Oh Sees / Dead Medic - 2017 - A Few Days of Reflection

 

Castle Face – CF-99

Dead Medic occupies an unusually revealing position in the Oh Sees catalog. Released near the end of 2017 after Orc and the quieter OCS album Memory of a Cut Off Head, this two-track record does not feel like a promotional single or a tray of scraps left beside the main course. Both pieces were extracted from longer improvisations recorded during the Orc sessions, and they expose the process that was beginning to reshape the band from a compact garage-rock weapon into something more spacious, rhythmic and exploratory. The songs on Orc had already begun opening trapdoors into progressive rock, electronics and extended instrumental passages. Dead Medic allows the band to remain below the floorboards for an entire side at a time.
The title track begins as though somebody has switched on a complicated machine whose intended function has been forgotten. John Dwyer’s recorder or flute produces an eerie little signal over Tim Hellman’s patient bass, while drummers Dan Rincon and Paul Quattrone establish the repeating movement beneath it. The rhythm does not hurry toward a chorus because no chorus is coming. It settles into a circular pattern and lets duration become one of the instruments. The longer the pattern continues, the more closely the ear examines its internal machinery: the slight differences between the two drum kits, the bass notes pressing against the beat, and the electronic shapes that flicker around the edges without announcing their source.
The recording credits specify Rincon as the drummer on the right and Quattrone on the left, making the stereo field part of the composition rather than merely a way of accommodating two people playing similar instruments. Their rhythms overlap, separate and occasionally appear to chase each other around the listener. One drummer may emphasize the groove’s skeleton while the other adds muscle, friction or a momentary imbalance. The result is less a conventional drum solo than a mobile rhythmic architecture. The listener is placed inside a structure whose two walls keep moving independently without allowing the roof to collapse.
Dwyer uses nearly everything within reach during these sessions: guitar, Mellotron, synthesizer, flute, recorder, fife, hand percussion, Wurlitzer electric piano and sampling. Yet “Dead Medic” does not resemble a demonstration of a crowded instrument cupboard. Many of these sounds appear only briefly, performing small acts of interference before disappearing into the groove. A keyboard tone hangs in the air, a woodwind cry suggests some anxious animal loose inside the studio, and the guitar arrives less as the traditional leader of a rock band than as another electrical substance entering the mixture. This restraint makes the track feel larger. There is always the possibility that another unidentified object is moving somewhere beyond the microphones.
The music was recorded at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, a residential studio complex located in the desert near the Mexican border. That setting seems audible even without turning it into mythology. “Dead Medic” possesses the spaciousness of musicians playing far from the interruptions of ordinary schedules, able to continue a groove long after a normal studio clock might have told them to stop. The dry repetition and small floating sounds suggest an expanse surrounding the band, while the dense percussion creates a temporary shelter within it. The studio becomes both laboratory and campsite: wires, keyboards and tape machines assembled in the middle of something much older and less interested in human activity.
“A Few Days of Reflection” establishes an even deeper historical passage. It is an interpretation of “Låt oss tänka ett par dagar” by the Swedish group Träd, Gräs och Stenar, a title more literally translated as “Let us think for a couple of days.” The original performance was recorded at the Gärdet festival in Stockholm on June 12, 1970 and stretches beyond twenty-one minutes. Oh Sees reduce it to just under ten, but reduction is not the same as simplification. They take the central emotional and rhythmic material, remove much of the original performance’s open-air sprawl, and rebuild it as a heavy, slow-moving studio hallucination.
Träd, Gräs och Stenar belonged to a Swedish counterculture in which music, collective organization and everyday life were not easily separated. The group helped arrange the free Gärdet festival and developed a leaderless form of psychedelic rock based upon repetition, participation and the momentum generated by people playing together. Their work could contain rock-and-roll riffs, Terry Riley-like minimalism, communal singing and stretches of uncertainty in which no one seemed entirely responsible for deciding where the music should go. Oh Sees do not imitate the surface of that history. They recognize the operating principle inside it: a repeated figure can become a shared space, and a band can discover a composition by remaining within that space long enough.
The cover therefore reveals something important about Dwyer’s listening and about the band’s evolution. Oh Sees are sometimes treated as though their music erupted entirely from California garages, cheap organs, damaged amplifiers and the need to propel bodies across sweaty floors. Those elements are real, but “A Few Days of Reflection” exposes a longer international wiring diagram. Swedish progg, German motorik music, British progressive rock, American punk and home-built electronic experimentation all pass through the group without being carefully sorted into separate historical boxes. Dwyer’s relationship with the past is neither reverent preservation nor casual theft. He hears an unfinished possibility inside older music and invites his present band to continue it.
Where the original Träd, Gräs och Stenar performance feels loose, communal and exposed to the conditions of an outdoor festival, the Oh Sees version moves with a heavier interior pressure. Hellman’s bass becomes the central gravitational object, repeating a phrase that appears simple until it has occupied the room for several minutes. Rincon and Quattrone surround it with rolling percussion, sometimes matching each other and sometimes producing a subtle rhythmic blur. Dwyer’s guitar avoids the constant upward climb expected from a psychedelic solo. It hangs, bends and briefly illuminates the surrounding darkness, leaving the rhythm to carry most of the emotional weight.
The title acquires another meaning through this change in atmosphere. “A Few Days of Reflection” sounds less like a vacation from activity than a necessary pause after exhaustion. The band released Dead Medic as a year-end message to its listeners, describing 2017 as a heavy year while insisting that hope and strength remained possible. That sentiment could easily have become a decorative note attached to the record, but the music performs the same idea more convincingly. It refuses panic. Both tracks find a pattern, remain with it and allow thought to reorganize itself around repetition. The record does not pretend that difficulty can be solved in eleven minutes. It makes eleven minutes of inhabitable time inside the difficulty.
There is a quietly generous quality to releasing this material as a fan-oriented holiday record. Many groups would have shortened these performances, added vocals or treated them as deluxe-edition residue. Oh Sees instead gave each jam an entire side of vinyl and trusted the listener to stay inside it. The original announcement even joked that nobody would need to get up and flip the record for approximately eleven minutes. Beneath the humor is a serious understanding of the format. A twelve-inch single can create a different relationship with time than an album crowded with songs. Dropping the needle becomes an agreement to remain with one developing thought until the side physically runs out.
Dead Medic also captures the importance of the Rincon and Quattrone lineup at the moment its possibilities were becoming fully apparent. Two drummers can easily become a spectacle, a larger hammer used to strike the same nail, but this band increasingly treated them as separate rhythmic voices. Their interaction made it possible for Dwyer and Hellman to simplify without making the music feel empty. A bass line could remain almost unchanged because dozens of tiny negotiations were occurring within the percussion. This would become essential to the more improvisational records that followed, where Oh Sees, later Osees, could move into long jazz-rock, krautrock and synthesizer passages without losing the bodily urgency of the earlier garage band.
The production preserves that bodily presence while leaving room for the record’s stranger details. Eric Bauer, Ty Segall, Enrique Tena and Dwyer were involved in producing and recording the sessions, with Bauer, Tena and Dwyer handling the mix and J.J. Golden mastering the result. The sound is substantial without being polished into a sealed modern surface. Drums retain their separate impacts, bass remains thick enough to guide both pieces, and the various winds, keyboards, samples and guitar treatments appear as physical events rather than plug-in decorations. One can hear a band in a room, but also the studio being used to expand that room beyond its architectural limits.
The two sides complement each other through different forms of inheritance. “Dead Medic” documents the band generating material from its own immediate chemistry, while “A Few Days of Reflection” begins with an idea passed forward from Swedish musicians playing together forty-seven years earlier. One side looks inward at the current lineup; the other looks backward and discovers a route forward. Together they reject the idea that improvisation means creating without history. Every jam contains remembered music, learned reflexes, old technologies and previous communities, whether or not the players name them. Oh Sees make that inheritance audible without allowing it to become a burden.
This may be why Dead Medic feels more significant than its modest two-track format suggests. It is a small hinge between distinct eras of the band, preserving the moment when acceleration ceased to be the only route toward intensity. The record discovers that repetition can be violent, meditative, funny, ominous and hopeful without substantially changing tempo. It also places an American underground institution in open conversation with a Swedish one, demonstrating how music can cross nearly half a century without losing its communal purpose. Someone hears an old recording, recognizes unfinished life within it, gathers friends in another room and begins the thought again.

Rat Cage - 2020 - Screams From The Cage

 

La Vida Es Un Mus – MUS215

The first voice heard on Screams From the Cage is almost comically civilized: “Ladies and gentlemen...now then.” It resembles the introduction to a public meeting in a Sheffield community hall, perhaps moments before somebody overturns the tables and drives a motorcycle through the wall. Then Bryan J. Suddaby screams, the drums detonate, and Rat Cage’s first full-length begins compressing decades of British and Swedish hardcore into nineteen minutes of exceptionally organized panic. The contrast is perfect. This is not undirected rage stumbling through the door. It has arrived on time, cleared its throat and prepared a detailed list of grievances.
Rat Cage is essentially Suddaby alone, writing and performing the songs before allowing a small number of friends into the enclosure for additional guitar and backing vocals. One-person punk projects can sometimes feel airless, with every instrument obeying the same imagination too neatly, but Screams From the Cage turns that concentration into force. The guitar, bass, drums and voice are not competing personalities negotiating a compromise. They are four limbs attached to the same furious nervous system. Every accent lands where the next instrument expects it, yet the record retains enough abrasion to sound endangered by its own momentum.
Suddaby’s central language is the Scandinavian hardcore often gathered beneath the wonderfully destructive word “mangel,” but this is not Swedish music reproduced by an English technician. Rat Cage drags that vocabulary back through Sheffield, UK82, street punk and the rough directness of early British anarcho-hardcore. The drums carry the familiar d-beat propulsion, but the guitars frequently contain more hook and rock-and-roll movement than pure genre reenactment would allow. Missbrukarna, Totalitär, Mob 47 and Skitkids may haunt the machinery, while the blunt melodic instincts of the Partisans and other No Future-era bands remain visible beneath the corrosion. Suddaby understands influence as fuel rather than costume.
“A Country for Idiots” begins the attack with a title broad enough to survive almost any change of government. The song’s frustration is not presented as abstract political theory. Rat Cage works in the old punk scale of bodily recognition: the sense of being governed by people who appear insulated from the consequences of their own decisions, hearing public language reduced to slogans, and watching obvious destruction sold as unavoidable common sense. The riff does not illustrate an argument so much as give that argument shoulders, boots and forward motion. In under two minutes, contempt becomes something the listener can physically enter.
“Jump Off a Building” and “Snake Oil” follow so quickly that the record barely permits the nervous system to reset. This velocity is not merely speed for its own glorious sake. Rat Cage uses short songs to eliminate the false comfort of distance. There is no leisurely instrumental introduction from which to admire the anger. The listener is placed immediately inside it, hurried from one condition to another before a stable perspective can form. “Snake Oil” is especially well named for an era in which political salesmanship, media performance and commercial wellness language increasingly borrowed one another’s tricks. Everything is a cure, every disaster is an opportunity, and everyone speaking from above wants another minute of your attention.
The two tiny “Vanity Game” fragments divide the album with only a few seconds each, behaving like cracks in the structure rather than fully developed songs. Their brevity gives them a strange importance. Amid music committed to frontal movement, these interruptions briefly expose the editing, performance and artificial construction holding the assault together. They are little trapdoors through which the album’s momentum momentarily falls before “Midnight Death Ride” restores it with one of the record’s strongest combinations of hardcore velocity and filthy rock-and-roll swing.
That rock-and-roll element matters. Without it, Screams From the Cage might have been an impressive but sealed demonstration of inherited d-beat technique. Instead, Suddaby repeatedly bends the guitar away from pure rhythmic punishment and toward riffs that feel reckless, catchy and slightly poisoned. George Wright and recording engineer James Fidler contribute additional leads and solos, small bursts of another personality entering Suddaby’s tightly controlled construction. These are not polished metal solos floating above the songs. They sound scorched into the recording, preserving the primitive excitement of somebody finding a narrow opening and forcing the guitar through it.
“I Don’t Wanna Listen” may be the album’s simplest possible statement of refusal, but refusal is one of punk’s fundamental creative tools. Before a person can articulate an alternative, there is often a necessary moment of saying no to the language already occupying the room. No to the explanation, no to the advertisement, no to the official reassurance, no to the instruction to behave reasonably while unreasonable conditions continue. Rat Cage understands that such refusal does not have to be philosophically complete to be meaningful. Sometimes shutting out one more fraudulent voice is how a private thought survives long enough to become an idea.
“Charge Them with Murder” sharpens that anger into accusation. The title refuses the soft vocabulary through which institutional harm is normally processed: mistake, mismanagement, oversight, regrettable outcome. Hardcore has always been unusually good at restoring verbs to situations that public language has smothered beneath nouns. Somebody chose, somebody profited, somebody authorized, somebody died. Rat Cage’s speed prevents the accusation from being absorbed as a calm topic for debate. The song arrives already past the stage of politely requesting that power investigate itself.
“Anti Trident” places the record within a specifically British history of nuclear opposition. Trident, the United Kingdom’s submarine-based nuclear weapons system, becomes a perfect subject for Rat Cage because it combines almost unimaginable destructive power with the numb administrative language of budgets, deterrence and national security. The song is one of the album’s shortest and most direct attacks, refusing the grandeur generally used to justify weapons capable of erasing cities. The music does not attempt to sonically imitate a nuclear explosion. It is the smaller, human sound made by somebody refusing to accept that such machinery should exist quietly in their name.
“Cold Furnace” is an especially evocative Sheffield title even before any lyrical meaning is considered. The city’s industrial identity, steelmaking history and subsequent economic transformations linger behind those two words. A furnace is supposed to be the source of heat, labor and production; a cold one suggests abandonment, interruption and a vanished system of collective purpose. Rat Cage does not turn industrial decline into sepia nostalgia. The recording is too immediate for that. Its distorted guitar and pounding drums feel assembled from whatever remains available after the official machinery has stopped, a smaller unauthorized factory generating its own voltage.
The album closes with “Not Got No Hope,” the longest track at three minutes and the closest Screams From the Cage comes to stretching out. Even here, Rat Cage does not suddenly become reflective or spacious. The extra time allows the final riff to dig deeper and the accumulated negativity to become almost triumphant. The title’s double negative contains an accidental opening: to have “not got no hope” can grammatically mean that some hope remains, however battered or unwilling to identify itself. That ambiguity suits punk. Total despair rarely produces records this energetic. Making the thing, playing every instrument, involving friends, pressing vinyl and sending the noise outward are all acts requiring a stubborn belief that contact remains possible.
The album was released on April 10, 2020, when the title Screams From the Cage had acquired an additional meaning that could not have been fully anticipated during its creation. Much of the world was suddenly confined indoors, public life had contracted, and the cage was no longer only a political or psychological metaphor. Yet the record does not sound like a document made in response to lockdown. Its anger was already prepared. That timing instead demonstrated how quickly old punk subjects can become newly literal: confinement, incompetent leadership, social abandonment, mistrust of official explanations and the need to create an outlet before pressure becomes paralysis.
James Fidler recorded the album at Harvest Studio in Sheffield, James Atkinson mixed it at Stationhouse in Leeds, and Brad Boatright mastered it at Audiosiege. That chain preserves the useful contradiction at the center of the record. Screams From the Cage sounds raw, but it is not careless. The instruments remain distinct enough for the riffs to register immediately, the drums possess physical impact without becoming an indistinguishable blur, and Suddaby’s voice sits at the front like a damaged emergency broadcast. Mylo “Mangel” Oxlo’s artwork completes the object by giving its claustrophobic hostility a visual body rather than smoothing it into tasteful punk design.
Warren Lovett and Henry Gumpson’s backing vocals are another small but essential breach in the one-person construction. Their appearances remind us that Rat Cage may be authored largely by a single musician, but the music belongs to a communal tradition. Hardcore survives through borrowed amplifiers, shared floors, guest shouts, tiny labels, mail orders, traded recordings and people recognizing something of themselves inside another person’s noise. Suddaby can construct the entire machine, but it becomes socially alive when other voices enter and the finished record leaves his possession.
La Vida Es Un Mus released the LP as MUS215 on black vinyl and in a blue-vinyl edition accompanied by a beer mat, a beautifully ordinary object for music this apocalyptic. That detail captures something central to British punk culture: catastrophe delivered without theatrical grandeur, world-ending anger sitting beside pub humor and everyday social life. Screams From the Cage does not imagine rebellion occurring in some purified revolutionary future. It happens now, among friends, jokes, cheap rooms, political exhaustion and whatever equipment can be made to work.
The record’s greatest strength is not simply that it moves fast or sounds furious. It is the precision with which Suddaby converts disgust into momentum. Twelve tracks pass in less time than many bands require to establish an atmosphere, yet the album contains a complete environment: governmental contempt, nuclear dread, fraudulent authority, industrial ruin, psychological confinement and the thin surviving wire of collective resistance. Rat Cage does not offer a program for escaping the cage. It makes enough noise to confirm that somebody else is trapped nearby, still alive, and kicking the same wall.

Rat Cage - 2023 - Savage Visions

La Vida Es Un Mus – MUS274

 The eleven-second “Beginning of the End” sounds less like an introduction than the instant somebody realizes the brakes are gone. Then “Savage Visions” erupts, and Rat Cage spends the next twenty minutes driving through a world where every available exit appears to lead toward another collapsing bridge. Screams From the Cage was already a concentrated blast of Sheffield mangel, but this second full-length feels darker, heavier and less willing to convert frustration into rowdy release. The earlier album still carried the exhilaration of resistance, the communal rush of shouting back at an idiotic world. Savage Visions begins after that exhilaration has curdled into something more claustrophobic. The cage remains, but now the occupant has been awake inside it for too long.

Bryan Suddaby continues to function as Rat Cage’s central nervous system, writing and performing the album while James Fidler, C. Mackay and Warren Lovett enter as additional musicians. The predominantly one-person construction gives the record an unusual consistency of attack. Guitar, bass, drums and voice all appear to have received the same emergency message at precisely the same moment. Yet Savage Visions does not feel clinically assembled or deprived of social friction. The additional players produce small breaches in Suddaby’s enclosed system, while gang vocals, lead breaks and abrupt stylistic turns make the record sound like a roomful of people trying to escape through one door at once.
The title track immediately reveals how much Rat Cage’s vocabulary has expanded. The familiar Swedish hardcore engine remains, but blackened guitar shapes, heavy-metal momentum and reckless rock-and-roll leads have been welded onto it without weakening the punk foundation. Venom, Midnight and later Darkthrone now flicker beside Totalitär, Disarm, The Varukers and The Partisans. This could easily have become a tour through influences, with each recognizable sound arriving in its assigned historical uniform. Instead, Suddaby throws them together until genre distinctions become sparks inside the same electrical fire. Metal is not added to make the music grander or more technically respectable. It makes the danger feel less containable.
“Scapegoats of Fear” compresses one of the record’s central political mechanisms into less than two minutes. Fear becomes useful to power when it can be redirected toward a visible target, especially one with fewer resources to answer back. Economic failure, institutional decay and political incompetence can all be disguised if the public is repeatedly offered somebody else to blame. Rat Cage does not approach this as a detached analysis of propaganda. The music reproduces the sensation of being trapped inside the process, with the drums surging forward while the guitar appears to scrape against every available surface. The song is short because the mechanism itself is brutally efficient.
“Change From a Fiver” may be the album’s most perfectly British title. A five-pound note is not wealth, yet even that modest sum becomes a measure of shrinking possibility. The phrase evokes bus fare, a drink, food, admission to a show, or the small daily arithmetic performed by people trying to remain functional while prices climb beyond wages. Rat Cage’s politics work best at this scale. Rather than speaking only in enormous abstractions, Suddaby notices how national decisions eventually arrive in pockets, cupboards, electricity meters and the anxious pause before buying something ordinary. The song’s velocity turns penny-counting into panic, making economic pressure audible as a body being hurried through its own life.
“Sinister Town” brings the album’s anxiety into the streets. Sheffield is never used merely as an industrial badge attached to the music, but its history remains present in the record’s combination of metal, machinery and working-class anger. The town here is not sinister because it contains cartoon villains lurking beneath streetlights. It is sinister because ordinary surroundings have become subtly hostile: shuttered spaces, unaffordable rooms, public neglect, surveillance, exhaustion and the suspicion that everything once held in common is being quietly sold. The riff moves with the swagger of street punk, but the mood underneath it is much colder. Rat Cage can still produce a chorus built to be shouted collectively, even when the words offer no celebration.
“Through the Darkness” shows how carefully the record balances despair against propulsion. Savage Visions repeatedly insists that conditions are intolerable, yet its music is never inert. The drumming keeps finding another burst of energy, the bass drives beneath the distortion, and Suddaby’s voice tears forward as though volume itself might create a passage through the wall. This is not optimism in any comfortable sense. It is closer to the body’s refusal to stop functioning merely because the mind can see no convincing outcome. Punk has always contained this contradiction: songs announcing that everything is hopeless, made by people working extremely hard to communicate with strangers.
“I.D.C.” introduces a different kind of release, a staggering, confrontational movement that feels less like a disciplined march than a barroom argument becoming architectural. The initials reduce language to a final exhausted refusal. Whatever explanation, demand or social performance preceded them has reached the point where engagement itself feels dishonest. Yet the track’s gang-ready force turns indifference into something communal and strangely exhilarating. The phrase may announce that the speaker no longer cares, but the violence of the performance proves the opposite. Nobody makes music this committed because nothing matters. The refusal is aimed at a world that has demanded too much attention while offering too little reason to trust it.
Then “Spitting on the Ceiling” opens a trapdoor beneath the expected Rat Cage method. Synthesizer enters the attack, not as an atmospheric introduction or post-punk decoration, but as another unstable substance inside the room. Its appearance is brief enough to remain startling and natural enough that it never feels pasted on for novelty. The track suggests how much territory Rat Cage can explore without losing its identity. Mangel is not being treated as a sealed historical formula whose authenticity depends upon excluding unfamiliar sounds. The genre survives because musicians continue testing what can be pushed through its overloaded circuitry.
“Expensive Bombs” returns to a concern already visible in “Anti Trident” from Screams From the Cage, but the newer song’s title sharpens the obscenity through ordinary financial language. Governments describe weapons in the vocabulary of procurement, capability, investment and deterrence, as though a device built to erase human beings were another piece of municipal equipment. Calling them expensive bombs strips away that protective language. The word “expensive” also connects military expenditure with the daily scarcity running through the album. Money is apparently unavailable for housing, heating, wages, hospitals or public life, yet limitless resources materialize when destruction requires funding. Rat Cage’s attack is effective because it makes that contradiction sound ridiculous before it sounds horrifying.
“Cover Up” barrels through another familiar public ritual: catastrophe followed by institutional self-protection. Responsibility becomes fragmented among committees, reports, private contractors, revised timelines and people who have already moved into other positions. Rat Cage’s music does the opposite. It concentrates responsibility. One person writes, performs and screams the accusation without allowing it to dissolve into procedural fog. Suddaby’s voice has become even more extreme here than on the previous album, less a conventional hardcore bark than an arterial shriek that appears to have bypassed ordinary speech. Its abrasion is not merely stylistic. It is what language sounds like after polite channels have repeatedly failed.
“Nothing’s Sacred Anymore” closes the album by allowing its metal component to reach full physical size. The track carries the familiar käng drive, but the guitar rises with a larger, almost apocalyptic weight, as though the record’s street-level frustrations have finally accumulated into weather. The title can sound like a conservative complaint about lost tradition, but within Savage Visions it suggests something more material. What remains protected when homes, labor, public space, truth and human survival can all be assigned prices? Sacredness here is not nostalgia for obedience. It is the belief that some parts of life should exist beyond extraction, calculation and sale.
James Atkinson’s engineering and mix make this increased heaviness possible without turning the album into an indistinguishable block. The kick drum and bass possess far more weight than decorative low-end normally permits, giving the record a constant bodily shove. Guitar leads cut across the rhythm with a thin, dangerous sharpness rather than floating above it. Will Killingsworth’s mastering pushes the whole construction toward overload while retaining the hooks hidden inside the impact. Savage Visions is ferocious, but its songs are not vague. Choruses remain memorable, changes register immediately, and each carefully placed disruption keeps the twenty-minute assault from becoming a single extended blur.
Mylo Oxlo’s artwork and M. Czerwoniuk’s layout complete a record whose visual and musical worlds are governed by nervous compression. Rat Cage releases have always understood hardcore as a total object rather than an audio file wearing an image. The drawing, lettering, lyric insert, sticker, vinyl and compact running time participate in the same transmission. Even the album’s brevity feels physical. One side ends before the listener’s body has adjusted to its speed, requiring the record to be turned over and the mechanism restarted. Digital playback can preserve the sound, but the LP’s interruption adds a tiny moment of agency inside music obsessed with losing control.
La Vida Es Un Mus described the album as the nauseating experience of “trying to get by,” and that phrase may be the clearest route into it. Savage Visions is not primarily about spectacular disaster. It is about the relentless pressure of maintaining an ordinary life within systems that make ordinary life increasingly difficult. Its songs address fear, money, towns, weapons, concealment and the erosion of anything not immediately profitable. Suddaby responds not by simplifying Rat Cage into purer d-beat, but by contaminating it with speed metal, synthesizer, rock-and-roll swagger and increasingly dramatic lead guitar. The world has become more unstable, so the music must become more resourceful.
That development makes Savage Visions a stronger companion to Screams From the Cage rather than a replacement for it. The 2020 album captured a person kicking hard enough to prove the cage had another living occupant. Three years later, the kicking has bent the structure, exposed unfamiliar corridors and revealed that the entire building may be a cage. Rat Cage’s achievement is to make this recognition exhilarating without pretending it is good news. There are enormous sing-along moments here, but no party waiting behind them. Community appears instead as the act of recognizing the same pressure in another person’s voice and answering it with your own.
Anyone who heard these songs in Sheffield, knows which parts were contributed by the additional musicians, or has compared the red and black vinyl editions is invited to add another piece of the record’s history. Savage Visions sounds like one person being pushed toward the edge, but punk becomes useful when that private alarm is heard and repeated by others.

Snapped Ankles - 2017 - Come Play the Trees

 

Leaf – BAY 103

Come Play the Trees opens as an invitation, but not necessarily a safe one. Snapped Ankles are welcoming us into a forest where the vegetation has learned to operate synthesizers, the wildlife understands motorik rhythm, and abandoned pieces of urban machinery have begun developing primitive social lives of their own. The title suggests playfulness, and the album is genuinely enormous fun, but there is always a small destabilizing force beneath that welcome. Come closer, dance, surrender to the groove, but remember that the trees have been watching what the city does to everything standing in its way.
Snapped Ankles had already existed for roughly six years before this debut album appeared in 2017. They began at East London warehouse events, performing long grooves beside films, installations, dancers and other artists rather than following an ordinary sequence of rehearsals, support slots and record releases. Their earliest music did not require finished songs. It needed enough rhythmic life to inhabit a room while images, bodies and improvised events developed around it. That history explains why Come Play the Trees feels unusually physical for a studio debut. These tracks were not imagined primarily as recordings. They were organisms that had spent years changing shape in public before being persuaded to fit onto vinyl.
The group’s handmade log synthesizers are not merely stage props created to decorate an otherwise conventional post-punk band. Electronic triggers and simple circuits were attached to rotten pieces of timber so that striking a log could produce a siren, pulse, bass tone or electronic crack. It is an elegant collision of several historical moments: prehistoric percussion, seventies analogue synthesis, punk’s damaged equipment and the modern electronic dance floor. Snapped Ankles reject the idea that new technology must arrive inside clean, expensive boxes. A single oscillator buried in dead wood can be enough to open another world.
That principle extends to the costumes. The musicians perform beneath ghillie-like vegetation, masks and tangled woodland material, turning individual players into one moving hedge. Concealment releases them from the familiar visual hierarchy of singer, guitarist, drummer and personality. Instead of watching identifiable musicians display themselves, an audience encounters a temporary species. The ridiculousness is essential. Snapped Ankles understand that folklore, horror and comedy often share the same roots, and that something can be genuinely unsettling while also looking as though it wandered away from a low-budget children’s television program and survived for several decades in an industrial estate.
The opening title track grows from ritual percussion, electronic buzzing and a repeated vocal summons. Its rhythm seems older than the circuitry producing part of it, as though a village procession has continued into a future where the original instruments have been replaced by salvaged components. Rather than treating nature and electronics as opposites, the band lets them become mutually contaminating. The synthesizer sounds feral; the drums behave mechanically; the voice moves between human command and animal signal. By the time the groove has established itself, the invitation no longer feels metaphorical. The record has constructed a place and begun reorganizing the listener’s movements inside it.
“Hanging With the Moon” condenses that environment into one of the album’s sharpest pop forms. Percussion snaps into place, synthesizer tones buzz around the beat, and the voice moves with the comic urgency of someone trying to deliver important information while being pursued through undergrowth. The song demonstrates how clearly Snapped Ankles understand hooks. Their homemade instruments and conceptual mythology could easily have produced a record admired more for its ingenuity than played for pleasure. Instead, the oddness continually becomes memorable rhythm. A noise that initially appears abrasive returns as a melodic identity; a chant becomes a chorus; a primitive pulse begins operating like dance music.
“I Want My Minutes Back” is an even more concentrated example. The title reduces modern dissatisfaction to a brilliantly petty demand. Money can sometimes be returned, possessions exchanged and apologies offered, but minutes are permanently gone. The song’s relentless forward movement intensifies that joke because the music is consuming time while protesting its theft. Every repetition seems to demand compensation from meetings, waiting rooms, administrative processes, delayed journeys, unwanted conversations and the countless mechanisms through which daily life is shaved into unusable pieces. Yet the groove is too exhilarating to feel defeated. These are minutes the record takes and somehow returns in a more animated condition.
The album reaches its great central clearing with “Jonny Guitar Calling Gosta Berlin,” an eight-minute piece assembled from two earlier versions of the song. One was concise and immediate, while another had expanded after a change in the band’s lineup. Rather than choose between them, Snapped Ankles connected the forms and created an unusually long pop construction whose repeated synthesizer figure keeps discovering new pressure. The title’s cinema references include Johnny Guitar, Greta Garbo’s early film The Saga of Gösta Berling and the band’s fascination with Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, a film in which bourgeois order disintegrates into traffic, violence and surreal social collapse. Snapped Ankles do not recount those films. They use cinema as a second instrument, allowing titles, remembered images and editing methods to influence how the music changes scenes.
The track also carries the group’s warehouse origins into the album more completely than any other. It begins as a recognizable song but keeps stretching until repetition produces the sensation of entering an installation. The beat becomes architectural, the arpeggios become lighting, and the fuzzed guitar appears as a moving object rather than a conventional solo voice. The piece never abandons pleasure while becoming increasingly strange. That balance is difficult to achieve. Experimental music can sometimes announce its intelligence by withholding immediate enjoyment, while pop can disguise every unusual decision beneath reassurance. Snapped Ankles allow both impulses to grow from the same rotten stump.
“Let’s Revel” continues the movement with a darker pulse and lyrics that transform social exhaustion into an invitation to collective disorder. Control becomes harder to maintain, work and unemployment become equally unstable, and revelry appears not as uncomplicated escape but as a temporary technology for surviving pressure. The song’s list of things in which to revel includes alcohol, misery, chemistry, building control and former glory, collapsing celebration and despair into the same chant. The band does not pretend that dancing removes the conditions producing anxiety. Dancing is simply one way a body proves that those conditions have not yet acquired complete ownership of it.
This is where the album’s woodland mythology reveals its urban roots. Come Play the Trees is not pastoral music imagining an innocent countryside untouched by modern life. Its forest grew inside warehouses, cheap artist spaces and threatened cultural communities. The trees represent whatever develops in neglected ground before property interests discover that ground can be monetized. Snapped Ankles’ ecosystem includes performers, filmmakers, dancers, broken equipment, improvised venues and people making substantial experiences from materials considered economically insignificant. Nature reclaiming the city becomes inseparable from art reclaiming a room.
“Tuesday Makes Me Cry” gives that argument an unexpectedly tender form. Monday receives most of modern culture’s hostility, but Tuesday can feel more severe because the week has fully revealed its shape and the weekend is no longer close enough to offer psychological shelter. The track moves with an industrial pulse that treats sadness as a repeating process rather than an isolated emotional event. Electronic sounds flicker around the rhythm while the voice turns an ordinary weekday into something immense and faintly absurd. Snapped Ankles are especially good at locating emotional pressure inside apparently minor details. A whole social system can become visible through one missing minute or one intolerable Tuesday.
“The Invisible Real That Hurts” leans furthest toward angular synth-pop, exposing how much melody has been hiding inside the album’s rough surfaces. Its title suggests forces that cannot be touched directly but nevertheless organize physical life: money, rent, time, expectation, bureaucracy, social status, anxiety and the private measurements through which people decide whether they are succeeding or failing. The invisible real is not less powerful because it cannot be held. It may be more powerful because it enters thought disguised as reality’s natural shape. The song converts that abstract discomfort into a bright, restless arrangement whose pop clarity makes the underlying unease easier to carry.
There is a wonderful contradiction in learning that the album’s working title was reportedly 20 Attempts at a Christmas Number One. Beneath the masks, log synthesizers, film experiments and pagan vegetation is a band that deeply respects the democratic power of a memorable song. Snapped Ankles are not using experimentation to escape pop. They are trying to discover how many unusual materials pop can digest without losing its ability to reach strangers. Their hooks are branches extended from unfamiliar trees.
“True Ecology” brings the album’s artistic philosophy into its clearest focus. Ecology here does not mean an untouched green landscape separated from human contamination. It means the entire network of waste, growth, habitation, reuse and exchange. Trash becomes an instrument, a warehouse becomes a cultural habitat, dead timber becomes electronic equipment, and discarded ideas acquire another life through collective play. Nothing exists alone, including the band. Every sound depends upon places, friendships, old technologies, films, previous musical movements and the listeners who complete the circuit.
One of Snapped Ankles’ most revealing inspirations for this idea was Ferdinand Cheval, the French rural postman who spent thirty-three years constructing his Palais Idéal from stones encountered during his rounds. Cheval gathered what the landscape placed along his daily route and slowly converted those overlooked fragments into a private architecture unlike anything sanctioned by conventional education or professional culture. Snapped Ankles recognized their own method in his example: picking up bits, carrying them home and continuing until the collection becomes a world. That connection reaches much deeper than a colorful piece of band trivia. It places repetition, manual labor, scavenging and imagination inside the same creative process.
Cheval’s palace and Come Play the Trees both demonstrate how an accumulated practice can become larger than any original plan. A single stone is not a palace, one oscillator is not an album, and one warehouse jam is not a musical identity. Meaning develops through return. The maker walks another route, finds another fragment, repeats another rhythm and adds another unlikely piece to the structure. Outsider creation is often described as though it appears suddenly from pure private inspiration, but both the postman and the band reveal its actual machinery: attention sustained across years.
The closing “Come Play the Trees Outro” does not supply a conventional resolution. It loosens the record back into its environment, allowing the invitation from the beginning to remain open after the songs have ended. The album has travelled from ritual to pop, cinema, social pressure, invisible systems and ecological reuse, yet everything still belongs to the same habitat. The outro feels like the band retreating into vegetation while leaving its equipment switched on. Human activity disappears first; the pulse continues.
Danalogue, also known as Dan Leavers of The Comet Is Coming and Soccer96, produced and mixed the album. His role was especially important because Snapped Ankles’ force had developed through unstable live performances, improvised “log jams” and songs whose forms could expand or contract according to the space. The production gives those ideas enough definition to survive repeated listening without disinfecting them. Bass and drums remain bodily, synthesizers retain their cracked surfaces, and the vocals are clear enough to carry language while never becoming too detached from the collective noise. Pete Fletcher’s mastering similarly preserves the album’s impact without ironing its bark flat.
Released by The Leaf Label in September 2017, Come Play the Trees appeared on CD, black vinyl and a transparent-yellow LP edition limited to three hundred copies. The label was almost suspiciously perfect for musicians presenting themselves as woodland messengers, but the relationship mattered beyond the botanical joke. After years of self-directed performances and recordings that could easily disappear into the enormous reservoir of unheard music, Leaf gave the group a structure through which its carefully cultivated strangeness could travel outward without being translated into something ordinary.
Come Play the Trees is therefore a debut only in the commercial sense. It carries years of rooms, costumes, failed experiments, altered lineups, handmade circuits and elastic performances within it. The album sounds confident because Snapped Ankles had already built a complete method before arriving at the point where a larger audience could hear it. They did not manufacture a visual identity to accompany finished songs. The songs, costumes, instruments, films and performance spaces had grown around one another until separating them became impossible.
What might initially look like a band using a woodland gimmick is ultimately a sophisticated argument about creation. Technology is not inherently sterile. Nature is not inherently peaceful. Pop does not require expensive equipment. Anonymity can produce freedom rather than absence. Waste can retain possibility. A group can make serious observations while remaining funny, and an invitation to play can also be an invitation to resist. Snapped Ankles enter dressed as the forgotten edge of the landscape and reveal that the edge may be where the future is quietly assembling itself.
Anyone who encountered the early warehouse performances, the log synthesizers in person, the Total Refreshment Centre community or the different versions of “Jonny Guitar Calling Gosta Berlin” is invited to leave another branch of the story. This album presents a complete forest, but forests become more interesting when people identify the strange things growing inside them.

Gauntlet Ring - 2023 - Beyond The Veil Of The Night

Blood And Crescent – CRESCENT-005

 Beyond the Veil of the Night begins with no desire to introduce black metal as a renovated contemporary art form. Gauntlet Ring enters as though the essential machinery was perfected decades ago and merely needed to be restarted: guitars scraped into a freezing melodic blur, drums striking with uncomplicated force, bass thickening the march beneath them, keyboards appearing as distant weather, and voices arriving from somewhere behind the entire formation. Yet this loyalty to an older language does not make the album inert. Taurus and Mercenary understand that tradition becomes alive through conviction. The record works because they do not approach raw black metal as a costume assembled from recognizable historical details. They behave as though this music remains an immediate necessity.

The New York duo formed in 2020 and produced an unusually concentrated series of demos, albums and related projects during the years that followed. Beyond the Veil of the Night was already their third full-length, arriving after Upon the Wings of the Black Eagle and Tyrannical Bloodlust. That rapid movement might suggest music poured out before it could be examined, but this album reveals an increasing command of scale. Earlier Gauntlet Ring recordings often attacked through shorter, sharper compositions. Here, most of the principal songs are given five to seven minutes, allowing the riffs to circle, accumulate atmosphere and develop the hallucinatory persistence required by the album’s title.
“Visions of a Midnight Hour” establishes the record through repetition rather than theatrical scene-setting. Gauntlet Ring does not require a long dungeon introduction to prove that darkness has arrived. The guitars immediately construct it. Melodic phrases rise through the coarse production, vanish beneath the percussion and return slightly altered by memory. The sound is raw, but its elements are not accidentally obscured. The abrasion becomes a veil through which the melodic shape must be perceived. What initially seems like a wall gradually separates into layers, and the listening act becomes a movement through them.
This is one of the record’s most important qualities. Raw production is often discussed as though it were merely a reduction of information: fewer frequencies, less clarity, less studio refinement. Gauntlet Ring uses it to produce additional imaginative space. Because every contour is not brightly exposed, the listener completes portions of the music internally. A keyboard line can resemble moonlight, distant horns or cold air passing through an opening because its exact physical source is withheld. The record does not provide a detailed illustration of its world. It supplies enough shadow for the mind to begin building one.
“A Mist of Blood and Battle” introduces the album’s martial vocabulary without settling into the polished heroism of conventional epic metal. The battle is not witnessed from a hilltop by someone admiring organized armies. It is entered at ground level, where direction has become uncertain and grandeur is mixed with exhaustion, mud and panic. The guitars retain a triumphant upward reach, but the recording continually damages that triumph. Melody and ugliness occupy the same body. Gauntlet Ring’s imagined warrior does not ride through a spotless fantasy painting. He staggers through a world whose heroic ideals are already dissolving into mist.
This distinction prevents the album’s swords, stars, blood and winter from becoming harmless fantasy decoration. Gauntlet Ring uses such images as containers for emotional states: isolation, hostility, endurance, longing and the wish to step outside a modern world experienced as spiritually flattened. The music does not ask whether medieval battle was historically glorious. It constructs an interior mythology in which armor, night and frozen landscapes provide forms for feelings that ordinary contemporary language has difficulty carrying. Black metal has always understood that an invented past can reveal something real about the present, even when the invention is deliberately excessive.
“Winter’s Dreams,” the first of two instrumentals, interrupts the campaign after more than twelve minutes of sustained attack. At only a minute and a half, it behaves like a small passage rather than a separate destination. The shift is valuable because it demonstrates that Gauntlet Ring’s atmosphere does not depend entirely upon distortion and screaming. The dream is created from the same limited materials, but their relationship changes. The album briefly turns inward, allowing its frost to become contemplative before “Soldiers of the Starless Sky” restores the physical movement.
That title contains the album’s mythology in miniature. A soldier ordinarily navigates by visible landmarks, commands, banners or stars. These soldiers advance beneath a sky offering no such guidance. Their loyalty is therefore directed toward something invisible, forgotten or perhaps nonexistent. The song’s repeated motion suits that condition. Gauntlet Ring’s riffs often appear to travel forcefully without reaching a final destination, creating the sensation of disciplined movement through immeasurable darkness. This is music about direction performed without reassurance.
Mercenary’s drumming is crucial to the effect. The percussion does not compete with the guitars through elaborate technical display. It establishes the ground upon which their melodies can appear larger than life. Blasts, direct beats and martial accents create a firm physical outline while Taurus’s guitar smears around it. Mercenary’s bass performs a similarly structural role, reinforcing the movement rather than demanding a separate spotlight. The duo’s division of labor is exceptionally efficient: one musician generates the storm and its disembodied voices, while the other makes certain the storm continues travelling.
“Steel Screams of Honor” opens the second half with the album’s central contradiction already present in its name. Steel does not scream, and honor cannot be heard, but black metal regularly gives physical voice to abstract principles. Here the guitar becomes both weapon and lament. Its higher lines carry something close to traditional heavy metal grandeur, while the production refuses the clean separation and muscular certainty usually associated with that tradition. The result is heroic music heard through damage, as though an old victory song has survived on a tape left outdoors for several winters.
This damaged grandeur connects Gauntlet Ring to several black metal histories at once. The album carries the solitary, crackling severity associated with Judas Iscariot, the romantic and unstable melodic sweep of the Blazebirth Hall orbit, and the proud martial movement heard across portions of Polish and Eastern European black metal. The value lies not in identifying which passage resembles which earlier band. Those traditions have become part of the duo’s instinctive vocabulary. Gauntlet Ring selects the emotional function of those sounds, then recombines them inside its own compact mythology.
“Beneath the Pendant of the Sun” briefly introduces warmth into a record dominated by night and winter, but the sun appears not as an open sky or a source of everyday comfort. It is a pendant, an emblem worn or suspended, perhaps a distant symbol of power rather than the power itself. This is characteristic of the album’s language. Natural objects become heraldic signs: the starless sky, the sun, frost, blood and night are arranged like symbols upon shields. Gauntlet Ring creates a private cosmology from a deliberately restricted vocabulary, and repetition gives those few images increasing weight.
The seven-minute “Frosty Blood of Winter” is the album’s longest composition and its natural summit. The title fuses landscape and body until the distinction between them disappears. Winter enters the blood; blood stains the winter. The extended duration permits Gauntlet Ring’s melodic method to work at full depth. A riff does not need to transform constantly when its purpose is to alter the listener’s surroundings. Repetition slowly removes the phrase from ordinary musical measurement. After enough returns, it no longer feels like a sequence of notes being played by a guitarist. It becomes the law governing the landscape.
This is where the album reveals its relationship to trance. Its imagery may be violent, but much of its actual effect is meditative. The direct percussion, limited harmonic vocabulary and recurring guitar figures narrow attention until small changes acquire enormous importance. A chord lifting slightly upward can feel like a gate opening. A keyboard entering behind the guitar can expand a small recording into an immense chamber. A change in drum emphasis can turn a march into a charge. Gauntlet Ring’s apparent primitivism is therefore not an absence of compositional thought. It is a method of magnifying a few carefully chosen events.
“Eventide Primitivism” closes the record instrumentally, giving a name to the aesthetic that has governed everything preceding it. Eventide is the approach of evening, the transitional hour in which familiar objects lose detail and begin resembling unknown forms. Primitivism suggests reduction, instinct and the rejection of unnecessary complication. Together the words describe Gauntlet Ring’s music with unusual precision. The duo reduces black metal to fundamental gestures, then places those gestures in the uncertain light between visibility and darkness.
Ending with an instrumental also prevents the record from concluding through a final lyrical declaration. The warriors, blood, stars and emblems withdraw, leaving only the environment that produced them. This makes the album feel cyclical. “Eventide Primitivism” could be the fading aftermath of “Frosty Blood of Winter,” but it could equally be the landscape before “Visions of a Midnight Hour” begins. The veil never lifts completely. Night is not an event with a clear beginning and conclusion; it is the surrounding condition from which the songs temporarily become visible.
Taurus handles guitars, vocals and synthesizers, while Mercenary supplies bass, drums and additional invocations. Both musicians are credited with writing, recording and mixing the album, and that enclosed production method is essential to its character. Beyond the Veil of the Night does not sound like musicians presenting material to an outside studio professional for correction. It sounds like two people determining the laws of a world and then sealing the doors behind them. The limited personnel and self-contained recording preserve the sense that the listener has intercepted something not originally intended for broad public explanation.
Blood and Crescent’s presentation reinforced this isolation. The album appeared as CRESCENT-005 in a limited vinyl edition, followed by a CD, circulating through a small international network of labels, distros, collectors and uploads rather than conventional promotion. In an era when nearly every new recording is expected to arrive accompanied by biographies, social accounts, interviews, visual content and continuous accessibility, Gauntlet Ring retains the older black metal pleasure of incomplete information. The record exists before the personalities behind it can explain it away.
That obscurity can become its own form of marketing, but Gauntlet Ring survives the danger because the music contains genuine melodic substance. Remove the scarcity, anonymity and cult presentation, and the riffs remain. The songs possess enough movement to be remembered after their atmosphere has dispersed. Beyond the Veil of the Night is not valuable merely because it resembles a mysterious artifact. It repeatedly earns the aura surrounding it.
The album also demonstrates that backward-looking music does not have to be creatively dead. Innovation is not limited to introducing unfamiliar technology, hybridizing genres or breaking every inherited rule. A musician can create new meaning by entering an established form with unusual depth of belief. Gauntlet Ring’s achievement is not the invention of another black metal vocabulary. It is the restoration of urgency to one that could easily have become ceremonial and empty.
Across thirty-nine minutes, Beyond the Veil of the Night converts modest means into an internally complete world. Two musicians, a handful of instruments, eight tracks and an intentionally rough recording become blood mist, starless armies, frozen dreams and the final dimming of evening. Nothing here requires literal belief in the fantasy. The music’s deeper subject is the human capacity to construct meaning under darkness, to keep marching when the sky provides no coordinates, and to transform isolation into a sound another isolated person might recognize.
Anyone with information about the original vinyl edition, the recording process, the Blood and Crescent network or differences between the LP and later CD is invited to add it. Gauntlet Ring leaves considerable darkness around its work, and sometimes the listeners carrying scattered pieces of the record’s history become the only lanterns available.

Breathilizor / Geile Diebe - 2021 - Satanic Mathematical Calculations From The Demonoid Dimension Of Gurgletron Eleven / Schwedisch Amerikanische Freundschaft

Wheelchair Full Of Old Men – WC674

 There are album titles that summarize the music, album titles that decorate it, and then there is Satanic Mathematical Calculations From the Demonoid Dimension of Gurgletron Eleven / Schwedisch Amerikanische Freundschaft, a title so overdeveloped that it begins behaving like an additional member of the band. Before the needle has touched the record, Breathilizör and Geile Diebe have already established the governing principle: every familiar gesture will be pushed slightly too far, seriousness will be allowed to inflate until it squeaks, and the supposed distinction between stupidity and intelligence will be treated as suspicious propaganda.

This split works because its comedy is embedded in the music rather than placed on top of it. Breathilizör does not merely play metal and attach ridiculous song titles afterward. The band understands how heavy music manufactures authority through ominous names, technical vocabulary, mythological creatures, death imagery and the suggestion that every riff has arrived carrying forbidden knowledge. Breathilizör keeps the machinery but replaces its sacred contents with spilled lima beans, murderous clowns, Gerald Ford’s corpse and a dimension called Gurgletron Eleven. The grandeur remains intact long enough for the absurdity to crawl inside it.
“Park of Horrible Spilled Lima Beans” is an ideal opening statement because its title joins domestic inconvenience to apocalyptic horror. A few overturned vegetables become a contaminated landscape through nothing more than the language normally reserved for underground metal cosmology. That transformation is funny, but it also reveals how titles instruct the ear. Call a piece “The Eternal Crypt of the Horned Necromancer” and listeners will search the guitars for darkness; call it “Park of Horrible Spilled Lima Beans” and the same dramatic weight becomes comic theater. Breathilizör exposes that mechanism without needing to stop enjoying it.
This is an important distinction. Parody made by people who dislike its subject usually grows thin after the original joke has been recognized. Breathilizör sounds closer to musicians who know the pleasures of primitive thrash, punky metal and basement horror well enough to exaggerate them affectionately. The riffs still need to move. The drums still need to push. The voices still need to sound as though a badly secured portal has opened beside the microphone. The comedy does not excuse weak music; it changes the atmosphere in which roughness, repetition and amateur excess are understood.
“Bats of Cthulhu” demonstrates the band’s talent for combining two pieces of ready-made darkness that become sillier when joined. Bats already carry an entire warehouse of heavy-metal symbolism, while H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu has been repeatedly recruited into music, games, shirts, tattoos and every imaginable form of tentacled merchandise. Breathilizör does not attempt to rescue either image from overuse. It piles them together and allows cultural exhaustion itself to become material. The monster is frightening, but it has also worked too many conventions.
“Gun of Loch Ness Monster” performs another useful grammatical collision. Is it a gun owned by the Loch Ness Monster, a gun designed to kill the Loch Ness Monster, or a weapon made from some portion of the creature? Breathilizör leaves the engineering unexplained. What matters is the sudden cooperation between folkloric mystery and action-film hardware. Much of the band’s world operates through this childlike freedom, not childish in the sense of being undeveloped, but in the older creative sense of refusing to accept that categories must remain where adults have placed them.
“Fife of Destruction” may contain the funniest scale problem on the side. Metal normally demands swords, axes, cannons, thunder and armies, while a fife suggests a small, piercing instrument leading troops through a historical reenactment. Giving it destructive power transforms it into an occult device. This is how Breathilizör’s humor accumulates: ordinary objects are promoted beyond their competence, while terrifying entities are made to deal with food, obsolete politicians and cheap entertainment. Everything is reassigned to the wrong department.
“Clown of Doom” belongs to a longer meeting point between genuine fear and shabby spectacle. Clowns are already unstable figures, expected to create joy while using artificial faces, exaggerated bodies and behavior that ignores normal social distance. Add doom and the result is not entirely a joke. The phrase could describe bargain-bin horror, professional wrestling, a forgotten regional haunted house or a real psychic condition produced by being trapped at a party with an entertainer who will not stop. Breathilizör repeatedly discovers that absurdity and dread are neighboring properties with a broken fence between them.
“Land of the Lost” briefly appears almost respectable because it carries the name of an actual television fantasy world, but within this sequence even recognizable culture is absorbed into the band’s private mythology. Saturday-morning dinosaurs, dimensional portals and cheap special effects belong naturally beside death-metal language because both forms ask the audience to complete an incomplete illusion. Neither requires perfect realism. A rubber creature, a distorted guitar and a painted backdrop can all become enormous when the participant agrees to meet them halfway.
The side ends with “Corpse of Gerald Ford,” bringing its cosmic nonsense abruptly into American history. Ford is an especially peculiar choice because he occupies a less theatrically mythologized place in popular memory than many presidents. That ordinariness makes his appearance among Cthulhu, monsters and doomed clowns more effective. The song title does not explain whether the former president has become a relic, ingredient, zombie or accidental object discovered in Gurgletron Eleven. He is simply there, the final bureaucratic body washed ashore by the side’s flood of horror-comedy.
Breathilizör’s personnel reinforce the sense of a small, enclosed workshop generating a disproportionately elaborate universe. Food Fortunata and Poopy Necroponde bring with them a web of connections to Sockeye, Sloth, Cauliflower Ass and Bob, Doktor Bitch, Zitsquatch and numerous other projects where punk, metal, home recording, grotesque humor and deliberate overproduction of ideas repeatedly overlap. This is less a conventional band career than a continuously branching folk art. New names appear because one container cannot hold every joke, sound or invented identity.
Geile Diebe takes the second side in a more recognizably punk direction, but the transition does not lead from comedy into seriousness. It changes the method of sabotage. Where Breathilizör inflates metal imagery until it becomes cartoon architecture, Geile Diebe works with short songs, familiar titles, damaged pop memory and a looser sense that any recognizable piece of culture can be disassembled and incorrectly rebuilt. The difference gives the split actual shape. These are not two interchangeable bands sharing plastic; they are two dialects of purposeful wrongness.
The name Geile Diebe can carry several shades of German slang, from “horny thieves” to something closer to “cool” or “awesome thieves,” depending on tone and context. The side title Schwedisch Amerikanische Freundschaft means Swedish-American Friendship and plainly bends the name of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft into another nationality. The joke arrives wearing the austere uniform of European electronic music, then immediately fails to behave with suitable dignity. Even before the first track, the band is already stealing identities and returning them with altered paperwork.
“One Day” and “You’re a Prisoner” establish the second side through titles that could have appeared on dozens of forgotten punk singles. Their plainness becomes a counterweight to Breathilizör’s overloaded fantasy language. Geile Diebe does not need an interdimensional monster when an ordinary day or the recognition of confinement can provide sufficient material. Punk has always understood that a short declarative phrase can become enormous when repeated by people who mean it, even when the recording surrounding it sounds unstable, sarcastic or intentionally under-rehearsed.
“Purple Haze” is where the project’s approach to cultural theft becomes especially clear. The music acknowledges the famous song, but contemporary descriptions note that the result is not exactly a cover beyond that borrowed musical foundation. This is less tribute than occupation. Geile Diebe enters a monument everybody recognizes, moves the furniture, writes on the walls and refuses to provide the expected tour. The famous title becomes communal scrap material rather than an artifact protected behind velvet rope.
That method belongs to a deep underground tradition. Punk covers are often most revealing when they misunderstand, mistreat or deliberately reduce their sources. Technical faithfulness can preserve a song’s surface while missing its social life. A cheap, incorrect version may expose the riff as something capable of surviving outside its original ownership. Geile Diebe treats recognition as a trapdoor. The listener identifies the object, then discovers that the expected contents have been removed.
“The Pain Isn’t Over” is almost startlingly direct among the surrounding nonsense. Its title admits a condition that much humorous music quietly conceals: comedy and pain are not opposites. Absurdity often develops because ordinary language has become inadequate or intolerably solemn. A ridiculous band name, a cheap recording and a mangled cover can carry real frustration without converting it into confession. The joke creates enough distance for unpleasant information to pass through.
Then comes “Fanged Rainbows of Flying Tongue Clouds, Meat Grucks,” whose title appears to have escaped from the same damaged cosmology as Gurgletron Eleven. At four and a half minutes, it is also the longest track on the Geile Diebe side, giving the nonsense room to expand into a central structure rather than a quick interruption. Fangs, rainbows, tongues, clouds and meat are forced into one sentence until language begins generating creatures faster than the imagination can stabilize them. “Grucks” may not need a definition. The word already sounds unpleasantly tangible.
“Can’t Happen Here” uses one of the oldest reassurances in political and social life, the belief that catastrophe belongs somewhere else, to another nation, another era or people less protected by normality. Whether the title is operating as quotation, cover reference or simple phrase, its presence among this record’s deliberate foolishness gives it additional force. Comedy becomes a way of testing the walls of certainty. The strangest events do happen here. They merely acquire respectable names afterward.
“Go Your Own Way” again presents a title burdened with enormous pop recognition, but Geile Diebe’s compact running time immediately warns against expecting the polished emotional architecture associated with it. The song lasts barely a minute and a half. Whatever road is being offered, the band travels it quickly, without luggage and possibly in the wrong vehicle. This compression is one of punk’s great editing tools. A cultural object that once occupied a grand stage can be reduced to a few urgent gestures and returned to circulation.
“Things I Am” and “One Way” complete the record with language stripped almost to signs. The titles resemble fragments found on protest buttons, diary pages or damaged singles whose larger stories have disappeared. After forty minutes of monsters, corpses, imprisonment, pain, parody and stolen musical memory, these final phrases feel strangely open. Identity remains plural, but direction narrows. There are things one is, and there may be only one way left to proceed.
The split’s cover makes the same argument visually. Two obscured figures hover above a dense hand-drawn territory of animals, machinery, signs, speech fragments and cellular clutter, all reproduced through the gray weather of photocopy culture. It refuses the clean separation between professional artwork and marginal doodling. The central drawing looks less designed than inhabited, a place where every available blank area has attracted another creature or thought. The packaging does not translate the music into a marketable symbol. It continues the music by other means.
Wheelchair Full of Old Men is an ideal home for such an object because the label’s presentation rejects nearly every ritual of prestige. Its Bandcamp navigation offers “Crap to hear,” “Crap to buy” and “What?” instead of the polished language through which labels normally certify their own importance. That self-deprecation is not a confession that the work lacks value. It is a defense against the idea that value must be granted by professionalism, scarcity theater, critical approval or respectable taste.
There is a meaningful difference between carelessness and anti-perfection. Carelessness loses interest in the object; anti-perfection remains deeply interested while refusing to erase evidence of the hands that made it. This split belongs to the second category. Sixteen tracks, two fully developed aliases, separate side titles, a crowded cover, a lyric and information sheet, a numbered catalog identity and a vinyl pressing of fewer than three hundred copies require real labor. The joke is not that nobody cared. The joke is that so much care was devoted to something determined to look disreputable.
That approach links the record to zines, cassette culture, mail-order catalogs and the countless private universes created by people whose output exceeds the permission granted by ordinary cultural institutions. One project becomes five bands; one joke becomes an LP; one drawing becomes a sleeve; one pressing enters collections and radio libraries far from its origin. None of this needs to become famous to become real. The object has already succeeded once it begins connecting strangers who recognize its frequency.
The limited edition of 248 copies makes each surviving record a tiny physical witness to this network. Scarcity here feels less like luxury marketing than the practical scale at which an eccentric idea could be manufactured. Two hundred forty-eight is neither an audience of millions nor a private room. It is a peculiar little population, large enough for the record to travel and small enough that every copy retains the feeling of an object someone had to pack, address and send.
Satanic Mathematical Calculations From the Demonoid Dimension of Gurgletron Eleven / Schwedisch Amerikanische Freundschaft ultimately turns bad taste into a workshop. Metal pomposity, punk bluntness, television memories, famous riffs, German phrasing, American presidents, monsters, vegetables and hand-drawn clutter are all treated as available components. Nothing is too sacred to alter and nothing is too foolish to preserve.
The record’s deepest pleasure may be its refusal to distinguish between the grand imagination and the stupid idea. Gurgletron Eleven is ridiculous, but somebody still had to discover it, map its demonoid mathematics and return with seven songs. Geile Diebe’s cultural thefts are crude, but they reveal how songs continue living after correct ownership and faithful interpretation have stopped being interesting. Together the two sides construct a complete philosophy of underground creation: take whatever is nearby, misunderstand it productively, give the result an unnecessarily long name and press it onto vinyl before sensible people can intervene.
Anyone who knows the hidden personnel behind Geile Diebe, the recording circumstances, the sources being dismantled across the second side or the story behind the sleeve should add another piece. This is exactly the kind of record whose full history may be distributed among inserts, old messages, mail-order packages and the memories of the 248 people who unexpectedly became custodians of Gurgletron Eleven.

Civilistjävel! – Fyra Platser

FELT – FELT004

Fyra platser translates simply as “Four Places,” but Civilistjävel! does not treat those places as destinations to be described. There are no scenic introductions, explanatory field recordings or musical equivalents of photographs taken from a marked viewpoint. The four names function more like coordinates stored inside a private memory system. Each track establishes a climate, pressure and distance around its location, allowing geography to become emotional without translating it into a conventional story. This is music about where something happened, or where somebody once existed, after most of the details have become impossible to retrieve.
Three of the locations, Sebäng, Kolugn and Valmsta, belong to the Nordingrå area of Sweden’s High Coast. Louhivesi shifts the map into Finland, with Athens also passing through the memories that shaped the collaboration. The record was dedicated to Civilistjävel!’s grandmother, which quietly changes the meaning of its title. These are not four arbitrary place names selected for their sound. They appear to be points in a family geography, pieces of land carrying information that cannot be written fully into liner notes. The EP behaves like a memorial built without portraits, dates or biographical explanation. Place itself becomes the surviving witness.
That regional connection reaches all the way into the project’s name. Civilistjävel! means approximately “civilian bastard,” an insult directed by the military toward civilians in Bo Widerberg’s film Ådalen 31. The film dramatizes the 1931 killing of striking workers by Swedish troops in Ådalen, the same broader part of northern Sweden from which Tomas Bodén comes. His alias therefore contains a piece of regional labor history before any music begins. It names the civilian as seen by armed authority, while the records repeatedly return dignity, interior life and mystery to people and places that official history might reduce to background.
This does not make Fyra platser an explicitly political record, but it prevents its landscape from becoming neutral decoration. The High Coast is beautiful, yet beauty here contains industry, family movement, class history, disappearance and inherited memory. A place is never only its cliffs, forests and water. It is also the labor performed there, the people who departed, the people who stayed and the names that continue circulating after individual lives have ended. Civilistjävel! does not explain those layers. He lets them remain compressed inside low frequencies and partially obscured tones.
The project originally emerged through recordings made during the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s, material that sat unheard until connections with Kiran Sande and Low Company finally brought it into circulation. That history matters because Civilistjävel!’s music often sounds as though it has already spent years somewhere before reaching us. Even newer recordings carry the emotional condition of archived sound. They seem retrieved rather than announced, arriving with their surfaces slightly clouded by storage, memory and the uncertainty of when the present actually began.
Bodén has spoken about finding energy in the aftermath of snowstorms on the High Coast, when the temperature falls, the sky clears and the landscape becomes intensely white. He has also described enjoying inexpensive musical equipment that other people overlook. Both details provide useful entrances into Fyra platser. The record achieves an enormous sense of space without requiring enormous gestures, and its materials rarely advertise technical prestige. Modest pulses, drones, static, damaged percussion and a small number of sustained tones are arranged until they seem capable of holding an entire terrain.
The preceding Järnnätter retained a stronger connection to dub techno, using cyclical rhythm and depth as architectural forces. Fyra platser moves farther into the region between beat and beatlessness. Rhythm has not disappeared, but it often exists beneath the music like a road covered by snowfall. The listener can still follow its direction, though its edges have softened and occasionally vanish. This creates a peculiar sense of motion. The four pieces travel, but so slowly that movement is registered primarily through changing atmosphere.
“Sebäng,” the shortest track, acts as the record’s first act of placement. Its comparatively tangible structure gives the ear something to stand upon before the longer pieces begin dissolving the distinction between foreground and distance. Civilistjävel! rarely introduces sounds with the drama of an event. Elements appear as though they were already present and the listener has only just become sensitive enough to detect them. A pulse does not begin so much as emerge from beneath surrounding grain. Tone becomes visible inside noise, then retreats before it can be examined completely.
This gives the music a low-resolution quality that has nothing to do with carelessness. High resolution promises that every surface can be enlarged, identified and made available. Memory does not work that way. Certain details remain vivid while the surrounding context disappears. A room may be gone except for the sound of its heating system; a road may survive through the quality of its winter light; a relative’s entire presence may become concentrated inside one ordinary phrase. Fyra platser uses partial information as a truthful medium. What cannot be recovered is allowed to remain missing.
“Louhivesi” introduces the human voice, but it does not suddenly make the record easier to interpret. Cucina Povera, the project of Karelian-Luxembourgish artist Maria Rossi, brings a vocal presence that feels at once intimate and geographically distant. Rossi’s own work frequently uses voice, field recording and inexpensive equipment to reveal mysticism inside everyday materials. That method fits naturally beside Civilistjävel!’s ability to enlarge a small electronic gesture until it appears to contain weather.
Cucina Povera’s relationship with Karelian singing traditions adds another invisible layer. Rossi has discussed the communal work songs associated with land, animals and repetitive labor, music whose hypnotic harmonies helped people move through recurring physical tasks together. “Louhivesi” does not reproduce one of those songs as an ethnographic quotation, but the relationship between repetition, voice and place remains present. The vocal does not stand over the electronics as a featured performance. It travels through them, becoming another form of atmosphere and another carrier of memory.
The composition surrounds that voice with distorted percussion, bent flute-like tones and deep reverb. Everything moves at a tempo so slow that trip-hop appears to have entered geological time. The recurring structure feels caught inside itself, but this is not stagnation. Each return slightly changes the apparent distance of the voice. At one moment Rossi seems close enough to occupy the same room; a few seconds later the reverberation places her across water, inside a building or years away.
The track’s source imagery reportedly involved Finnish geography, Athens café conversations and hazy photographic memories. These elements do not assemble into a travel diary. Finland and Athens coexist through the private logic of recollection, where two distant locations can touch because one person, sentence or sensation connected them. “Louhivesi” becomes the EP’s hinge because it makes this process audible. A human voice passes through the map and suddenly the four places no longer feel empty. They contain movement between lives.
The lyrics may be difficult or impossible for many listeners to understand, but that uncertainty strengthens the composition. A voice can carry information beyond language through breath, hesitation, repetition and the shape of a vowel held inside reverberation. The inability to translate every word prevents the singer from being reduced to a message. Rossi remains a person and a sound simultaneously, present without becoming fully available. This resembles the way family memory often survives through phrases whose original context has vanished.
“Kolugn” returns to a more severe form of abstraction. The name identifies another location in Nordingrå, but in Swedish the word can also mean completely or utterly calm. The track tests that word until calmness becomes ambiguous. Calm can mean peace, but it can also describe pressure held in perfect balance, a room so still that the smallest crackle acquires threatening significance. Civilistjävel! creates that second condition. The music does not move toward an explosion, yet the possibility of one appears to inhabit every sustained tone.
Overdriven synthesizer layers fluctuate against one another while tiny surface noises remain audible underneath. The piece has been compared with Robert Rutman’s vast metal resonances and with seventies Berlin electronic music, but it does not reproduce either tradition cleanly. Its tones possess the scale of monumental drone while retaining the discoloration of an old private recording. Grandeur is heard through dust. Instead of raising a polished electronic cathedral, “Kolugn” leaves the walls unfinished so that wind, static and structural vibration can enter.
The track’s long duration allows sound to stop behaving as a sequence of musical decisions and become a condition inside the room. At first the listener examines the drone. Gradually the relationship reverses, and the drone appears to be examining the listener. This is one of Civilistjävel!’s most powerful methods. Repetition does not hypnotize by making consciousness disappear. It holds consciousness still long enough for previously unnoticed details, memories and associations to become active.
There is also a quiet linguistic pleasure in placing a location named Kolugn inside music committed to extreme restraint. Place name and descriptive word overlap, but neither explains the other completely. The calmness is grainy, overdriven and faintly unstable. Perhaps true stillness is not the absence of internal activity. It is the point at which numerous movements temporarily cancel one another out, creating a surface that looks motionless while pressure continues underneath.
“Valmsta” closes the record with its most bodily pulse. A kick appears at intervals resembling a heartbeat, steady enough to provide orientation but unstable enough to avoid becoming comfortable. Static and synthesizer tones gather around it while small disturbances pass through the larger structure. The beat does not command the music in the manner of club techno. It confirms that something remains alive inside the landscape.
That heartbeat is especially effective after the disembodied suspension of “Kolugn.” Fyra platser begins by locating the listener, introduces another voice, removes nearly every human outline and then ends by restoring the simplest possible evidence of bodily existence. The final rhythm does not resolve the record’s mysteries. It only keeps time beside them. Memory cannot recover the dead or return a vanished place to its earlier condition, but it can produce another pulse in response.
The High Coast itself provides an extraordinary physical metaphor for this music. The region continues rising as the land slowly rebounds from the immense weight of Ice Age glaciers. Ground that appears permanent is still moving, and the relationship between land and water changes by degrees too small to perceive during an ordinary visit. Fyra platser behaves in a similar way. Its changes can be so gradual that they seem absent, yet by the end of a piece the entire emotional elevation has shifted.
This makes the record less a map of fixed places than a study of places changing under the pressure of time. Roads alter, buildings disappear, shorelines move, relatives die and names remain attached to locations whose meaning has been transformed. Electronic music is especially suited to this subject because it can sustain sounds beyond ordinary instrumental breath, allowing changes to occur at nearly environmental speed. Civilistjävel! does not imitate the landscape’s appearance. He borrows its timescale.
The grandmother dedication gives the EP’s restraint an ethical dimension. Memorial art can sometimes overwhelm its subject with the maker’s own grief, converting a private person into a dramatic public symbol. Fyra platser does the opposite. It protects what is private. No listener is given enough information to claim knowledge of the relationship, yet the care invested in these sounds confirms that the relationship mattered. The four place names become markers whose full meanings remain within the family, while the music permits strangers to recognize the experience of carrying their own private geography.
This is why “Louhivesi” feels so powerful without disrupting the record’s reserve. The voice does not reveal the hidden story, but it introduces vulnerability into an environment that might otherwise seem self-contained. Its arrival suggests that memory is not only stored in land and objects. It is transmitted between people, altered through collaboration and sometimes carried by a language another person cannot understand. A place belonging to one life can enter someone else’s music and become newly inhabited.
The 12-inch format suits the project beautifully. Four moderately sized compositions occupy a physical object whose surface must be divided and turned. The record resembles a compact atlas with two locations on each side. Its printed sleeve, risograph insert and associated poster extend the music’s interest in partial images, grain and reproduction. Risograph printing carries visible texture and slight irregularity, qualities that correspond naturally with sound whose details seem to drift at the edge of definition.
Fergus Jones designed the release, Rebecka Holmström created the label design and Jenny Vinterqvist made the video for “Louhivesi.” These contributions keep the object from appearing as the expression of one isolated producer alone. Like the collaboration with Cucina Povera, they turn private memory into a small network of responses. One person supplies the locations, another voice enters one of them, and others determine how the resulting object will be seen and circulated.
FELT released the EP as its fourth catalog entry, following its earlier presentation of Järnnätter. The relationship between artist and label seems particularly well matched because neither tries to inflate this music through excessive explanation. The record is given enough framing to be found, but not enough to exhaust its mysteries. Distribution carries the four places outward while the places themselves retain their privacy.
Fyra platser lasts less than half an hour, yet it produces the sense of having travelled across a much larger duration. This comes partly from tempo, but more importantly from the way each sound is allowed to hold multiple times at once. A synthesizer can suggest a recording made yesterday, a machine remembered from the 1990s and a landscape whose geological movement began thousands of years ago. The tracks do not choose among those periods. They let them overlap.
Civilistjävel! demonstrates that music about place does not require documentary realism. Field recordings, interviews and local instruments could have supplied obvious evidence, but they might also have narrowed the imagination. Instead, Fyra platser preserves the gap between a geographic location and what that location means privately. The names are exact, while the music surrounding them remains open. Precision and mystery coexist without weakening one another.
The record is also a reminder that quiet music need not be passive. These pieces alter the room slowly but persistently. Their bass enters furniture and floorboards, their pulses reorganize attention, and their empty spaces make surrounding noises newly audible. A passing vehicle, footsteps from another apartment or the electrical hum of playback equipment can temporarily join the composition. The four places enter a fifth place, wherever the record is being heard.
Perhaps this is the final meaning of the title. Four places are named, but listening always creates another. Sebäng, Louhivesi, Kolugn and Valmsta are carried into bedrooms, record shops, headphones, postal packages, hard drives and rooms thousands of miles from the High Coast. The private coordinates remain intact while accumulating new listeners and associations. Memory does not stay pure when it travels, but travel may be how it remains alive.
Anyone who knows these locations, recognizes the family or regional history behind them, understands the words and memories moving through “Louhivesi,” or has compared the original and later vinyl pressings is warmly invited to add another point to the map. Fyra platser gives us four names and enough sound to feel their gravity, while wisely leaving the roads between them unfinished.