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

 

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

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

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

 

Neural Operations – NO 25  119.69MB FLAC

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

Clock DVA - 2021 - Horology - Anthology Vol. 1-3 15xCD

 

Vinyl-on-demand – VOD CD09  3.41GB FLAC

Horology begins before Clock DVA had settled into a band, before Sheffield’s electronic underground had been divided into tidy histories, and before anyone knew which homemade tapes would become evidence of a revolution. Across fifteen CDs, the collection repeatedly catches ideas while they are still unstable. Tape loops snag against bass guitar. Violin scratches through primitive electronics. Drum machines appear without the polished certainty they would later acquire. Voices move between whispered ritual, spoken theory, bodily panic, and damaged cabaret. The set does not lead smoothly toward the Clock DVA heard on White Souls in Black Suits, Thirst, or Buried Dreams. It exposes a much larger workshop beneath those records, full of abandoned routes, private experiments, and sounds that never intended to become songs.
Released by Vinyl-on-Demand in 2021, Horology: Anthology Vol. 1–3 compresses three earlier vinyl box sets into one enormous CD edition. The first six discs collect Clock DVA’s recordings from 1978 through 1980. Five more reach backward into The Future and Adi Newton’s radiophonic work. The final four gather tape and reel experiments made during Clock DVA’s formative period. The result is not simply fifteen albums arranged inside a folder. It is a map of overlapping practices: group improvisation, industrial song, home-studio research, electronic composition, performance art, occult study, tape manipulation, and the social chemistry of late-1970s Sheffield.
The first volume begins with Lomticks of Time, where Clock DVA already sound suspicious of conventional rock structure. Bass and percussion may establish a pulse, but the electronics refuse to behave like decoration. They interrupt, stain, and destabilize. Adi Newton’s voice does not offer the listener a comfortable emotional center. He sounds detached from the room and trapped inside it at once, delivering phrases as though language has become another machine producing unreliable signals.
The early recordings retain punk’s permission to begin without mastery, but Clock DVA were never content with punk’s basic vocabulary. Their music absorbs free improvisation, musique concrète, krautrock repetition, jazz dislocation, electronic research, and the corrosive theatre surrounding industrial culture. A saxophone or violin can enter with none of the elegance those instruments normally imply. They are used as pressure devices, scraping across the rhythm and widening the wound.
The two CDs devoted to 2nd show how quickly the group’s language was expanding. These pieces do not behave like demos awaiting proper studio treatment. Their roughness is structural. Magnetic tape compresses drums into dull impacts, voices occupy awkward distances, and electronic tones move unpredictably across the stereo field. The limitations create a claustrophobic room where every sound appears to contaminate the next.
There are recognizable songs inside this material, but they seem surrounded by experiments attempting to dissolve them. A bass pattern may suggest post-punk discipline, then a free horn line cuts across it. A drum machine establishes repetitive order while spoken voice makes that order feel clinical or obscene. Clock DVA were learning that rhythm did not have to produce pleasure. It could become surveillance, compulsion, or ritual.
Sex Works Beyond Entanglement pushes further into the body. Titles such as “Genitals and Genosis,” “Theatre of Eroticism,” “Antigone,” and “Throbbing Sweeping Obscene” reveal Newton’s interest in sexuality as philosophy, biological system, taboo, and psychic machinery. The recordings are erotic only in the widest and least comforting sense. Desire appears connected to repetition, violence, transformation, and the unstable border between individual identity and physical process.
The electronics are wonderfully primitive. Oscillations pulse without behaving like finished synthesizer parts. Tape speed alters texture and pitch. Voices are doubled, filtered, or made to hover at the edge of intelligibility. Rather than concealing the studio process, the recordings allow each technique to remain exposed. One can almost hear hands operating switches, reels, microphones, and unstable connections.
Deep Floor brings the ensemble closer to the grim momentum associated with early Clock DVA, but even here the ground keeps shifting. Percussion can be brutally direct, while guitar, horn, or electronics resist locking into agreement. The music walks with a limp and seems proud of it. Groove is present, but it has been deprived of ease.
Fragment is an exact title for the sixth disc. These recordings preserve incomplete forms without apologizing for them. Some pieces appear briefly, establish one texture or rhythmic argument, then disappear. Others extend into loose zones where the musicians test how little structure is required to keep a performance alive. The disc does not finish the first volume with a triumphant summary. It leaves the band in pieces, which is the most honest portrait possible.
Horology II then rewinds to The Future, the project Newton formed with Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh before Ware and Marsh moved toward The Human League and later Heaven 17. These recordings are historically fascinating because familiar futures remain undecided inside them. Synth-pop, industrial music, minimal electronics, and proto-techno share the same inexpensive machinery without yet recognizing themselves as separate territories.
The Future pieces are often more concise and rhythmically inviting than Clock DVA’s early tapes. Sequences pulse with a clarity that points toward dance music, but there is still grit around the circuitry. Melodies appear beside electronic abrasion. Machine repetition offers both pop potential and depersonalized force. The recordings capture Sheffield musicians realizing that synthesizers could replace traditional rock instrumentation without requiring them to reproduce progressive rock’s technical grandeur.
What separated Newton’s path was his attraction to rupture. Ware and Marsh would refine electronic repetition into a modern pop language. Newton retained the laboratory, the séance, and the interrogation chamber. The Future disc is therefore less an origin story with an obvious conclusion than a junction where several possible versions of British electronic music briefly occupied the same room.
The four Radiophonic Dvations discs move almost completely away from the idea of a band. These are Newton’s zones of acoustic research, occult suggestion, tape experiment, and psychoacoustic pressure. The title “radiophonic” acknowledges the legacy of electronic sound assembled through tape, oscillator, filters, and studio imagination, but the recordings are darker and more private than a workshop demonstration.
Many passages unfold without percussion or recognizable song form. Tones drift, collide, and recede. Tape loops establish cycles whose repetition alters perception rather than supporting melody. Voices arrive as transmissions, incantations, documentary fragments, or forms of internal speech. Silence is allowed to remain active around the sounds.
This is some of the collection’s most demanding material because it offers fewer historical handles. The listener cannot simply identify an early version of a famous song or trace a rhythmic idea toward a later album. The pieces occupy their own sealed environments. They demonstrate that Newton’s electronic practice was not a secondary activity conducted between band sessions. It was one of the engines driving Clock DVA from the beginning.
The Radiophonic Dvations also clarify the intellectual atmosphere surrounding the project. Newton drew upon figures including Antonin Artaud, Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Charles Baudelaire, and the Marquis de Sade, not as decorative references but as methods for breaking ordinary perception. Theatre could become cruelty. Eroticism could expose systems of power. Sound could alter consciousness without needing to communicate a conventional message.
This does not make the recordings academic. Their textures remain bodily. Low oscillations create pressure. High frequencies irritate the ear. Repetition produces fatigue or trance. Abstract ideas are tested against physical hearing.
Horology III opens the archive further through four discs of tape and reel recordings made between 1978 and 1980. Here the distinction between composition, rehearsal, experiment, and accident becomes nearly useless. EMS synthesizer, electric violin, guitar, bass, loops, voice, and unidentified devices enter combinations whose purpose may only have existed during the act of recording.
These discs are the set’s exposed wiring. Familiar Clock DVA elements appear without the structures that normally organize them. A bass figure may circulate beneath raw oscillator movement. Violin creates a sustained metallic thread while tape fragments interrupt its continuity. Voices emerge without becoming songs. Some recordings feel closer to 1960s electroacoustic composition than post-punk, despite being produced within the same period and social environment that generated the band’s earliest performances.
The studio becomes an instrument whose most important feature is memory. Tape allows an event to be captured, reversed, layered, slowed, accelerated, and made to answer itself. Horology repeatedly reveals how central this process was to Newton’s thinking. The recorder does not merely preserve music after it has happened. It creates forms that cannot exist before recording.
That is why the collection’s title works so well. Horology is the study and measurement of time, but these tapes refuse a simple chronological clock. Material from nearby years sounds as though it belongs to different decades. An electronic pulse anticipates music still far in the future, while an improvised violin passage reaches backward toward an older avant-garde. Tape loops create circular time. Archival recovery makes private moments suddenly present more than forty years later.
The fifteen-CD format risks absurdity, yet the excess is necessary. A smaller anthology would inevitably favor the tracks that resemble the established story of Clock DVA: Sheffield pioneers moving from industrial post-punk toward severe electronic music. Horology preserves the mess that story normally removes. It includes the failed forms, repeated ideas, skeletal rehearsals, and solitary investigations required for the recognizable work to emerge.
The collection also refuses the myth that electronic music developed through clean technological progress. These recordings are full of unreliable equipment, crude synchronization, tape hiss, distortion, and manual intervention. Their intelligence does not come from advanced tools. It comes from using limited tools without respecting their intended purpose.
Clock DVA’s later music would become increasingly precise. On Buried Dreams and Man-Amplified, rhythm, sampling, cybernetics, surveillance, and digital systems were organized with chilling control. Horology shows that precision growing from a much dirtier origin. Beneath the later geometry lies a room full of loose wires, wounded instruments, occult books, cheap tape, and people testing whether sound could be made to think.
The package’s scale turns listening into excavation. Fifteen discs cannot be absorbed as one ordinary album. They require return, comparison, and temporary disorientation. Ideas disappear for several hours, then reappear in altered form. A texture first heard as random becomes recognizable as part of Newton’s continuing vocabulary. The archive slowly teaches the listener how to hear it.
Horology does not improve Clock DVA’s past by making it cleaner. It preserves the friction between ambition and available means. The recordings remain uneven, overloaded, unfinished, and sometimes deliberately hostile. That is where their value lives. The box captures a moment when genres had not yet hardened, electronic instruments had not yet become polite, and a group could approach the recording studio as laboratory, trap, and instrument of psychic disturbance.
By the fifteenth disc, Clock DVA have not arrived at a destination. They have multiplied. The band, The Future, Newton’s solo experiments, and the anonymous tape fragments exist beside one another as competing mechanisms. Horology measures their time without straightening it. The clock runs forward, backward, and in circles, its internal machinery visible through the cracked face.

Junta - 2024 - Pathetic Frustration

Satatuhatta – SATATUHATTA-77  190.80MB FLAC

Pathetic Frustration begins with “Panic Attack Is the Best Defence,” a title that converts involuntary collapse into strategy. Junta’s noise arrives in waves rather than as one fixed slab, surging forward, thinning, then reforming with different frequencies forced to the surface. High abrasion tears across a heavier electrical body while lower pressure keeps the recording from becoming weightless static. The sound is violently saturated, but it remains active inside that saturation. It does not merely stay loud. It twists, swells, buckles, and keeps changing the location of its damage.
Released by Finland’s Satatuhatta label in 2024, Pathetic Frustration is a C21 cassette containing two pieces of almost equal length. “Panic Attack Is the Best Defence” runs for nine minutes and fifty-four seconds, while “Muffl’l Oy Hell” follows at nine minutes and fifty-six. The chrome tape was limited to one hundred copies, giving each side approximately ten minutes to establish its own pressure system without stretching the material beyond its natural intensity.
Satatuhatta introduced the cassette as Junta’s most uncompromising recording to that point, describing a free-flowing electronic harsh storm influenced by Japanese noise. That comparison makes sense because the release is not organized around the rigid immobility of a harsh noise wall. Its density remains fluid. Frequencies constantly overtake one another, and the stereo field feels crowded with competing currents rather than occupied by one single texture.
The first side treats panic as acceleration without escape. Sounds pile up faster than the ear can organize them. A sharp frequency may dominate briefly, then be swallowed by midrange distortion or pushed aside by a deeper surge. The recording gives the impression of several systems malfunctioning simultaneously, each one increasing the pressure placed upon the others.
Yet the track does not sound careless. Its apparent disorder has direction. Junta understands how long one texture can remain exposed before another must enter, and how a sudden reduction in density can make the following eruption feel physically larger. The piece moves through changing states of overload while refusing the conventional rise toward one final climax.
That refusal matches the title. A panic attack does not necessarily progress in a straight line. It loops through physical signals, catastrophic interpretation, attempted control, and renewed alarm. Calling it “the best defence” adds bitter humor. The body protects itself by becoming temporarily impossible to inhabit.
Junta does not illustrate anxiety through samples, speech, or recognizable heartbeat effects. The connection is structural. The music places the listener inside rapid changes of intensity without providing a stable perspective from which to measure them. Abrasion arrives from several directions, and every possible exit seems to produce another frequency.
The cassette format intensifies this instability. Tape compression binds separate layers into a thick surface while allowing peaks to smear and strain. High frequencies acquire grain rather than digital sharpness, and the lower material pushes against the limited space available on the tape. The sound feels physically crowded because the medium itself is being asked to carry more energy than comfort permits.
Chrome tape gives the recording enough definition to preserve motion within the mass. The noise does not collapse into dull mud. Scraping upper layers remain distinct from the heavier middle and lower bands, allowing the listener to follow how one area of the spectrum attacks another. The better the playback system, the more internal conflict becomes audible.
Turning the cassette over leads into “Muffl’l Oy Hell,” whose strange title reads like corporate language, damaged speech, or a Finnish company name crushed into nonsense. “Oy” is the abbreviation used for a Finnish limited company, placing a tiny piece of administrative order inside an otherwise mangled phrase. Hell has apparently been incorporated, registered, and placed into operation.
The second side feels heavier in implication because its title shifts frustration from personal panic toward organized machinery. The noise remains mobile, but the movement suggests an industrial system cycling through several kinds of failure. Distortion grinds, recedes, and returns with altered pressure. High frequencies flare like exposed electrical edges while the broader mass continues working beneath them.
Where the first side’s title implies the body turning against itself, “Muffl’l Oy Hell” suggests an institution designed to continue regardless of human distress. The two pieces therefore complement each other without becoming a narrative. Panic is the defence available to the individual. Hell is the company that keeps normal business hours.
Junta’s use of humor is crucial. Pathetic Frustration is not funny because the sounds are harmless or because harsh noise has been reduced to parody. The humor is embedded in the gap between extreme sonic force and titles that sound defeated, bureaucratic, or absurd. “Pathetic” weakens “frustration” before the recording has even begun, as though the emotional condition is not impressive enough to deserve dignity.
That self-contempt gives the release a different character from noise built around invincible aggression. Junta does not present frustration as righteous power. It is repetitive, embarrassing, bodily, and unable to solve whatever caused it. The electronics may be overwhelming, but their emotional source is described as pathetic.
This creates tension between sound and title. The cassette sounds enormous while naming weakness. That contradiction prevents the harshness from functioning as simple domination. The noise can overpower the listener, yet the project has already admitted that power may be nothing more than helplessness amplified until it fills the room.
The Japanese influence appears less through imitation of one artist than through a shared understanding of harsh noise as continuous motion. The best Japanese noise recordings often contain astonishing detail inside apparent excess. Feedback, distortion, contact sounds, and electronic pressure behave like rapidly changing weather rather than one stationary wall. Junta works within that tradition while retaining the cold directness associated with contemporary Finnish noise.
Finland has produced a particularly severe noise culture, often emphasizing rough physical sound, private fixation, crude electronics, and an unwillingness to make experimental music socially polite. Satatuhatta has continued that lineage while releasing a broad range of current harsh noise and sound work. Pathetic Frustration fits the label because it is direct enough to strike immediately but detailed enough to reward repeated listening.
Its twenty-minute length is nearly perfect. A full hour of similar intensity might turn the noise into background through exhaustion. Two ten-minute sides preserve concentration. Each begins, develops, and stops before adaptation can fully neutralize its force.
The cassette’s equal-sided construction also gives it a severe balance. Neither piece becomes the obvious main event accompanied by a shorter extra track. Panic and hell receive the same amount of magnetic tape. The body’s collapse and the institution’s machinery are treated as parallel conditions.
There is no voice to clarify who is frustrated or why. No sample identifies a political target, personal event, or psychological diagnosis. The absence keeps the emotion broad without making it empty. Frustration is translated directly into blocked motion: sound constantly moving but never reaching a destination.
That may be the cassette’s defining quality. The noise is free-flowing, yet freedom does not produce release. Every surge runs into another surge. Every frequency creates more obstruction. Motion becomes another form of confinement.
Pathetic Frustration therefore avoids both purity and catharsis. It is too restless to become a perfect wall and too unresolved to offer emotional cleansing. The listener is not carried through frustration and delivered beyond it. The cassette simply gives frustration enough voltage to reveal its texture.
When “Muffl’l Oy Hell” ends, the pressure disappears because the tape has run out, not because the problem has been solved. The mechanism stops. The room returns. Somewhere inside the cassette, panic remains the best defence, hell remains open for business, and twenty minutes of electronic failure wait to begin again from the opposite side.

 

Incapacitants - 2025 - Chwalfa

 

Otoroku – roku044  502.50MB FLAC Chwalfa begins with Incapacitants already operating at full temperature. There is no patient introduction, no isolated signal offered as a guide, and no orderly climb toward overload. “Night One” erupts as a field of clipped tape loops, crushed feedback, overloaded electronics, and rapidly shifting pressure in which Toshiji Mikawa and Fumio Kosakai appear less like two performers than two fronts of weather colliding inside the same room. The sound is enormous, but its scale never becomes static. Every few seconds the internal balance changes. A shrieking upper frequency is buried beneath a thicker surge, a low electrical mass opens briefly into granular detail, then another layer enters and burns the opening shut. Recorded at London’s Cafe OTO on September 6 and 7, 2024, Chwalfa documents the duo’s first UK appearance since 2016. OTOROKU gives one complete performance to each disc: “Night One” lasting thirty-seven minutes and sixteen seconds, followed by the thirty-eight-minute “Night Two.” The format is important. These are not excerpts selected from several concerts or studio pieces dressed in live atmosphere. Each disc preserves one uninterrupted encounter between the duo, their equipment, the room, and an audience placed close enough to experience noise as moving air. The Welsh title can mean dispersal, rout, upheaval, upset, or a confused and chaotic condition. All of those meanings apply, but none completely contains the music. Incapacitants create confusion without sounding uncertain. Their noise is chaotic at the level of surface activity, yet the performances possess a fierce internal responsiveness. Mikawa and Kosakai listen through the density, answering changes in pressure with new disruptions. One electronic current swells, another slices through it, and the first mutates in response. What appears from outside to be total saturation is actually a conversation conducted at catastrophic volume. “Night One” carries a restless, vertical energy. High frequencies flare upward while dense midrange distortion churns beneath them. The sound often seems to be climbing out of itself, generating new layers faster than the existing ones can collapse. Tape loops provide fragments of recurrence, but repetition never stabilizes the performance. A loop appears, catches, deforms, and becomes another surface for feedback to attack. This continual mutation separates Incapacitants from harsh noise built around one perfected wall. Their sound can become as dense as any wall, but it refuses immobility. The mass bends, folds, and repeatedly changes direction. At moments it resembles hundreds of short events compressed until they occur simultaneously. Elsewhere it expands into a broad electrical roar whose smaller details remain active beneath the apparent unity. The cover captures this method from above. Mikawa and Kosakai stand far apart inside Cafe OTO, each bent over a small table of pedals, mixers, and compact electronic devices. They look almost ordinary, two men working quietly at separate stations beneath plain white walls. The image refuses the scale heard on the discs. Nothing visible explains how these modest arrangements of cables and boxes could produce something resembling industrial collapse, volcanic pressure, and an entire damaged communications system operating at once. That visual contradiction has always been part of Incapacitants. The duo do not rely on theatrical costumes or elaborate machinery to announce extremity. Their physical performances can become intensely expressive, with bodies tensing, faces twisting, and hands working frantically across equipment, but the source remains recognizably human and limited. Two people produce more sound than the room seems capable of holding. Mikawa began Incapacitants as a solo project in 1981 before Kosakai joined later in the decade. Across more than forty years, the project has maintained a remarkably direct premise: live electronic noise generated through contact microphones, pedals, loops, feedback, and improvised control. That longevity has not turned the music into ceremonial reenactment. Chwalfa sounds dangerous because the duo have refined their ability to create instability without making instability predictable. Experience appears through timing. Incapacitants know when to press harder and when to let one frequency remain exposed long enough to become unbearable. They understand that maximum volume does not require every part of the spectrum to be filled continuously. Brief thinning can make the next surge feel enormous. A small pocket of brittle clicking or damaged loop repetition can suddenly reveal the depth of the larger mass surrounding it. Near the center of “Night One,” the performance seems to pull apart into several competing bands. A low mechanical vibration holds the floor while midrange distortion writhes above it and thin feedback needles through the upper edge. The listener can choose one layer and follow it briefly, but the others keep changing its context. Incapacitants make focused listening difficult without making it pointless. The reward lies in repeatedly losing the sound one has selected. This is noise as excess perception. There is always more activity than the ear can process, yet the music does not become meaningless because of that excess. It becomes physical. The body receives pressure before the mind organizes detail. Bass moves through the chest, high frequencies tighten the jaw, and the rapidly shifting middle produces a sense of motion even when no recognizable rhythm exists. “Night Two” begins from a similarly scorched condition but soon develops a different personality. The sound feels broader and heavier, with longer masses of distortion allowed to gather before being ruptured. Where the first night often appears to climb and splinter, the second seems to sink, drag, and then detonate from below. The difference is not dramatic enough to make the discs opposites, but it confirms that Incapacitants are responding to a present situation rather than reproducing a fixed set. The live room becomes audible through the pressure. Cafe OTO is known for intimate performances in which small gestures can command near-total quiet. Chwalfa overturns that familiar atmosphere. The venue’s walls, speakers, and floor become components in the duo’s electronics. Feedback is shaped by the dimensions of the room, while the doubled subwoofers transform low frequency into architecture. The recording does not merely capture sound occurring in OTO. It captures OTO being temporarily remade by sound. Billy Steiger’s recording and Oli Barrett’s mix preserve the performances without smoothing their overload. Peaks remain fierce, but the internal layers do not collapse into flat digital clipping. The two discs retain depth. Certain sounds appear close enough to touch, while others hover far behind the main surge. Even at extreme density, the room has corners. The second performance contains several moments where a damaged pulse begins to emerge. It never becomes a beat, yet the recurrence gives the noise temporary forward motion. Another signal then bends the pulse out of shape, turning rhythm back into texture. Incapacitants repeatedly approach musical forms without submitting to them. A loop almost becomes a riff. Feedback almost becomes a sustained melody. Repetition almost becomes meter. Each form survives just long enough to be recognized before the duo tear through it. That destructive relationship with form is not nihilistic. Chwalfa is intensely alive. The performances contain exhilaration, humor, concentration, and the strange joy of two people discovering how much uncontrolled movement can be produced through practiced interaction. The volume may suggest annihilation, but the music’s energy comes from construction happening faster than destruction can erase it. Vymethoxy Redspiders’ liner notes connect Incapacitants less with conventional noise lineage than with the “fire music” of free jazz, invoking Albert Ayler, Dave Burrell, and Sun Ra at his most apocalyptic. The comparison is useful because it emphasizes emotional outpouring and collective improvisation rather than genre technique. Incapacitants do not play electronic noise as a demonstration of equipment. They hurl sound into motion with the same commitment that free-jazz musicians bring to breath, pressure, and instrumental extremity. The duo’s instruments may not produce recognizable notes, but they create phrasing. A dense surge acts like a held cry. A sudden cut resembles breath. A rapidly oscillating loop becomes a tremor around which the other player builds. The performances possess musical intelligence even while refusing melody, meter, and conventional development. The two-disc structure also prevents one night from becoming definitive. “Night One” does not stand as the perfect Incapacitants statement followed by a bonus performance. The second night revisits the same tools and discovers another route through them. Listening to both reveals how much variation exists inside a method sometimes dismissed as indiscriminate noise. By the final section of “Night Two,” the sound has accumulated nearly eighty minutes of pressure across the set, yet the duo do not resolve it through a grand concluding gesture. The performance continues mutating until it stops. There is no final chord, no clean collapse, and no ceremonial release. The ending feels imposed by the end of the live action rather than built into a composition. Chwalfa captures upheaval without reducing it to chaos for its own sake. Mikawa and Kosakai disperse every stable form that begins to appear, but their interaction remains exact, bodily, and alert. The two ordinary-looking men on the cover stand beneath Cafe OTO’s ceiling with a handful of electronics, creating enough sound to make the room feel briefly detached from London and dropped into some furnace beneath the planet. The album does not ask whether noise can still be extreme after decades of accumulated history. It answers by making history irrelevant for seventy-five minutes. There is only the present pressure, the next loop catching fire, the next feedback line cutting through, and two performers listening to one another inside a volume that should make listening impossible.

Chaos Cascade - 2024 - Dino Velvet

 

Desolation Galaxies Records – DeGa15  304.53MB FLAC

Dino Velvet begins with the cover already chewing through the album’s central contradiction. A woman’s face is rendered in stark black and white, glamorous enough to suggest fashion photography until the machinery becomes visible. A metal apparatus enters her mouth, clamps across her face, and converts elegance into restraint. An insect-like form sits above one eye, adding another layer of invasion. The title appears beneath her in small, refined lettering: Dino Velvet. Something prehistoric and crushing has been wrapped in something soft, luxurious, and faintly erotic.
Chaos Cascade uses that contradiction throughout the album. The sound is brutal power electronics, but it rarely behaves like one uninterrupted block of aggression. Thick oscillators, vomiting vocals, shrill feedback, mechanical rhythms, and collapsing low frequencies are constantly arranged against one another. Hardness meets texture. Force meets a strange, diseased sensuality. The record does not simply roar. It presses close.
Released in 2024 by Desolation Galaxies Records as DeGa15, Dino Velvet is a limited CD edition of one hundred copies. It contains eleven tracks, with German project Pissoir Rouge contributing to seven of them. That collaboration expands the record without turning it into a split. Chaos Cascade remains the dominant identity, but Pissoir Rouge introduces another layer of damaged electronics, vocal sickness, and rhythmic filth that repeatedly changes the shape of the attack.
The opening stretch establishes a grinding sound built from several different pressures operating at once. Low oscillators create the physical base, dense enough to move air rather than merely occupy the speakers. Above them, feedback streaks across the surface in sharp, unstable lines. Vocals arrive already mangled, forced through distortion until words become less important than breath, strain, and the sensation of a throat being used beyond comfort.
This is not power electronics built around one commanding speech. The voice does not stand above the machinery and control it. It is caught inside the same violent system. Some passages make the vocals sound enormous, as though amplified through industrial ductwork. Others bury them until only a shredded human contour remains. The result is less a political address than a body being processed.
Chaos Cascade’s strength lies in keeping density mobile. Many harsh recordings find one effective texture and remain there, relying on volume to maintain intensity. Dino Velvet keeps altering its weight. A piece may begin with a narrow, needling frequency, then widen into a distorted mechanical pulse. Another starts from a deep electrical churn and gradually exposes higher layers until the entire mix seems to peel upward.
Rhythm appears often enough to make the violence bodily. These are not clean beats designed for a club, but blunt repetitions resembling damaged machinery trying to complete a cycle. A pulse catches, drags, and returns. Distortion fills the spaces between impacts. The body can recognize the pattern, but cannot settle comfortably inside it.
That tension gives the album its grinding character. Forward motion exists, yet every step meets resistance. The music moves like equipment overloaded by material too heavy for its intended purpose. Nothing glides. Even the quieter sections feel burdened.
Pissoir Rouge’s presence strengthens this diseased mechanical quality. The project’s contributions do not arrive as polite guest spots with clearly separated identities. They enter the tracks as contamination. Additional electronics crowd the middle frequencies, vocals acquire another layer of instability, and the arrangements feel less like one person controlling a system than several operators pushing the same machine toward different forms of failure.
The collaboration is especially effective because the two projects share brutality without becoming interchangeable. Chaos Cascade favors a broad, crushing sound, often using dense oscillator movement and heavy feedback as physical mass. Pissoir Rouge brings a more cramped, septic quality. Where Chaos Cascade can feel like a structure collapsing outward, Pissoir Rouge seems to work from inside the walls.
Together they create an atmosphere that is both enormous and claustrophobic. The record can fill the room while still feeling pressed directly against the face. That sensation returns the listener to the cover, where a mechanical device does not destroy the woman from a distance. It grips, enters, and remains attached.
The title Dino Velvet encourages several readings without settling into one. “Dino” suggests something extinct, oversized, primitive, or lumbering. “Velvet” suggests touch, luxury, darkness, and surface. Combined, the words describe the album’s production unusually well. The low end has prehistoric weight, while feedback and vocal distortion create a rough nap across the surface, a kind of velvet made from wire and dried blood.
There is also humor in the name. Power electronics frequently adopts titles announcing violence with absolute seriousness. Dino Velvet sounds like a nightclub, a cheap perfume, a porn alias, or a forgotten glam-rock performer. That absurdity prevents the record from becoming solemn. Chaos Cascade understands that extremity can become ridiculous when it poses too stiffly.
The humor does not weaken the attack. It makes the attack stranger. A grotesque title placed beside genuinely punishing sound creates uncertainty about how much theatricality is intended. The listener cannot reduce the album to confession, ideology, parody, or pure abstraction. Each possibility remains active.
The eleven-track structure keeps the album moving through separate concentrations rather than one endless performance. Tracks end before their strongest textures become fully familiar. The next begins with a different arrangement of pressure, forcing the ear to recalibrate. This makes Dino Velvet more dynamic than an hour-long slab of continuous harshness.
Some pieces emphasize thick low-frequency grinding. Others sharpen the upper register until feedback feels like something drawn tightly across metal. Several bring damaged pulse close to industrial rhythm, then corrode it before it can become functional. The most effective moments combine all three levels: bass as body, rhythm as machinery, and feedback as exposed nerve.
The vocals provide the human residue binding those layers together. Even when unintelligible, they prevent the album from becoming an exercise in equipment. Someone remains inside the sound, breathing, retching, commanding, or simply enduring. The machinery matters because it is acting upon a voice.
The production preserves separation inside overload. Dino Velvet is saturated, but not flattened. Deep oscillator movement remains distinct from the midrange grind, while high feedback cuts through without erasing everything beneath it. The CD format gives the sound enough space to reveal how carefully the violence has been layered.
This detail becomes especially apparent at higher volume. What first appears to be one solid mass divides into shifting planes. A vocal sits farther back than expected. A rhythmic pulse continues beneath a feedback eruption. A low tone changes pitch slowly enough that its motion is felt before it is consciously heard.
The album belongs firmly to contemporary German power electronics, yet it avoids presenting tradition as a museum style. Its ingredients are familiar: oscillators, distortion, hostile vocals, crude rhythm, violent imagery. The distinction lies in their arrangement. Chaos Cascade treats the genre as something still capable of becoming unstable rather than a fixed collection of approved gestures.
There is no attempt to modernize the sound through sleek digital production or crossover structure. Dino Velvet develops by deepening the grime. It asks how many textures can coexist inside brutality before the brutality loses shape, then keeps forcing them together without crossing that line.
The collaboration with Pissoir Rouge also makes the record feel social in a perverse way. Power electronics often cultivates isolation, presenting one individual’s obsession as a sealed chamber. Dino Velvet repeatedly opens that chamber to another participant, allowing disgust and aggression to become shared labor.
The result is not camaraderie in any comforting sense. It sounds like two people making a bad situation more efficient. One supplies pressure, the other introduces infection. One builds the apparatus, the other tightens the straps.
By the final tracks, the album has established a vocabulary of grinding pulse, oscillator weight, feedback rupture, and mutilated voice without exhausting it. The sound remains recognizable, but each return arrives with a different balance of elements. Repetition becomes identity rather than stagnation.
Dino Velvet succeeds because its violence has texture. It is not satisfied with being loud, hateful, or ugly. It wants abrasion to have depth, rhythm to feel damaged, and vocals to remain bodily after language disappears. The cover’s machinery may dominate the image, but the face beneath it is still visible.
That remaining face is the album’s most disturbing detail. The subject has not been erased. She is trapped inside the apparatus, glamour and injury occupying the same frame. Chaos Cascade builds the music the same way. Beneath the thundering oscillators, the feedback, and the grinding collaborations with Pissoir Rouge, a human signal keeps trying to survive. The velvet is already caught in the teeth.

Green Tea - 2023 - Children of the Wisteria

 

Satatuhatta – SATATUHATTA-71  358.98MB FLAC

“Hacking at Branches, Hitting Bone” opens with a beautiful mistake of scale. Soft synthesizer color hovers behind the noise, suggesting distant light through leaves, while a coarse electronic blade tears across the foreground. Green Tea does not use ambient sound as an introduction that will eventually be destroyed by harshness. Both states remain active together. The calm layer continues beneath the abrasion, and the abrasion begins revealing its own strange warmth. What should be opposition becomes climate.
Children of the Wisteria is the second full-length Green Tea album by Nick Forté, whose history includes Rorschach, Raspberry Bulbs, and Half Mortal. Released by Finland’s Satatuhatta label in September 2023, it follows the Green Tea debut Snowblower and develops the project’s unusual meeting of harsh noise, ambient drift, psychedelic density, and new age tranquility. The six tracks last just under forty-eight minutes, giving Forté enough room to build complete environments rather than a sequence of brief attacks.
The opening title contains the album’s method in miniature. Branches suggest growth, shelter, and organic complexity. Bone waits underneath. Hacking through one eventually reaches the other, turning an apparently natural scene into anatomy. The track behaves the same way. Broad, almost soothing tones create foliage while distortion cuts downward until something harder appears beneath them.
Green Tea’s noise is dense, but rarely blank. The harsh layers move constantly, separating into grain, feedback, low pressure, and brittle upper-frequency activity. Instead of one gray wall, Forté creates several surfaces occupying different depths. One sound may scrape close to the listener while another glows far behind it. The ear can move through the mix even when the overall pressure remains enormous.
“Twining Vine Supremacy” makes that movement more tangled. Noise coils around sustained tones, repeatedly crossing its own path. The title suggests vegetation achieving dominance not through sudden force but through persistent growth. A vine occupies space by wrapping itself around whatever is already there. Forté’s distortion behaves similarly, climbing across ambient layers without completely covering them.
This is where the project’s psychedelic character becomes most apparent. Psychedelia does not arrive through retro guitar effects or recognizable drug-culture imagery. It comes from unstable perception. Harsh noise that initially seems flat begins opening into depth. New age tones that should feel peaceful become uncanny when surrounded by abrasion. The listener cannot decide whether the music is beautiful material being damaged or violent material producing beauty.
“Wedding Beneath a Wasp Nest” sharpens that contradiction. The title places ceremony directly under suspended danger. A wedding asks participants to trust the future, while the nest above them contains a collective capable of immediate attack. The track does not choose between celebration and threat. Its brighter electronic layer continues while the harsher frequencies swarm around it.
The buzzing textures avoid literal imitation, but they create nervous movement throughout the stereo field. High frequencies cluster, separate, and return. Lower sound supplies weight, preventing the piece from becoming a thin cloud of static. The arrangement feels crowded with activity, yet the underlying atmosphere remains curiously open.
That balance separates Children of the Wisteria from noise albums that use calm passages merely to increase the impact of later eruptions. Green Tea does not treat serenity and violence as alternating scenes. They coexist. The tranquility is not destroyed when the harshness arrives, and the harshness is not removed when the music becomes luminous.
“Patio Mist Euphoria” stretches beyond nine minutes and gives this coexistence its most spacious form. The title evokes domestic leisure, artificial cooling, summer heat, and the slightly chemical pleasure of water being sprayed into warm air. The music hangs in a similar suspended state. Broad drones create humidity while distortion passes through them in sheets.
The track’s euphoria is not clean. It feels overheated, dizzy, and close to sensory overload. Forté understands that pleasure can become disorienting when it lasts too long or arrives too intensely. The mist cools the skin while the air remains heavy. The sound offers relief without removing pressure.
Long duration changes how the harsh material is perceived. A burst of distortion can be experienced as impact, but several minutes of shifting noise become an environment. The body adapts to the volume, allowing smaller movements to emerge. A narrow feedback line changes direction. A low frequency swells beneath the drone. A brief thinning makes the remaining layers appear enormous.
“Tropical Chainsaw” contains the album’s most direct collision of paradise and machinery. “Tropical” promises humidity, color, fruit, vegetation, and escape. “Chainsaw” introduces fuel, teeth, labor, and destruction. Forté joins the words without turning the track into a joke. The music genuinely contains both.
Its harshness is more muscular, with grinding movement cutting across warmer atmospheric color. Yet the chainsaw element never becomes ordinary industrial aggression. The noise appears almost radiant, producing streaks of brightness as it tears through the mix. Destruction becomes another source of color.
The project name Green Tea also carries this dual quality. Forté took inspiration from Sheridan Le Fanu’s story “Green Tea,” in which the drink is connected to altered perception and a terrifying supernatural presence. Something associated with calm, health, and ritual becomes a doorway into hallucination. Green Tea’s music follows that route. Tranquility does not protect the listener from disturbance. It creates the conditions through which disturbance can enter.
Forté’s background in hardcore and blackened rock makes the project’s restraint especially interesting. Rorschach was built from physical urgency, dissonant guitar, and compressed violence. Raspberry Bulbs turned punk repetition into something raw and spectral. Green Tea retains the intensity of those practices while removing the conventional band. Guitar, drum, riff, and vocal confrontation give way to electronic density, but the sense of pressure remains bodily.
The difference is that Children of the Wisteria allows beauty to remain visible. Noise does not need to prove seriousness by rejecting pleasure. Forté lets soft synthesis, drifting drone, and almost spa-like calm enter the harsh field without apology. These elements are not ironic decorations. They are equal materials.
“Underground Orchids – Wisp” closes the album with its longest piece, extending beyond twelve minutes. The title joins hidden growth with near-disappearance. Orchids suggest intricate form, rarity, and cultivated beauty, but these flowers grow underground, away from display. The wisp is even less stable, something seen briefly before dissolving.
The track unfolds accordingly. Its harsh layers retain substantial weight, yet the piece feels less frontal than the earlier material. Sounds drift in and out of focus. Deep textures seem buried beneath the surface while lighter tones move above them like vapor. The album’s garden has become subterranean.
The long closing movement gives Forté room to reduce density without losing intensity. Near-silence never arrives, but certain layers recede enough for others to reveal their shapes. Distortion becomes less a weapon than soil, something dense and granular through which more delicate forms continue growing.
Wisteria is an especially suitable image for this music. Its hanging flowers can look soft and dreamlike, yet the plant is vigorous, heavy, and capable of overtaking structures. Its vines twist around supports, thicken with age, and become difficult to remove. Beauty and domination grow from the same organism.
The “children” of the title may therefore be the sounds themselves: related growths descending from one tangled source. Each track carries a botanical title or image, but the album does not become gentle nature worship. Branches conceal bone. Wasps hang above a wedding. Machinery cuts through the tropics. Orchids bloom where no light should reach.
The Satatuhatta CD presents these contradictions in a compact digipak, a polished physical form for music that repeatedly makes polish unstable. The label’s description of harsh noise floating upon an ocean of tranquilizing new age sound is unusually exact. Green Tea does not place a few ambient interludes between noise tracks. The ocean is always present, even when the surface is burning.
Children of the Wisteria succeeds because it refuses the easy emotional assignments attached to its materials. Harsh noise is not automatically anger. Ambient music is not automatically peace. New age sound is not automatically innocence. Forté mixes them until each begins carrying properties of the others.
The resulting album can feel crushing, restorative, humid, poisonous, and strangely inviting within the same minute. Its beauty has teeth, but its violence has color. The vines continue climbing through the electronics, wrapping themselves around every sharp frequency until noise and tranquility become parts of one impossible plant.

Green Tea - 2024 - Owl Arcana

 

Satatuhatta – SATATUHATTA-88  450.72MB FLAC

“Concrete Talisman” opens Owl Arcana with a contradiction heavy enough to carry the entire album. A talisman is supposed to protect through mystery, belief, and charged symbolism. Concrete protects through mass. Green Tea combines both ideas inside a six-minute surge where luminous synthesizer tones hover beneath harsh electronic pressure, as though a sacred object has been poured into a construction mold and left to harden around the listener. The noise is dense, but the atmosphere is not sealed. Light keeps leaking through it.
Owl Arcana is Nick Forté’s second Green Tea album for Finland’s Satatuhatta label and a direct continuation of the territory explored on Children of the Wisteria. The two records share an attraction to ambient-driven harsh noise, new age color, psychedelic depth, and natural imagery with concealed violence. The difference is perspective. Children of the Wisteria remained close to the ground among vines, branches, insects, orchids, patios, and machinery cutting through vegetation. Owl Arcana leaves the garden floor and enters the night sky. Its eleven tracks follow an owl through forest darkness, nesting, hunting, flight, and an increasingly supernatural ascent.
“Gateway to Deepest Sky” begins opening that vertical space. The title does not describe the nearest visible stars but a sky with depth, something entered rather than viewed. Forté’s broad ambient layers produce the sensation of open distance while distortion moves across them in thick sheets. The harshness does not simply block the view. It becomes weather encountered during the climb.
Green Tea’s strongest music depends upon this refusal to assign fixed emotional roles to sound. Soft synthesizers are not automatically peaceful, and noise is not automatically hostile. A glowing drone can feel ominous when held too long. Distortion can become strangely comforting once its movement surrounds the listener completely. Forté keeps exchanging those properties until calm and violence begin sharing one nervous system.
“Join the Night” makes that exchange feel voluntary. The title is an invitation, not a warning, yet the track’s darkness contains appetite. The owl is not merely a symbol of wisdom seated peacefully on a branch. It is a predator whose silence exists so that another animal will not detect its approach. Green Tea’s ambient beauty works the same way. It draws the listener inward while the harsher frequencies circle beyond immediate attention.
The album’s owl imagery avoids becoming cute or ornamental because it remains tied to physical behavior. Owls see through darkness, rotate their heads with disturbing freedom, digest prey, and later cough up compact pellets of bone, teeth, and fur. They are beautiful animals whose daily life depends upon killing quietly. Owl Arcana treats that combination of grace and brutality as a compositional principle.
“Snowy Eyes” is one of the record’s shorter pieces, but its title immediately suggests the pale face and enormous dark gaze of a snowy owl. The music feels exposed and cold, with bright frequencies cutting through a softer underlying field. Forté does not imitate a call or wingbeat. He translates the bird’s visual intensity into electronic contrast: white glare surrounding black attention.
The album is more spacious than its predecessor, yet the harsh layers can be even more concentrated. Instead of filling every moment with tangled botanical growth, Owl Arcana repeatedly clears openings around its noise. That extra room makes individual frequencies feel larger. A thin electronic whine can cross the stereo field like an object moving through moonlight. A low surge can suggest the forest floor far below.
“Dense Needle Vibrations” returns the record to close physical texture. The needles might belong to pine trees, medical equipment, or sharpened electronic points. Forté allows all three possibilities to remain active. High frequencies prick the surface while thicker distortion vibrates underneath, producing sound that seems both organic and mechanically amplified.
This track demonstrates how carefully Green Tea controls internal movement. The noise is heavy, but it never becomes one stationary wall. Fine layers tremble across broader masses. Abrasive signals briefly rise above the mix, then sink back into it. The piece feels densely inhabited rather than simply loud.
“Nesting in an Altered State” slows the flight and turns shelter into hallucination. A nest should offer stability, yet the altered state makes even rest unreliable. The ambient material becomes warmer and more enveloping, but the harsher elements continue shifting beneath it like branches unable to support a sleeping body.
Forté’s titles are unusually important because they do not merely decorate abstract music after the fact. Each one establishes a physical or psychic problem that the sound then inhabits. Concrete must become magical. The sky must become a gateway. A nest must remain protective while perception changes. The tracks do not illustrate these phrases literally, but their pacing and textures keep returning to the contradiction contained inside each title.
“Desire for Cosmic Change” is the album’s emotional center. At more than six minutes, it has room to expand beyond nocturnal forest imagery into something larger and less earthly. The word “desire” matters because cosmic change is too vast for an individual to command. The track sounds like yearning amplified beyond the scale of the body.
Ambient tones stretch outward while noise arrives in recurring waves, each one seeming to push against the limits established by the last. The piece does not deliver transformation as a triumphant climax. It remains inside the wanting. Change is imagined, approached, and obscured by the force required to reach it.
“Forest Solitude” is the longest track, extending past nine minutes. Solitude here does not mean silence. The forest is full of unseen movement, overlapping distances, and life that becomes audible only after human activity has receded. Forté builds the piece in the same manner. At first the mass seems continuous, but prolonged listening reveals layers moving at different speeds.
One electronic texture resembles wind pressing through branches. Another has the dry grain of insects or leaves. A deeper current forms the ground while brighter frequencies pass above it. None of these sounds needs to be a field recording for the forest to become convincing. The environment is produced through relationships of height, density, motion, and concealment.
The extended duration allows the listener’s hearing to adjust. Noise that initially feels overwhelming becomes habitat. Once that adaptation occurs, small changes gain enormous importance. A new frequency enters and the entire forest seems colder. A layer recedes and distance suddenly opens behind it.
“Worship Talon Scars” introduces devotion through injury. The phrase could describe scars received from the owl, markings treated as evidence of sacred contact. It could also describe worship directed toward the talons themselves, revering the part of the animal designed to seize and puncture. Green Tea’s beauty has always contained this kind of wound.
The track carries a more cutting character, with abrasive surfaces pressing forward and atmospheric color buried deeper in the mix. The softer material has not disappeared, but it must now be reached through damage. The arrangement turns listening into a form of contact where attraction and injury cannot be separated cleanly.
“Angelic Paralysis” pushes the contradiction further. Angels promise transcendence, motion between worlds, and wings. Paralysis removes movement. Forté suspends bright, almost celestial tones inside a dense electronic field that prevents them from rising freely. The track feels radiant and immobilized at once.
This is not heavenly music interrupted by noise. The harshness is what gives the radiance its body. Without resistance, the ambient tones might drift into harmless atmosphere. The surrounding distortion makes every glimpse of light feel earned and temporary.
The closing “Nocturnal Ascension” completes the album’s upward motion without turning it into victory. The owl rises, but the night rises with it. The piece gathers the record’s ambient breadth and abrasive density into one final climb, extending beyond six minutes while layers repeatedly open and close around the listener.
Ascension usually implies escape from physical limitation. Green Tea refuses that ease. The sound remains grainy, heavy, and bodily even at its most spacious. Wings must still move air. Talons remain attached. Whatever reaches the upper darkness carries the forest’s violence with it.
Owl Arcana lasts nearly an hour, considerably expanding the scale of Green Tea’s earlier full-length work. Its eleven-track design gives the album more distinct chambers, yet the sequencing creates one continuous nocturnal journey. The concrete talisman opens the passage, the sky deepens, the listener joins the night, and the owl gradually moves from observation toward mystical transformation.
The record’s new age and ambient elements are sincere, but sincerity does not make them safe. Forté understands that meditative music can alter perception, and altered perception may reveal things serenity normally keeps hidden. Green Tea offers tranquility as an entrance rather than a destination.
Forté’s background in Rorschach, Raspberry Bulbs, and other physically intense music remains audible in the pressure and discipline of these recordings. Green Tea does not sound like a hardcore guitarist relaxing into synthesizer music. The project carries hardcore’s bodily insistence into a form where force can be spread across long duration and hidden inside beauty.
Satatuhatta’s digipak CD gives the album a compact physical home for a sound that continually exceeds its boundaries. The artwork and owl-centered concept provide a clear route into the record, but repeated listening makes the route less certain. The owl may be predator, guide, guardian, witness, or hallucination. Its wisdom cannot be separated from its appetite.
Owl Arcana improves upon Children of the Wisteria by widening Green Tea’s world without abandoning its central discovery. Noise and calm do not have to alternate or defeat one another. They can occupy the same air, each revealing qualities hidden inside the other.
The owl passes silently through branches while the album surrounding it roars. That is the final puzzle. Silence belongs to the predator, not the recording. Green Tea makes the unseen flight audible as immense electronic pressure, then leaves the listener beneath the trees, staring upward after the talons have already passed.

Grunt - 2005 - Installation of Blood and Steel

 

Industrial Recollections – none  323.96MB FLAC

“Swarm of Human Locust” begins with a low electrical churn already gathering bodies inside it. The sound does not rush immediately toward maximum density. It advances through layers of analogue distortion, repetitive pulses, scraped frequencies, and distant vocal pressure until the title’s image becomes physical. A locust swarm is not frightening because of one insect. It is frightening because countless small movements merge into a single dark mass capable of stripping a landscape. Grunt constructs the opening piece the same way. Individual noises remain briefly audible, then disappear into collective hunger.
Installation of Blood and Steel was recorded on April 25, 2005, using an analogue four-track. Its four pieces run for approximately thirty-eight minutes, originally issued by Sweden’s Harsh Head Rituals as a cassette limited to fifty copies. The same label released a vinyl edition in 2007, and Industrial Recollections later returned the material to circulation on CD. Each format changes the surface, but the recording’s central character remains tied to tape: compressed violence, saturated middle frequencies, unstable edges, and sounds forced to occupy the same restricted space.
This is Grunt at a particularly blunt intersection between harsh noise and power electronics. Mikko Aspa does not construct the album around clear verse-like vocal passages or neatly separated electronic backgrounds. Voice, feedback, metal, oscillator, and tape overload are joined into one difficult body. When vocals enter, they rarely sit above the noise with complete authority. They are dragged through it, damaged by the same machinery used to amplify them.
“Swarm of Human Locust” develops through accumulation. A rough rhythmic pattern forms beneath the distortion, not a beat in the conventional sense but a recurring mechanical shove. Each repetition seems to carry more debris. Higher frequencies cut across the pulse, while the voice appears as a hostile human trace within a process much larger than speech.
The title suggests population transformed into plague. Human beings become consuming units, moving collectively, exhausting resources, and leaving absence behind them. Grunt does not need spoken explanation to make that idea audible. The track’s pressure comes from multiplication. Every sound appears to attract another until the recording seems overcrowded beyond structural safety.
The analogue four-track is crucial because it does not offer unlimited space. Layers compete. Frequencies mask one another. Distortion enters not only through deliberate effects but through the recording medium being pushed against its limits. The machine does not stand outside the performance as a neutral witness. It participates by compressing every element into a thickened, contaminated surface.
“Iron Rain over Zion” changes the album’s movement. Recorded live in the studio along with its second part, the piece feels less assembled than activated. Electronics rise and strike in repeated downward gestures, creating the sensation of material falling through air. The title combines military destruction with a spiritually and politically charged location, turning bombardment into an image of historical and symbolic violation.
The sound carries that weight without becoming cinematic. There are no realistic explosions or battlefield samples guiding the listener toward a specific scene. Instead, Grunt reduces bombardment to pressure, repetition, impact, and helpless duration. A descending electronic figure returns while harsher material gathers around it. The listener is not shown an event. The listener is placed beneath a mechanism.
The live studio method gives the track an unstable momentum. Changes feel like decisions made inside the sound rather than edits imposed afterward. A frequency grows too large, another is introduced against it, and the whole structure bends under their combined force. The performance survives through response.
This responsiveness distinguishes the album from a perfectly fixed harsh-noise wall. Installation of Blood and Steel can become extremely dense, but its surfaces keep shifting. One layer moves forward, another retreats, and moments of reduced pressure expose smaller mechanical details. The noise remains severe because it changes, not because it refuses all change.
“Iron Rain over Zion Pt2” continues the same material without functioning as a simple reprise. The first part establishes the storm; the second seems to enter its aftermath while the machinery remains operational. Frequencies feel more exposed in places, allowing individual tones and rough pulses to emerge from the broader mass.
Dividing the performance into two tracks also changes the listener’s sense of duration. The title repeats, suggesting that the event has not ended when the first section stops. Part two denies the relief normally provided by a track boundary. The rain continues. The second side of the image begins where the first should have concluded.
The voice becomes particularly effective when only fragments survive. A clearly intelligible declaration can be evaluated at a distance. Grunt’s damaged vocal delivery leaves intention obvious while refusing full access to language. Anger, contempt, urgency, and exertion remain, but the exact sentence is often swallowed by electronics.
This creates an uneasy balance between command and failure. The vocalist sounds as though he is attempting to dominate the noise, yet the noise repeatedly consumes him. Human will is present, but it is not guaranteed control over the system it has created.
The title track closes the album with its longest and most concentrated statement. “Installation of Blood and Steel” sounds less like a description of sculpture than an instruction for constructing an environment. Steel provides structure, machinery, weaponry, and cold permanence. Blood introduces injury, mortality, warmth, and contamination. An installation joins them inside a space the audience must physically enter.
Grunt’s sound makes that union immediate. Metallic harshness forms the frame, while the vocal and overloaded analogue texture provide the bodily element. The electronics are not clean or futuristic. They feel stained, handled, and forced through material resistance. Steel is already carrying blood before the listener arrives.
The track develops through a heavy repeated foundation. Low and middle frequencies create a grinding base while sharper feedback cuts into it. Unlike the swarming opening piece, this final construction feels more vertical and architectural. The sound rises in layers around the listener.
Yet the installation is not stable. Distortion causes the structure to vibrate and deform. Tones slip out of position. Repetition becomes increasingly oppressive because it does not build toward a liberating release. The machinery continues its task without explaining what completion would look like.
The album’s four titles form a tightly connected vocabulary. Swarm, iron rain, Zion, blood, and steel all describe collective force acting upon bodies and places. Nature, industry, warfare, belief, and flesh are pulled into one system. The imagery is large, but the recording remains physically crude and close.
That tension is one of the release’s strengths. The titles imply mass destruction and symbolic scale, while the actual sound originated through limited equipment and an analogue four-track. Grunt does not need technological sophistication to create enormous pressure. Restricted means become part of the hostility.
The original cassette edition strengthens this contradiction. Fifty small objects carried a recording concerned with swarms, bombardment, and monumental installation. The music suggests vast systems, yet it circulated through a narrow underground network by mail, trade, and personal contact. Its power was contained inside a plastic shell that could fit in one hand.
The 2007 LP gave the material more physical breadth. Turning the record divided the two “Iron Rain” sections while emphasizing the long duration of each side. Vinyl also introduced its own low-frequency weight and surface noise, joining another mechanical process to the recording’s analogue violence.
The later Industrial Recollections CD preserves the complete program with sharper access to its internal layers. The transfer reveals that the album is not one continuous gray block. Feedback, rhythm, voice, low pressure, and tape saturation occupy different depths. Digital clarity does not clean the music. It shows how carefully the dirt was arranged.
Installation of Blood and Steel belongs to a period when Grunt’s work was already established but still intensely direct. The project had moved beyond early primitive noise without replacing physical roughness with polished composition. Structure is present, yet it remains embedded inside overload.
The record’s strongest achievement is making force sound organized without making it orderly. The swarm moves collectively, but no individual controls it. Iron falls according to gravity, but destruction beneath it is chaotic. Steel forms a structure, but blood enters every seam.
When the title track ends, the installation does not feel dismantled. The recording simply withdraws access to it. The analogue machinery stops, the vocal pressure disappears, and the room returns with its surfaces apparently intact. Somewhere behind that silence, the swarm is still gathering, iron is still falling, and blood is drying across the steel.