable.
After the sustained engulfment of the opening piece, Squamata’s “Poison On Poison” changes the album’s internal dimensions. A contemporary account described it as comparatively calmer after Gelsomina’s melting, though “calmer” within this environment remains a relative measurement. Its twelve minutes are marked by thunderous lower frequencies and high squeals moving across the stereo field. The title proposes accumulation without neutralization. Conventional chemistry suggests that a poison might be counteracted by an antidote, diluted by another substance or rendered inactive through treatment. Here poison is laid upon poison. Damage becomes the medium in which further damage circulates.
The spatial behavior is important. A low-frequency foundation establishes weight and apparent scale, while sharper sounds travel above or across it. This creates an organism with different levels of activity: a massive body below, nervous signals moving rapidly along its exterior. The behemoth is no longer an undifferentiated heap. It has metabolism. The low end provides organs and bulk; the squeals function as insects, alarms, exposed nerves or fragments of machinery rotating at dangerous speed. Their movement from one side to another prevents the listener from locating a stable center. The creature’s mass is obvious, but its head remains impossible to identify.
The name Squamata contributes to this bodily reading. In zoological classification, Squamata is the order containing snakes, lizards and related scaled reptiles. Whether AE and AO selected the term for its scientific meaning or simply for its sound, the word introduces skin, shedding, flexible anatomy and cold-blooded movement. Reptiles do not grow by preserving one permanent exterior. They periodically abandon a surface that once belonged to them. That image suits a project constructed from exchanged recordings. Source material becomes shed skin. It retains the shape of an earlier body but can be inhabited, displayed or torn apart by another.
Noise itself frequently behaves in this reptilian manner. A performer develops a technique, exhausts it, discards its visible form and retains only the muscular knowledge beneath it. A cassette becomes a CD, then files; each format is another skin surrounding the same unstable contents. Junkyard Behemoth arrived in a plastic keep case, a form associated more readily with video than with an ordinary compact disc jewel box. The packaging makes the release feel like an industrial component or evidence container rather than a conventional album. Its limited pressing of 300 copies gave the object a brief physical life, but the sound has continued migrating through rips, blogs and private archives. The skin changes while the vibration survives.
Squamata’s second contribution, “Die Elixiere Des Jeufels,” appears to deform the title of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Gothic novel Die Elixiere des Teufels, The Devil’s Elixirs. The printed “Jeufels” may be an intentional mutation, a typographical error or a piece of noise introduced into language itself. Whatever its origin, the damaged title is appropriate. Hoffmann’s novel is a delirious structure of temptation, murder, religious corruption, unstable identity and doubling. Its monk protagonist drinks from a forbidden elixir and enters a narrative in which guilt, inheritance, madness and resemblance repeatedly make the self impossible to secure. Squamata’s title drags that nineteenth-century crisis into an electronic and metallic environment.
An elixir normally promises concentrated transformation. It may heal, intoxicate, preserve life or open access to forbidden knowledge. Squamata’s version offers no clean distinction between medicine and poison. The preceding track has already established toxicity as cumulative; now the toxin becomes sacramental. The machine does not simply attack the body from outside. It is consumed. Feedback becomes a potion made from the system’s own excessive return, an output routed back into input until the circuit begins feeding upon itself. This is one of noise music’s most compelling technical and philosophical loops. The machine hears its own voice, reacts to it, produces a louder answer, and rapidly loses any external subject. It becomes narcissistic, possessed by self-reference.
This relationship mirrors the Gothic double. A feedback signal is both the original sound and its pursuing duplicate. Each cycle resembles what came before while accumulating distortion. The double is never an exact copy; it is the original returning with altered intensity. Hoffmann’s characters encounter identities that seem to repeat, inherit or impersonate one another. Squamata’s circuitry does something comparable without narrative. Tone follows tone, reflection follows reflection, until origin becomes impossible to recover. The result is not a story about possession but a possessed system, one whose behavior has crossed from instrument into apparent appetite.
The album’s shortest piece, “Enslaved By Ants,” closes the structure in 7:23. After titles invoking judicial execution, layered poison and diabolical intoxication, enslavement by ants initially seems almost comic. That scale reversal is one of the release’s sharpest ideas. A behemoth implies monumental size, but immense systems are often incapacitated by tiny agents acting collectively. Ants invade electrical housings, walls, food stores and machinery through openings too small for a human hand. No individual ant possesses the strength to overpower a large animal or industrial structure, yet thousands can dismantle, transport or occupy what none could control alone.
The metaphor also describes sound. A huge noise mass may be composed from innumerable small events: clicks, grains, oscillations, short loops, microscopic distortions and repeated impacts. The listener perceives one overwhelming body because the components move too quickly or densely to count. “Enslaved By Ants” turns the apparent hierarchy of the album inside out. The enormous scrapyard monster is not sovereign. Its surfaces are occupied by smaller processes, and those processes determine how the larger body moves. The behemoth has been animated, but it has also become a habitat.
Ant colonies further complicate individual authorship. Their intelligence is distributed. No single ant contains the blueprint for the colony’s total behavior, yet coordinated patterns emerge through local interactions. Junkyard Behemoth works similarly. Gelsomina and Squamata each contribute fragments without controlling every later use of those fragments. The final album contains decisions made by individuals, but its identity emerges from circulation between them. The shared source material functions like chemical information carried through a colony. A sound deposited by one participant causes a response in another; the resulting structure belongs to the network as much as to either named author.
This makes the album’s violence feel strangely generative. Its scrap metal is not simply smashed for the symbolic pleasure of destruction. Broken material becomes a foundation for construction. Feedback is not only a shriek of malfunction but a method of producing continuing energy from return. Distortion does not merely conceal information; it breeds new information by multiplying harmonics and accidental relationships. Even the album’s most abrasive surfaces are busy manufacturing. The junkyard is not the end of industrial life. It is an unauthorized factory whose products no longer have recognized uses.
There is an economic argument buried inside this aesthetic. Modern systems classify objects according to utility, novelty and exchange value. A machine that cannot perform efficiently becomes waste even when most of its material remains intact. Consumer culture depends upon this premature declaration of death. Noise reverses the judgment. It values objects precisely when they cease behaving as intended. A clean signal demonstrates successful engineering; a damaged amplifier reveals processes that engineering normally suppresses. A perfect steel panel disappears into a building; a bent panel makes its materiality audible. What commerce calls failure becomes artistic specificity.
The junkyard is therefore an anti-museum. A museum preserves selected objects by removing them from ordinary use, controlling climate and stabilizing interpretation. A junkyard preserves accidentally. Objects remain exposed to rust, weather, impact and scavenging. Their identities become less certain as labels disappear and components are separated from original assemblies. Noise artists approach this unstable archive without the curator’s obligation to protect it. They strike the exhibit, drag it across concrete, attach a contact microphone, send voltage through it and discover what history sounds like when preservation includes further damage.
Yet the album is not a fantasy of innocent recycling. The word “behemoth” keeps the scale threatening. Industrial debris carries the memory of extraction, labor, pollution, consumption and planned obsolescence. Metal does not appear from nowhere. It has been mined, refined, transported, shaped and discarded through systems extending far beyond the performers. By activating scrap, Gelsomina and Squamata awaken those hidden histories without narrating them directly. The resulting sound can feel exhilarating because it releases enormous physical energy, but its materials also belong to a civilization that produces wreckage faster than it can understand it.
The cover concentrates this history into a compressed brown, black and ochre field. It does not present a clear documentary view of an outdoor salvage yard. Mechanical forms appear layered, enlarged and partially obscured, with structures resembling springs, rods, ribs or collapsed frameworks crossed by heavy black gestures. The artists’ names are written in comparatively delicate white script near the lower center, almost swallowed by the surrounding machinery. Human designation has become a small mark inside the industrial body. The image seems less concerned with identifying particular objects than with creating a diagram of entanglement. Scrap has lost its former categories and become anatomy.
The contrast between the elegant lettering and the damaged mechanical field reflects the album’s internal relationship between composition and force. Nothing here is truly uncontrolled. The artists select, transfer, edit, layer and arrange. The delicacy of those decisions remains embedded inside a surface that presents itself as catastrophic. Harsh noise is often misheard as the opposite of composition because its materials are extreme. In reality, extremity increases the importance of small decisions. A slight shift in frequency can change pressure into pain, depth into flatness, movement into stasis. A few seconds of space can make the following impact feel dramatically larger. An overloaded signal still possesses shape.
Gelsomina and Squamata approach that shape from complementary directions. Gelsomina’s work often suggests montage, psychological contamination and the transformation of borrowed material. Squamata’s known performances emphasize concrete clatter, metal action, machine sound and the bodily transition from control into raging immersion. Junkyard Behemoth does not flatten those approaches into a shared house style. Instead, it allows them to infect one another while preserving differences. Gelsomina constructs the immense opening furnace. Squamata divides its response into three chambers, moving through poison, Gothic intoxication and insect collectivism. The disc feels less like equal halves than like one large event followed by three examinations of what survived.
Pekka PT ended Gelsomina in 2008 and continued exploring darker industrial territory through Sick Seed. This gives the 2007 release a retrospective importance that would not necessarily have been obvious at the time. It belongs to the final, extraordinarily productive phase of a project that issued tapes, collaborations, live recordings and compact discs at a pace suggesting almost compulsive activity. The same year also brought the Bizarre Uproar collaboration Assisted Self-Sterilization and the wonderfully titled Deus Ex Garbage Can cassette. Those titles reveal a recurring universe of waste, damaged bodies, mechanical intervention and corrupted transcendence. Junkyard Behemoth stands near the center of that universe because its method embodies its imagery. It is not merely music about refuse. It has been built through the reuse of sonic matter.
That distinction is crucial. Conceptual noise can fail when provocative titles and artwork promise an intensity that the recordings do not structurally contain. Here the title, production method, sound sources and packaging reinforce one another. Exchanged recordings are scrap. Individual compositions are rebuilt machines. Feedback is a system consuming its own output. The limited keep-case edition resembles an object recovered from an industrial evidence shelf. The cover collapses machinery into anatomy. Even the four track titles describe structures losing control over themselves: mercy melts, poison accumulates, an elixir possesses its drinker, and a giant is enslaved by insects.
The album’s deepest subject may therefore be failed sovereignty. Judges cannot preserve the mercy seat. Bodies cannot isolate one poison from another. The self cannot drink transformation without becoming divided. The large cannot rule the small. Artists cannot exchange material while retaining complete ownership of its meaning. Machines cannot amplify indefinitely without beginning to generate behavior of their own. Every hierarchy established by the titles is destabilized by circulation. Power moves through the system but belongs permanently to no single part.
This is where Junkyard Behemoth becomes more than a strong Finnish harsh-noise recording from a particularly active period. It proposes an ontology of noise. Things are not defined exclusively by what they were designed to do. Identity continues after function, damage and exchange. An abandoned object remains capable of entering new relationships; a recorded sound can survive separation from its source; an artist’s material can become part of another artist’s language without disappearing completely. The world is filled with afterlives that official systems classify as waste because they lack the vocabulary to recognize transformed use.
The listener participates in that process. To hear only undifferentiated abrasion is to repeat the economic judgment that discarded material has become meaningless. Attention reveals distinctions inside the apparent heap: low-frequency weight, stereo movement, metal resonance, high feedback, layered density, momentary openings and the differing compositional instincts of the two projects. The album teaches perception by initially threatening to overwhelm it. Its force says everything is happening at once; sustained listening answers that no two collisions are identical.
Junkyard Behemoth is perfectly titled because its monster never becomes a singular, polished creation. Bolts remain visible. Different metals retain different resonances. The creature lurches under the pressure of incompatible components, and that instability is precisely what keeps it alive. Gelsomina and Squamata do not restore discarded sounds to respectability. They preserve the damage, add further damage and discover that wreckage can possess structure without becoming repaired.
What rose from this particular Finnish yard in 2007 was not merely a collaboration, a split CD or an hour of hostile electronics. It was a temporary body built from exchanged nervous systems, failed machines and sounds severed from their original owners. Its mercy is molten, its bloodstream poisonous, its sacrament contaminated and its skin alive with insects. Nearly two decades later, the physical edition remains scarce, but the behemoth has continued shedding formats and moving between private archives. It was assembled from refuse, which may be why it has proved so difficult to kill.

Culver / Seppuku - 2009 - Dedicated To Soledad Miranda

 

At War With False Noise – atwar043  212.00MB FLAC

Dedicated To Soledad Miranda is a tribute assembled from materials that initially appear incapable of tenderness. Culver contributes more than thirty minutes of bass-heavy drone and amplifier pressure. Seppuku follows with one piece of almost geological doom and another of scorched post-industrial power electronics. There is no obvious imitation of the psychedelic lounge music, jazz, organ, percussion and erotic exotica associated with the Jesús Franco films that made Soledad Miranda a cult figure. No melody arrives to recreate her movement across the screen, and no sample explains why these sounds have been placed beneath her name. The album chooses a more difficult form of dedication. It does not attempt to represent Soledad Miranda as she was. It explores what remains when a human life has been transformed into photographs, film stills, projections, private obsessions and traces.

Soledad Miranda died in 1970 at the age of twenty-seven, just as her collaboration with Jesús Franco was giving her screen presence a new intensity. Her career had already included musicals, comedies, historical adventures, horror pictures, television work and Spanish pop recordings, but the films made during her final period came to dominate her posthumous reputation. In Count Dracula, Eugénie de Sade, Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed in Ecstasy and The Devil Came from Akasava, she appeared as victim, seducer, vampire, avenger, criminal, apparition and doomed woman. Franco’s cinema frequently surrounded her with unstable zooms, lurid color, erotic ritual and dreamlike narrative discontinuity. Miranda could seem less like a conventional character than an event occurring inside the film. The camera watched her, but her gaze often appeared to travel beyond the scene, as though she were observing another picture inaccessible to everyone around her.

Her accidental death intensified this quality. A performer who had been repeatedly photographed as a figure of danger, eroticism and death disappeared before the films most closely associated with her had completed their international circulation. The living actress became inseparable from the knowledge that the audience was looking backward. Each movement on screen acquired the sorrowful pressure of something already lost. This is one reason Miranda inspired forms of devotion exceeding ordinary admiration for a cult-film performer. Her admirers did not merely collect movies. They collected fragments, alternate titles, publicity stills, interviews, censored editions, lobby cards and stories about projects that might have followed. She became a missing center around which incomplete evidence continued accumulating.

Culver’s “Traces Of The Woman By The Lake” understands this condition immediately. Even its title avoids naming a complete person. It offers traces rather than presence, “the woman” rather than Soledad, and a lake rather than a stable room or landscape. Water keeps an image visible while refusing to hold it still. A reflected face belongs simultaneously to a body and to the surface receiving it. The smallest disturbance breaks that face into light. Lee Stokoe’s Culver project has long operated through comparable processes, taking relatively restricted materials and exposing the minute changes occurring inside prolonged amplification. Rather than moving through a sequence of riffs or discrete events, the music suspends the listener inside tone until tone itself begins behaving like weather, architecture and memory.

The piece lasts 31:26 and occupies more than half of the album. It begins with a mechanical unease often compared to a generator heard from an unsafe distance. The comparison is useful because a generator produces power while also announcing the possibility of malfunction. Its rhythm suggests continuity, but every vibration contains irregularities. Culver develops this opening into a heavy low-frequency drone whose scale gradually becomes difficult to judge. It might be a machine operating in a basement, an engine beyond a wall, a film projector magnified until its mechanical pulse fills a theater, or the subterranean sound of the building itself. The source matters less than the listener’s growing awareness that the sound has become an environment.

Culver’s music can appear almost motionless when measured according to conventional musical events. Measured by pressure, grain and depth, it is continually changing. The low end thickens and thins. Higher abrasion gathers around it. A tone that first seems distant moves into the foreground without clearly becoming louder. Amplifier residue begins to resemble orchestration. The piece eventually reaches a level of crushing saturation, but the escalation does not function like a rock crescendo promising release. Culver offers no victorious summit. Accumulation makes the room smaller. The listener is not carried upward by the sound, but increasingly enclosed within it.

This is where the dedication begins to make emotional sense. “Traces Of The Woman By The Lake” does not portray Miranda’s appearance or reproduce the sensual atmosphere of her films. It creates the experience of trying to recover something from an image that cannot answer. The long duration becomes an act of staring. At first the picture seems stable; then small details emerge, disappear and return altered by attention. Eventually one becomes aware not only of the photographed subject but of the grain, chemical surface, projector, screen and darkness surrounding the image. Culver’s drone performs an equivalent reversal. What initially appears to be one large sound slowly reveals the machinery of listening.

The title’s lake may also suggest the peculiar immortality supplied by cinema. Film preserves movement but does not preserve life. The actress continues turning her head, opening her eyes and entering rooms, yet every repetition confirms that the movement belongs to the past. A lake likewise appears alive through constant motion while remaining bound to one place. The image can return endlessly, but it cannot cross the surface. Culver does not try to solve that separation. The drone deepens it until admiration becomes almost indistinguishable from mourning.

The track’s later passage shifts toward a more sedative, hovering tone, though “sedative” should not be mistaken for peaceful. After the preceding weight, the reduced aggression feels narcotic, as though the music has moved from external machinery into the listener’s nervous system. The transformation recalls the aftermath of extreme volume, when a room has fallen quiet but the ears continue manufacturing an internal residue. The sound is no longer simply in front of the listener. It has been impressed upon perception. This lingering state is essential to Culver’s work. The recording seems to end only after it has created conditions in which ending becomes impossible.

Lee Stokoe’s broader activity helps explain the piece’s density. Alongside Culver, he was connected to Marzuraan and to Matthew Bower’s Skullflower, projects that treat guitar and bass less as vehicles for conventional playing than as sources of abrasion, mass and psychedelic disorientation. Culver is nevertheless his most concentrated laboratory. The project strips away the visible gestures of a band until only amplified matter remains. On “Traces Of The Woman By The Lake,” this reduction produces something unexpectedly appropriate for a memorial. Grief also reduces the world. Details that once seemed ordinary become charged, while everything unrelated temporarily loses definition.

Seppuku enters through a different door. “Inga,” lasting 13:16, begins with what resembles a tolling bell before a repetitive mechanical pulse establishes an industrial foundation. When the full band arrives, the track becomes almost unbearably heavy. Guitar, bass, percussion and voice do not merely accompany one another; they collapse into a shared downward movement. The tempo possesses the ceremonial slowness of doom, but the sound is too damaged and physically aggressive to become stately. Every impact seems to drive the recording deeper into the floor.

The bell gives “Inga” a funerary threshold, but the machinery immediately complicates the ritual. It might be a factory pump, hydraulic system, primitive sequencer or an amplified mechanical loop. The exact source is less important than the relationship it establishes between body and machine. Doom metal usually derives its weight from riffs whose repetition becomes monumental. Seppuku allows repetition to become coercive. The pulse does not guide the performers so much as force them to continue. When the guitars arrive, they sound trapped inside the mechanism, producing enormous resistance without escaping its cycle.

The vocals operate at both ends of the human register. Low emissions merge with the bass frequencies, while screams tear upward through the mass. This division creates the sense of a body being stretched across the composition. The lower voice has almost surrendered its linguistic identity and become another engine. The higher voice remains recognizably desperate, but its words are subordinate to texture and strain. Between them, the human figure is present everywhere and secure nowhere. Seppuku’s heaviness does not come only from tuning or volume. It comes from placing recognizable human effort inside a system too large to be mastered.

“Inga” is the album’s most conventionally musical piece, but that accessibility makes its violence more vivid. There are drums to anticipate, riffs to follow and a physical rhythm capable of producing the bodily response associated with metal. Yet each familiar element seems diseased. Cymbals flare rather than decorate. Guitar tones remain smeared after the attack. The pulse continues long enough to feel compulsory. The performance resembles a doom band discovered inside an abandoned industrial recording whose machinery cannot be switched off.

The title probably extends the album’s devotion beyond one actress toward the wider mythology of European erotic and exploitation cinema. Inga was the title character of Joseph W. Sarno’s successful 1968 Swedish film, played by Marie Liljedahl, another performer whose screen image became much larger than her relatively brief career. Whether Seppuku intended that precise reference is not documented clearly enough to treat it as certainty, but the placement of “Inga” beside “Emanuelle,” within packaging assembled from European film imagery, makes the association difficult to ignore. The CD appears to construct a private pantheon of women whose photographed bodies circulated internationally through dubbed prints, censored editions, video boxes and collectors’ copies.

That private pantheon raises questions the album does not attempt to settle. A tribute can preserve memory, but it can also preserve the conditions under which a person was converted into an object of fascination. Miranda’s beauty is central to the release’s declared admiration, and the booklet reportedly gathers glossy images of nude European actresses. The distinction between celebrating a performer and collecting her image is therefore deliberately or carelessly unstable. Yet this instability belongs to the genuine cultural history surrounding exploitation cinema. These films were sold through bodies, scandal and fantasies of access, while the performers themselves often supplied the emotional and visual force that allowed inexpensive productions to survive long after more respectable movies vanished.

Miranda’s continued importance cannot be explained simply by nudity or beauty. Thousands of performers were photographed by exploitation cinema without producing the same afterlife. Her screen presence contains a peculiar autonomy. Even when a film frames her as an object of desire, her expression can appear inward, analytical or remote. She seems to retain something the camera cannot obtain. This resistance may explain why admirers repeatedly describe her in mystical terms. They do not experience the films as having delivered her completely. They experience them as evidence that something escaped.

“Emanuelle,” at 12:48, abandons the full-band doom of “Inga” for a far more exposed post-industrial attack. Deek and Stevie of Messiah Complex participate, and the performance is built from bleak static, damaged air, high-frequency abrasion and distorted vocals. Where “Inga” creates a huge body, “Emanuelle” strips the body down to nervous signals. The transition is severe enough to make Seppuku seem like two different projects joined by a shared appetite for collapse.

Static forms the track’s ground, but it is not a neutral background. It moves in sheets, sometimes resembling wind crossing a destroyed landscape, sometimes the electrical snow of a television without a signal. That second association is especially potent within an album devoted to a screen figure. A blank television is not truly empty. It displays the activity of a system unable to receive an image. “Emanuelle” can be heard as the violent continuation of that condition: the picture has disappeared, but transmission remains, filling the room with evidence of failed contact.

The vocals do not restore communication. They arrive overdriven and partially buried, their urgency greater than their intelligibility. Language becomes another damaged broadcast. The voice tries to cross the static but cannot emerge without becoming part of it. Power electronics often turns this failure into aggression, using distortion to transform speech into command, accusation or panic. Here the result is more desolate than authoritarian. The voice seems stranded inside the signal.

The spelling “Emanuelle,” with one “m,” commonly evokes the unofficial Italian Black Emanuelle cycle associated with Laura Gemser rather than the French Emmanuelle series. Once again, the title appears to open a corridor into European exploitation culture wider than the named dedication alone. Soledad Miranda, Inga and Emanuelle become less a historical grouping than a constellation assembled by underground spectatorship. They belong to different films, countries and cinematic economies, but their images traveled together through late-night screenings, VHS circulation, cult magazines, mail-order catalogs and private collections.

This is not incidental packaging pasted onto unrelated music. Culver and Seppuku share exploitation cinema’s interest in unstable boundaries between attraction and repulsion, beauty and damage, intimacy and distance. Low-budget genre film often exposes its own construction: sets look temporary, dubbing floats away from mouths, edits fracture space and music returns without natural explanation. Noise similarly makes the recording apparatus audible. Amplifier hum, overload, feedback and room resonance are no longer defects hidden behind the performance. They become the event itself.

The difference between the projects gives the album its architecture. Culver approaches the screen as memory, stretching one tone until it becomes an environment of absence. Seppuku approaches it through bodily impact, first constructing a doom ritual and then tearing it apart into electrical weather. The sequence moves from trace, to incarnation, to disintegration. A woman is glimpsed beside the lake; a huge body appears through “Inga”; the body loses coherence inside “Emanuelle.” The album can therefore be heard as an accidental narrative of cinema itself. Light produces an apparition, the audience invests that apparition with physical and emotional force, and the image finally collapses back into grain and static.

At War With False Noise was an ideal home for this object because the label’s catalog ignored firm boundaries between noise, doom, grind, industrial music, black metal and private obsession. Dedicated To Soledad Miranda does not behave like a carefully balanced split release. Culver receives one enormous chamber; Seppuku receives two shorter but radically different rooms. The proportions are uneven, the genre movement is abrupt, and the dedication remains unexplained. Its coherence emerges from fixation rather than polish.

The original compact disc made this fixation physical. Five hundred copies were issued in jewel cases with a glossy booklet dominated by film imagery. The object resembles a miniature shrine assembled from commercially reproduced pictures. That description should not make it sound solemn or respectable. Underground devotion is often excessive, adolescent, embarrassing, erotic and sincere at the same time. Its objects preserve the peculiar intensity with which an individual encounters an image and decides that ordinary admiration is insufficient.

The album’s greatest strength is that its tribute cannot be reduced to flattery. None of the music is conventionally beautiful in the manner its creators evidently found Miranda beautiful. Instead, it investigates the darker mechanics of adoration: repetition, enlargement, distortion, projection and the desire to keep an image present after its source has vanished. Culver turns looking into duration. Seppuku turns desire into physical pressure. Together they create a memorial that feels less like placing flowers at a grave than remaining alone in a theater after the projector has begun malfunctioning.

The release does not restore Soledad Miranda to life, explain her, or rescue her from the gaze that helped create her legend. It reveals the machinery of that legend still running. The generator continues beneath the building. The bell sounds. The guitars drag themselves forward. Static fills the abandoned screen. Somewhere within it, a face is briefly visible, not returning, but leaving another trace.