Harakiri for the Sky - 2025 - Scorched Earth

 

AOP Records – AOP127  567.64MB FLAC

Scorched Earth begins with somebody asking to be healed while already admitting that healing may never come. “Heal Me” opens through clean guitar and a distant spoken exchange, briefly creating the impression that Harakiri for the Sky might enter its sixth album quietly. Then the full band arrives with the familiar collision of blast beats, broad melodic guitar and J.J.’s shredded voice. The difference is not in the ingredients. It is in the temperature. Earlier albums often sounded like emotions reaching the point of combustion. Scorched Earth begins after the fire has crossed the landscape and left the surviving figures to determine what can still grow there.
The title operates on two levels. It describes a world marked by war, environmental collapse, political brutality and an increasingly ordinary sense that catastrophe is no longer approaching from the future. It also describes the emotional tactic of destroying everything left behind when a relationship ends, ensuring that no safe route back remains. Harakiri for the Sky has always written about grief, addiction, abandonment and the desire to disappear, but Scorched Earth is less fascinated by disappearance than by finality. The question is no longer whether death might offer escape. It is how to live after an ending has become irreversible.
“Heal Me” establishes that change. J.J.’s lyrics remain crowded with sleeplessness, medication, self-accusation and exhaustion, but the song does not romanticize the collapse. The repeated recognition that healing cannot be found at the feet of those who caused the injury feels less like despair than a boundary finally being understood.
Tim Yatras of Austere contributes vocals, connecting Harakiri for the Sky directly to one of the formative depressive black-metal bands. His presence is not used for a dramatic guest spotlight. The additional voice expands the song’s sense of internal dialogue, as though the plea for healing is being answered by somebody equally damaged.
M.S.’s guitar writing is cleaner and heavier than on Mære. The melodic lines remain central, but they are often supported by thicker chord movement and riffs with a stronger post-metal weight. The songs still stretch beyond ordinary rock dimensions, yet they feel less swollen than the previous album’s eighty-four-minute architecture.
“Keep Me Longing” turns desire into a survival mechanism. Longing hurts, but losing the capacity to long may be worse because longing at least keeps the absent person active inside the imagination. The song’s central melody rises with the brightness Harakiri for the Sky repeatedly places against J.J.’s bleak language. This contrast is no longer surprising, but the band continues to use it effectively.
The guitars do not illustrate sadness through minor-key gloom alone. They create open space, speed and almost triumphant movement. J.J.’s voice then reveals that the movement has nowhere to arrive. Harakiri for the Sky’s songs run because standing still would require acknowledging how little distance has actually been crossed.
“Without You I’m Just a Sad Song” risks collapsing under its title before it begins. The phrase sounds like the final line of an especially dramatic breakup message, direct enough to embarrass anyone who prefers emotional suffering disguised through folklore or cosmic symbolism. Harakiri for the Sky refuses that protection.
The track becomes one of the album’s strongest because it commits entirely to its central image. The speaker has become his own ghost, haunting rooms shaped by another person’s absence. Memories are collected not as comfort but as objects capable of repeatedly injuring sleep. A heart-shaped vacancy remains specific even while the surrounding music expands it toward enormous scale.
The song also demonstrates how Scorched Earth differs from Mære. Mære often poured multiple quotations, images and emotional declarations into the same track until language itself became crowded. Here the writing is more focused. One idea is chosen, repeated and allowed to carry the song’s emotional load.
“No Graves but the Sea” widens the album beyond private romance. The sea can conceal bodies without markers, names or stable burial places. It is movement, border, graveyard and the route taken by people who have no safe land available to them.
The title carries unavoidable associations with migration, war and the unnamed dead lost while crossing water. Harakiri for the Sky does not turn the song into a detailed political report, but its placement on Scorched Earth connects personal grief to a world producing disappearance at industrial scale.
Musically, the track is heavier and more patient. The guitars move in broad waves, while the drumming repeatedly pulls the arrangement from rolling mid-tempo weight into faster black-metal momentum. The sea is represented less by watery effects than by recurrence: advance, retreat and another surge arriving before the previous one has been understood.
“With Autumn I’ll Surrender” is the album’s clearest meeting of landscape and emotional decision. Autumn has long functioned in Harakiri for the Sky’s vocabulary as the season of endings, but surrender here does not mean dramatic suicide. It sounds closer to ceasing resistance against inevitable change.
The opening guitar figure carries immediate melancholy without becoming fragile. When the drums enter, the song accelerates into one of the album’s most accessible structures. The chorus returns often enough to feel almost anthemic, though J.J.’s voice prevents anthem from becoming celebration.
The song’s strength lies in making surrender sound active. Leaves do not decide to fall, but people can decide to stop pretending a season will reverse itself. The scorched-earth image returns in softer form: not everything ends through fire. Some things loosen gradually and are carried away.
“I Was Just Another Promise You Couldn’t Keep” continues the album’s preference for titles that nearly contain their entire emotional argument. It is both accusation and self-reduction. The speaker does not merely claim that a promise was broken. He accepts that he has become one item in a larger history of broken commitments.
The track builds through a darker opening before the guitars open into one of M.S.’s large melodic passages. Harakiri for the Sky remains exceptionally skilled at making a returning riff feel transformed by what has happened between its appearances. The notes may be identical, but the vocal and rhythmic context changes their weight.
That repetition can also be the album’s weakness. The band’s long-form structures are so established that experienced listeners can anticipate several transitions. A clean or restrained opening widens into full-band movement, a melodic figure returns, blast beats intensify the center and a final repetition carries the accumulated emotion outward.
Scorched Earth does not completely escape that formula. Its improvement lies in pacing. The songs are given more individual shape, and the album stops before abundance turns into suffocation.
“Too Late for Goodbyes” closes the standard edition with Serena Cherry of Svalbard, whose voice introduces a different kind of friction. Her screamed delivery does not provide the airy contrast of Neige on Mære. It meets J.J. inside the wound, creating the feeling of two separate perspectives arriving at the same failed farewell.
The title understands that goodbye has a proper time. Spoken too early, it may be betrayal. Spoken too late, it cannot reach the person for whom it was intended. The song occupies that useless delay, when words remain emotionally urgent but have lost their practical destination.
Cherry’s presence prevents the ending from becoming one more solitary male monologue. The second voice does not necessarily represent the absent partner or answer J.J.’s accusations directly. It creates resistance. Grief is no longer projected into empty air without another human pressure entering the arrangement.
The deluxe edition adds a cover of Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” featuring P.G. of Groza. It is an obvious but fitting selection. The original already carries cyclical guitar, fatalism and the sense of being trapped within forces too large to negotiate. Harakiri for the Sky enlarges its pulse into post-black-metal scale without erasing the song’s restraint.
The cover works better than a heavier transformation of a Radiohead song might suggest because “Street Spirit” already depends upon repetition as enclosure. The guitar figure circles without granting escape. J.J.’s harsh voice replaces Thom Yorke’s controlled dread with exposed desperation, but the composition’s fundamental helplessness remains.
“Elysian Fields,” featuring Daniel Lang of Backwards Charm, completes the deluxe version by offering the image of an afterlife reserved for the blessed or heroic dead. After an album of damaged relationships, war, environmental fear and exhausted survival, the title seems to promise relief.
Harakiri for the Sky is too suspicious of peace to let that promise settle easily. Elysium may be another imagined destination used to make suffering tolerable. The fields may exist only as the last beautiful picture formed before the scorched landscape takes over again.
The album artwork by Brvno Gonzalez presents a skeletal, antlered creature within a burned natural world. The figure resembles an animal, deity and corpse assembled from the same remains. Antlers usually suggest growth because they are shed and return, but here they rise from something already overtaken by death.
That image distinguishes Scorched Earth from the solitary human figures associated with earlier records. The emotional damage has spread beyond one person. Nature itself appears mutated by the fire, and whatever survives has done so in a form that cannot return to innocence.
The production supports that wider scale. Guitars are layered but less cloudy, drums carry physical depth and the vocals remain harsh without disappearing into the top of the mix. Acoustic passages and quieter openings provide contrast, but the record does not retreat toward softness. Its clean moments resemble exposed ground between ruined structures.
Harakiri for the Sky has not become optimistic. J.J. has said that explicit longing for death appears less frequently here, but the farewells may be sadder because they are accepted as final. That distinction defines the album. Earlier records often asked whether the speaker could survive. Scorched Earth assumes survival and asks what survival is worth after the desired future has burned away.
The answer is not presented as wisdom. There is no grand lesson about rebuilding stronger. The songs retain resentment, fixation and the wish to return to moments that no longer exist. But they also contain boundaries, perspective and flashes of anger directed beyond the self.
Scorched Earth is therefore not Harakiri for the Sky’s rebirth record. It is a record about learning to recognize the landscape after rebirth has failed to occur. The same guitars still climb. The same voice still tears itself open. The difference is that the fire is no longer being mistaken for light.

Kryptan - 2025 - Violence, Our Power

 

Edged Circle Productions – EDGE089  291.20MB FLAC

Violence, Our Power opens with hands that cannot reach whatever they are pleading toward. “The Unheard Plea from Thousands of Broken Hands” is barely more than a minute of voices, pressure and suspended dread, but it establishes the album’s governing image before the first proper riff appears. Kryptan is interested in violence not only as an action but as accumulated human force, something created when despair, anger and powerlessness are compressed until they become capable of movement. The hands remain unheard. The record becomes their answer.
“I Hope They Die” arrives with a riff large enough to erase any uncertainty about Kryptan’s intentions. Mattias Norrman builds the song from Swedish black metal’s familiar materials: cold tremolo movement, martial rhythm, melodic shadow and the sense that every chord should advance rather than merely create atmosphere. Yet the production refuses nostalgic thinness. Guitars have weight, drums strike with modern depth and Alexander Högbom’s voice occupies the center like a person being torn between command and collapse.
That vocal performance gives Violence, Our Power much of its identity. Högbom does not remain inside one dry black-metal rasp. He shifts between shrieks, deeper roars, spoken accusation and anguished cries that sound increasingly unstable as the songs develop. The variety prevents the album’s polished surfaces from becoming emotionally clean. Even when the instruments sound controlled, the voice suggests that control may be temporary.
Simon Wizén’s solo on “I Hope They Die” briefly cuts through the song’s disciplined violence with a hotter, less contained line. It does not transform the track into melodic heavy metal or provide graceful relief. The solo feels like metal heated until it loses its original shape, then dropped back into the main riff before it cools.
“Vägen Till Våld,” or “The Road to Violence,” is the album’s clearest statement of purpose. Its lyrics describe the distance between thought and action collapsing within seconds. Violence is not presented as heroic combat or ritual strength. It emerges from hopelessness, suicidal certainty and the desire to stop thinking altogether.
The song moves accordingly. Its opening has the forward momentum of a march, but Högbom’s vocals repeatedly disturb that order. Cleanly defined guitar lines are met by cries that sound closer to psychological rupture than satanic proclamation. The refrain becomes frightening because of its clarity. The road is not hidden. The song knows exactly where it leads.
Kryptan’s melodic language owes much to the Swedish black metal that followed Dissection’s fusion of icy tremolo riffing, death-metal structure and memorable guitar movement. Norrman does not disguise that inheritance. Several riffs possess the same grim brightness, producing melody without warmth and grandeur without comfort.
The album is more than a respectful reconstruction because Norrman also allows crust, punk and straightforward heavy-metal momentum into the songs. The guitars sometimes stop gliding through the upper register and begin striking in compact, physical patterns. These changes give the record muscle and prevent its atmosphere from floating above the body.
“The Miracle Inside” contains one of the album’s most immediate riffs, blunt enough to suggest thrash or first-wave black metal before synthesizers begin spreading a colder light behind it. The title sounds hopeful until the music reveals the miracle as something invasive, perhaps the discovery that the body can continue producing darkness after hope has been exhausted.
Kryptan uses synthesizers carefully. They do not coat every track in orchestral fog or announce a symphonic identity. They appear around riffs, widening the environment and occasionally giving a section an almost ecclesiastical scale. Their restraint matters. The album’s power remains located in guitar, drums and voice.
Victor Parri’s drumming is equally important to that physical center. His blast beats are forceful without blurring the riffs, while the slower passages carry enough swing and impact to avoid becoming ceremonial waiting rooms between faster sections. The drums repeatedly turn atmosphere into action.
“Purge” is built around removal, but the music makes purification sound filthy. The song alternates between a relentless central attack and darker stretches where the guitars widen and Högbom’s voice appears to descend beneath them. Purging here is not cleansing in the religious or medical sense. It is the desire to empty the self through force, regardless of what remains afterward.
The album’s strongest quality is its refusal to equate black metal with one tempo. Kryptan can accelerate into full Scandinavian assault, but several of its most effective moments occur when the songs slow enough for the riffs to become visible as structures. A repeated chord begins feeling like a wall. A drum pattern becomes the sound of bodies moving toward it.
The title track is the record’s shortest full song and its most concentrated. “Violence, Our Power” wastes little time constructing an elaborate entrance. The guitars move immediately, the drums force them forward and Högbom delivers the title as both declaration and diagnosis.
The comma is important. “Violence Our Power” would sound like a slogan stamped onto a banner. “Violence, Our Power” addresses violence directly while also identifying it as the source of collective force. The phrase remains unstable. It can be heard as celebration, surrender or recognition that people denied other forms of agency may begin treating destruction as the only power available.
The music does not settle the question. Kryptan clearly enjoys the physical exhilaration of violent metal, but the lyrics repeatedly connect violence to despair, self-destruction and the failure of meaning. The record understands that extreme music can transform terrible impulses into controlled sound without pretending those impulses become harmless in the process.
“Det Är Döden Som Krävs,” meaning “Death Is What Is Required,” brings Nox of Craft into the album’s most openly old-school piece. His voice adds another layer of Swedish black-metal lineage, but the track avoids becoming a ceremonial guest appearance. Nox sounds embedded within the song’s ugliness, another damaged throat entering the same argument.
The riffing has a stronger punk current, particularly when the rhythm drops into a direct forward charge. Then the middle section opens into something more solemn, allowing the guitars and synthesizers to stretch outward before the aggression returns. Death is treated not as theatrical destination but as the cost demanded by whatever system the song is confronting.
Mikael Hanni’s backing vocals throughout the album create similar moments of collective pressure. Högbom may sound isolated, but other voices repeatedly gather behind him. The effect is not communal reassurance. It resembles a crowd forming inside one person’s anger.
“Let Us End This” closes the album with a title that could refer to the record, a relationship, a life, an institution or existence itself. The drums begin with furious momentum, and the guitars carry one of the album’s most memorable melodic shapes. Kryptan ends not by slowing into exhausted ambience but by concentrating everything into one final forward movement.
Högbom’s performance is particularly strong here. His voice rises from rage toward something almost pleading, though the song never reveals whether the plea is for intervention or permission. The phrase “let us end this” contains collective agency, but it also contains ambiguity about what “this” includes.
The cover artwork by Ikosidio gives the album’s violence a ritual body. Dense black ink forms a grotesque vertical structure of limbs, faces and occult suggestion, arranged with enough symmetry to resemble an altar or crowned figure. The details pull the eye inward while the overall shape remains confrontational.
The image fits Kryptan because the album is carefully constructed even when its subject is loss of control. Every riff, vocal layer and synthesizer entrance has been arranged with precision. Violence appears chaotic from within, but Norrman frames it through songwriting strong enough to make each eruption arrive exactly where it causes the most damage.
That control separates Violence, Our Power from black metal that depends upon poor fidelity as proof of sincerity. Kryptan does not sound underground because the instruments are difficult to hear. It sounds underground because its emotional world remains hostile to compromise even when presented with clarity.
The polished production may trouble listeners who prefer Swedish black metal to arrive buried under rehearsal-room grit. The album’s references are also obvious. Dissection, Watain, Craft and the melodic end of Scandinavian extremity remain close enough to identify without excavation.
Kryptan’s achievement lies less in inventing a new black-metal vocabulary than in speaking an established one with conviction. Norrman understands why those older records worked beyond imagery and surface sound. Their riffs could move, their melodies could be remembered and their aggression had shape.
Violence, Our Power takes that architecture and fills it with a modern sense of psychological exhaustion. Its songs are not fantasies of ancient evil returning from remote forests. They concern people reaching the point where thought, hope and identity become intolerable burdens.
The album lasts just over forty minutes, long enough to establish its world without allowing solemnity to harden into boredom. The brief introduction opens the chamber, seven songs drive through it and “Let Us End This” closes the door through force rather than fade.
Kryptan’s violence is therefore not shapeless. It is disciplined, melodic and repeatedly examined from inside. The power comes from knowing exactly when the riff should strike, when the voice should break and when the cold atmosphere should separate long enough to reveal the human despair producing it.
The broken hands remain unheard by the world outside the album. Inside it, they have gathered into fists.

Dismal Euphony - 1997 - Autumn Leaves - The Rebellion of Tides

 

Napalm Records – NPR033  285.00MB FLAC

Autumn Leaves: The Rebellion of Tides opens with keyboards wandering through an empty landscape before the band appears beneath them. “An Autumn Leaf in the Circles of Time” takes more than seven minutes to establish nearly everything Dismal Euphony could do in 1997: black-metal speed, gothic melancholy, female vocals, harsh male screams, acoustic reflection, abrupt rhythmic turns and melodies that seem to arrive from a half-remembered folk song. The music does not move in a straight line. It drifts, surges, retreats and returns altered, behaving less like a conventional metal composition than weather moving across a coastline.
Dismal Euphony came from Stavanger, far from the Oslo-centered mythology that swallowed so much attention around Norwegian black metal. By the time of this second full-length, the group had developed a sound that shared black metal’s cold guitar language without accepting its demand for purity. Keyboards were not buried behind the riffs as decoration. Elin Overskott used them to establish countermelodies, introduce entire sections and create the sensation that the songs existed inside a larger dream environment.
That freedom is what separates Autumn Leaves from the symphonic black metal that soon became standardized. The album does not arrange keyboards like orchestral wallpaper spread evenly behind blast beats. The instruments continually change their relationship. A synthesizer may lead while the guitars provide texture, then disappear as the rhythm turns toward death metal or gothic rock. The songs feel composed by people still discovering how these materials might fit together.
Linn Achre Tveit’s voice is equally important. Her delivery is clear and controlled, but it is not the polished operatic singing that later became almost mandatory within female-fronted gothic metal. She sounds human, sometimes fragile and sometimes severe, entering the arrangements as another character rather than an angelic symbol placed above the violence.
Ole Helgesen’s harsh vocals provide the opposite pressure. His rasp carries black-metal abrasion, but it is thick enough to retain a death-metal weight. When the two voices overlap, Dismal Euphony avoids the predictable beauty-and-beast routine in which femininity represents purity and masculinity represents corruption. Both voices inhabit the same unstable emotional world.
“Simply Dead” follows the long opener with less than three minutes of concentrated movement. The guitars cut quickly, the drums remain restless and the keyboards flash around the edges without slowing the attack. Its compactness is useful after the sprawling first track. Dismal Euphony proves that its identity does not depend upon turning every idea into a miniature suite.
“A Thousand Rivers” is more melodic and immediate. The central guitar line has a bright, windswept quality that could almost be triumphant if the surrounding chords did not keep pulling it downward. The title suggests separate currents gathering into something too large to resist, which describes the album’s compositional method. Black metal, doom, folk melody, gothic atmosphere and progressive structure enter from different directions until their borders become difficult to locate.
Kristoffer Austrheim’s drumming holds these mixtures together. He does not rely upon continuous blast beats to certify extremity. His playing shifts between rapid attack, rolling tom patterns and restrained passages where cymbal movement supplies most of the momentum. The drums keep the songs physically active even when keyboards and voices begin pulling them toward abstraction.
“Mistress Tears” is the album’s gothic center. Its title could have belonged to any number of romantic metal records from the period, but the song avoids sinking into decorative sorrow. The arrangement remains unsettled, moving between heavy riffs, mournful keyboard figures and vocal passages that feel almost theatrical without becoming stagey.
The strongest feature is the way melancholy remains attached to motion. Dismal Euphony does not represent sadness through slow tempo alone. The music can race while sounding grief-stricken, as though emotional collapse has accelerated the body instead of freezing it.
“Carven” begins with a harder guitar attack and places more emphasis on riffing. The keyboards remain active, but the song has sharper edges than the pieces surrounding it. Its melodies feel carved into the rhythm rather than suspended above it, and the concise structure gives every transition unusual force.
The album’s production helps preserve these distinctions. The guitars are clear without becoming glossy, the keyboards occupy real space and the drums retain enough natural room sound to avoid mechanical perfection. Autumn Leaves sounds carefully constructed, but it does not sound sanitized.
That balance mattered in 1997. Symphonic and gothic metal were moving rapidly toward larger budgets, cleaner singing and increasingly elaborate presentation. Dismal Euphony had access to those possibilities but had not yet allowed professionalism to flatten its eccentricity. A strange keyboard tone, abrupt transition or imperfect vocal entrance could remain because atmosphere mattered more than seamless polish.
“Spire” functions as a short instrumental threshold. At less than two minutes, it rises through keyboards and atmosphere without attempting to become a complete statement. Its placement before “In Rememberance of a Shroud” makes the next song feel entered ceremonially rather than simply selected from a track list.
“In Rememberance of a Shroud” is one of the album’s most complete marriages of aggression and mourning. The title’s misspelling remains part of the original artifact, lending the phrase an awkward sincerity that suits the record. A shroud covers the dead, but remembrance removes that covering repeatedly, exposing what burial was supposed to place beyond sight.
The guitars move with a stronger black-metal current, while the keyboards create the sensation of distance opening behind them. Female vocals appear not to soothe the harsh voice but to deepen the sense of absence. Every layer seems to remember the same event from a different position.
Then comes “Splendid Horror,” a fifteen-minute closing structure that occupies roughly one-third of the album. The title summarizes Dismal Euphony’s aesthetic better than any genre label. Horror is present, but it is allowed to become beautiful. Splendor appears, but never without something decaying inside it.
The track unfolds patiently through extended instrumental passages, recurring melodies, changes in pace and long stretches where atmosphere becomes more important than conventional hooks. Its length does not feel designed merely to prove ambition. The song needs time because it repeatedly changes scale, moving from private lament toward something vast and elemental.
There are moments when “Splendid Horror” nearly comes apart. Transitions can feel abrupt, and certain sections appear connected through intuition rather than formal logic. That looseness is valuable. The track behaves like a dream remembered in fragments, where one location becomes another without requiring a visible doorway.
A hidden piece follows after the apparent ending on some versions, turning the album’s final silence into another concealed chamber. It suits a record filled with thresholds, circles, shrouds and unstable time. Even after the declared composition has ended, something remains buried inside the disc.
The cover reinforces the album’s seasonal symbolism. Autumn is not represented as warm nostalgia or decorative fallen leaves. It is the visible stage of decay before winter erases detail. Color becomes richest at the exact moment life is withdrawing from it.
That contradiction runs through the music. Dismal Euphony’s melodies are often beautiful precisely because they sound temporary. A keyboard line appears, glows briefly and is swallowed by distorted guitar. A clean voice rises through the mix and vanishes. A riff returns once before the song abandons it forever.
The subtitle, The Rebellion of Tides, adds movement to the autumnal image. Tides normally obey cycles, but rebellion suggests water refusing its assigned boundaries. The album’s styles behave similarly. Gothic passages refuse to remain soft, black-metal sections open into melody and keyboards repeatedly seize control from the guitars.
This was also the final Dismal Euphony album to feature both Linn Achre Tveit and Elin Overskott. Their departure afterward changed more than the personnel list. The peculiar balance of voices and keyboards that gave the early records their identity could not be reproduced simply by hiring replacements.
The later material became heavier and more direct, but Autumn Leaves preserves the moment when the band’s possibilities still seemed unusually open. Dismal Euphony could have moved further into black metal, gothic rock, progressive music, electronic experimentation or melodic death metal. For forty-six minutes, all those futures remain present at once.
The record is not flawless. Some lyrics carry the purple romanticism common to the era, and certain arrangements contain more ideas than they can fully organize. The keyboards will sound dated to anyone who believes atmosphere should remain invisible behind modern production.
But removing those flaws would remove the album’s personality. Autumn Leaves matters because it sounds created before its ingredients became a dependable market category. Dismal Euphony was not following a completed map of symphonic gothic black metal. The band was drawing one while walking.
The result remains restless, melancholy and gloriously uneven. Guitars rise like cold wind, voices pass through one another and keyboards keep opening doors into rooms the songs have no time to explore. By the end of “Splendid Horror,” the leaf from the first track has completed no simple fall. It has been caught in circles, carried across rivers, buried beneath a shroud and returned by a tide that refuses to obey the moon.

LSZ - 2025 - Draincleaner

 

Not On Label – none  292.92MB FLAC

Draincleaner enters the pipe without checking what has gathered inside it. “Sift (0)” begins with an immediate electrical density, a broad field of low pressure and abrasive detail that seems less composed than released. Frequencies push against one another, disappear beneath heavier movement and return carrying new damage. The title suggests separation, the patient act of passing material through a screen, but the sound does not behave patiently. LSZ pours everything into the mechanism at once and lets the filtration system struggle to remain intact.
LSZ is the harsher, more process-oriented face of Brian Grainger’s Limestone Ziggurat project, a vast ongoing body of work built from modular electronics, feedback systems, generative structures and the belief that a recording can function as evidence of a living circuit. Draincleaner contains two additional formations discovered during the extended patching session that produced “Sift.” That word, “discovered,” is important. Grainger does not describe the pieces as songs written in advance and performed according to plan. They emerged from a configured electronic environment whose behavior could be guided but never completely predicted.
Both pieces were recorded live using the Audioholistics modular system. There are no conventional instruments, no vocals and no melodic theme placed at the center to orient the listener. Instead, the system produces interacting strata of bass, distortion, oscillation, feedback and microscopic rhythmic activity. The performance lies in building conditions under which these materials can collide without immediately collapsing into sameness.
“Sift (0)” lasts more than twenty-three minutes, but its duration does not feel devoted to gradual ambient development. The piece begins busy and remains busy. Change occurs inside the mass rather than through obvious section breaks. A low-frequency surge may briefly dominate before being perforated by higher electronic grit. A cluster of pulses appears almost rhythmic, then becomes submerged beneath a wider roar. Tiny flickers move along the edges like sparks escaping faulty insulation.
The drain-cleaner image fits because the sound is both chemical and mechanical. It suggests a corrosive substance poured into blocked infrastructure, dissolving organic matter while scraping against metal. The recording does not resemble the clean futuristic electronics often associated with modular synthesis. Its surfaces feel wet, oxidized and clogged.
Grainger’s modular system rarely produces the impression of one musician controlling a collection of obedient machines. The circuits appear to possess competing intentions. One layer expands while another attempts to choke it. Feedback threatens to seize the entire field, then retreats before complete saturation. Bass accumulates not as a stable foundation but as pressure moving through enclosed space.
That movement gives Draincleaner a physical identity distinct from a conventional harsh noise wall. The album is certainly dense enough to resemble wall noise from a distance, but sustained attention reveals constant rearrangement. The apparent wall contains channels, leaks and unstable cavities. Texture is not placed on top of a static block. It is the block changing internally.
The subtitle “Sift” also describes the listener’s work. Nothing is highlighted as the correct detail. Attention must pass repeatedly through the total sound, catching different particles each time. A dry crackle may become visible for several seconds before vanishing. A deep oscillation may reveal a slow cycle that was previously hidden beneath surface agitation.
This is deep listening under hostile conditions. The phrase often suggests quiet drones, extended tones and meditative patience, but Draincleaner demands concentration through abundance. It does not lower its voice to invite inspection. It asks whether the listener can continue examining detail while being physically pressed by it.
About halfway through “Sift (0),” the system seems to develop a crude respiratory pattern. Waves swell and contract without settling into breath’s natural regularity. The effect is closer to machinery attempting to imitate lungs through damaged valves. Each expansion carries electrical debris with it, and every contraction leaves residue behind.
The live recording matters here. These changes do not sound edited into a clean dramatic sequence. They occur with the uneven timing of decisions made inside a moving system. Certain textures remain longer than conventional composition might permit, while others disappear before their possibilities have been fully explored.
That refusal to polish the experience into ideal proportions is one of LSZ’s strengths. The recording preserves process, including stretches where the machine appears temporarily trapped inside one behavior. Those sections are not empty. They allow small variations in pressure and grain to become meaningful.
“Sift (00)” extends the session beyond twenty-seven minutes and arrives not as a sequel but as another formation produced by the same electrical ecology. The doubled zero suggests duplication, deeper magnification or another pass through the filtering mechanism. Familiar materials return, but their proportions have changed.
The second piece feels heavier in its lower register. Bass does not simply rumble beneath the activity. It swells into enormous rounded masses that push the bristling upper frequencies toward the edges. The system seems less like a clogged pipe here than the underground network surrounding it, a dark infrastructure carrying pressure beneath streets and buildings.
Higher textures scrape across that bass in irregular sheets. Some resemble radio interference, others granular synthesis or metal dragged across stone. The exact source is irrelevant because LSZ’s sound is built to resist stable identification. A texture may resemble several physical materials at once without settling into any of them.
This ambiguity distinguishes electronic noise from straightforward field recording. A field recording points toward an event that occurred in the world. LSZ creates events whose imagined physical sources are generated after the fact by the listener. Electricity becomes architecture, weather, corrosion or bodily malfunction according to whatever image can temporarily hold it.
Draincleaner’s artwork strengthens this material reading. Its title uses ordinary industrial language rather than occult abstraction or cosmic grandeur. Drain cleaner is ugly, practical and potentially dangerous. It is purchased because something hidden has stopped functioning.
The blockage itself cannot be seen directly. Its presence is inferred from backup, odor and failed flow. The same is true of the album’s structure. The listener hears pressure but not the object causing it. Every surge implies resistance somewhere deeper inside the system.
The record can therefore be heard as a study in forced circulation. Sound continually attempts to pass through an environment too crowded to permit clean movement. Frequencies accumulate, compress and eventually find temporary routes around one another. Nothing flows freely for long.
The modular synthesis is generative without becoming passive. Grainger has built the system, selected its connections and shaped its behavior, but the patch produces consequences beyond simple knob-by-knob authorship. The performance becomes a negotiation between intention and feedback.
This tension places LSZ between composition, improvisation and systems music. The pieces are not random, yet their exact forms could not be reproduced simply by following a score. They are specific weather events created by a particular configuration on particular nights.
Grainger recorded Draincleaner while preparing to relocate to Cleveland, with much of his studio being packed into boxes. That circumstance gives the release an accidental archival quality. These pieces were retrieved while the normal working environment was being dismantled, as though the system had produced more material than could be properly examined before the room disappeared.
The recording site, White Pillar, becomes part of that disappearing context. Modular music is often discussed as though circuits exist independently of rooms, but feedback, monitoring volume and physical resonance always involve architecture. The space hears the system and returns part of it.
Draincleaner preserves that relationship without offering photographs or explanatory diagrams. The room survives only as pressure embedded in the recording. Its dimensions can be imagined through how the bass spreads and how the upper textures seem to rebound from invisible surfaces.
The album’s length may initially appear excessive for such dense material. Fifty minutes of live modular abrasion offers no narrative, melody or recognizable beat to measure progress. But shortening either piece would change its central effect.
The duration allows sound to stop functioning as event and become condition. After ten or fifteen minutes, the listener no longer waits for a decisive transition. Attention adjusts to the internal behavior of the mass. Small changes become enormous because the surrounding environment has established such force.
This is where Draincleaner approaches psychedelia. Not through colorful melodic expansion, but through prolonged sensory pressure altering scale and perception. A minor frequency shift begins resembling a structural collapse. A momentary reduction in density feels like a door opening.
Silence never arrives, but degrees of obstruction change. The system clears one passage and immediately blocks another. The title’s implied cleaning process therefore never reaches completion. There is no triumphant final rush of restored flow.
The pieces end because the performances stop, not because the machine has solved the problem. Whatever filled the pipe remains partly present. Residue coats the interior.
Draincleaner is difficult music, but not because it hides behind intellectual explanation. Its difficulty is bluntly physical. It is loud, crowded and resistant to comfortable orientation. The album asks the listener to enter a structure already under pressure and remain there long enough to perceive its internal life.
LSZ turns modular synthesis away from pristine technological demonstration and toward dirty infrastructure. Electricity tangles, bass backs up and textures scrape against one another inside a system whose purpose has become inseparable from its malfunction.
The cleaner has been poured. The blockage moves, but does not disappear. Somewhere below the surface, the pipes continue arguing with the building.

Small Cruel Party - 1991 - Do you Believe in a Pencil

 

Ferns Recordings – stem_14  424.00MB FLAC

Do You Believe in a Pencil? begins by making the question feel less ridiculous than it looks. A pencil is among the least mysterious objects in a room: wood, graphite, paint, metal ferrule, eraser. It is cheap, portable and nearly silent until a hand puts it against a surface. Small Cruel Party removes the hand’s obvious intention and listens to what remains. Scraping, rubbing, faint impact and environmental residue slowly enlarge until the familiar object becomes difficult to distinguish from the room around it. Belief enters where identification fails.
The 1991 CD was originally divided into a beginning and an ending, without a conventional middle announced between them. That structure immediately shifts attention away from songs, development and climax. Something starts, something eventually stops, and the long region between those facts remains open to examination.
The 2022 reissue joins the two sections into one seventy-three-minute track, making the work’s continuity even more severe. There is no track change offering reassurance that one idea has concluded and another has begun. The listener must determine whether a faint shift in pressure represents a new event or merely a different angle on the same one.
Small Cruel Party was the work of William Key Ransone, whose recordings consistently focused on sound as matter rather than sound as illustration. Do You Believe in a Pencil? does not appear interested in composing a portrait of a pencil, imitating writing or turning stationery into a cute conceptual instrument. The title behaves more like a challenge to attention. Can an ordinary object support sustained belief once its name and practical use have been stripped away?
The recording’s most recognizable materials are metallic. Thin surfaces rub together, scrape, tremble and occasionally strike with a dry, enclosed resonance. These sounds do not carry the monumental weight of industrial noise. They remain small enough to suggest objects handled close to a microphone, where slight friction becomes enormous because distance has been removed.
Contact-microphone and close-miking practices changed experimental music by revealing that objects contain internal acoustic worlds unavailable to ordinary hearing. A table is not simply a flat support. Metal is not one stable timbre. Wood does not remain quiet until struck. Pressure, grain, vibration and surface resistance all produce activity before anything resembles a musical note.
Small Cruel Party treats that hidden activity without turning it into demonstration. The listener is not guided through an educational sequence of object A, object B and object C. Sources overlap and lose their names. A scrape may resemble metal, stone, graphite or a damaged tape mechanism. The ambiguity is part of the composition.
Low-fidelity environmental sound surrounds these close details. Room noise, distant movement and recording-system hiss prevent the central objects from appearing in isolation. Nothing has been cleaned for display. The work preserves the atmosphere in which the sounds were captured, including whatever cannot be separated from the intended action.
That dirt matters. A perfectly silent studio would make each microscopic event feel scientific, presented beneath glass for inspection. Do You Believe in a Pencil? sounds inhabited. The room remains active around the object, and the recording equipment announces its own limitations.
The result is sometimes described as half-drone, an accurate phrase because the piece sustains continuity without relying upon one pure held tone. Its drone is assembled from friction, environmental residue and the persistence of listening. A sound fades, but another occupies a similar range. The surface changes while the pressure remains.
At ordinary volume, much of the record can seem nearly empty. Increase the level and a dense field begins appearing: faint grains, low rumble, thin metallic whistles and movements that may have been present for minutes before attention recognized them. The recording teaches the ear to stop waiting for something important to happen.
This is not silence in the Cagean sense of proving that absolute silence does not exist. Small Cruel Party is more tactile and less philosophical in presentation. The question is not whether the room contains sound. It is how close listening changes the apparent size of an event.
A pencil moving across paper may be trivial from several feet away. Placed against a sensitive microphone, it becomes abrasion, impact and repeating resistance. The mark left on the page is visual evidence of a physical struggle: graphite breaking from its core and being caught by paper fibers.
The title’s wording makes that simple process strange. “Do you believe in a pencil?” is not the same as asking whether pencils exist. Belief implies doubt, faith or an invisible power operating through the object. The pencil becomes a tiny religious problem.
Experimental music often gains authority through severe titles, scientific terminology or references to philosophy. Small Cruel Party chooses a phrase that could have been spoken by a child, a prankster or somebody beginning to lose confidence in the stability of ordinary things. Its humor keeps the work from becoming pompous.
The question may also point toward notation. A pencil is a tool for planning music, writing scores, making corrections and preserving compositional decisions before sound exists. Do You Believe in a Pencil? largely rejects that kind of visible order. Its events feel discovered through handling and listening rather than executed from a page.
If the pencil represents composition, belief in it means trusting that marks can govern sound. Small Cruel Party turns the relationship around. The object produces sound before it produces instructions, and those sounds resist being written down in any useful conventional notation.
How would a score represent one metal surface rubbing another with slightly changing pressure for several minutes? How would it distinguish intended room noise from accidental room noise? Notation could describe actions, but the recording’s identity lies in tiny consequences that no instruction could reproduce exactly.
The original beginning-and-ending division quietly acknowledges this resistance. Those titles describe placement rather than content. They do not claim that a section is about metal, wood, belief or any particular emotion. They indicate only where the listener has entered and where the listening period will terminate.
Inside that broad frame, time becomes granular. Long stretches seem motionless until a small alteration suddenly reveals how much has changed. A rough surface grows smoother. A metallic vibration loses energy. A low environmental tone becomes noticeable only when it disappears.
The record’s patience never becomes soothing in the manner of ambient music designed to soften a room. Its quietness can be uncomfortable because it places responsibility on the listener. There is no melody to follow and no dramatic rhythm promising that attention will be rewarded at predictable intervals.
Instead, the work produces a mild state of suspicion. Every faint sound might matter. Every scrape may contain another scrape beneath it. A moment that appears accidental may have been carefully placed, while a seemingly deliberate gesture may be nothing more than the room intruding.
That uncertainty is where Small Cruel Party differs from more theatrical forms of musique concrète. The recording does not rush through startling contrasts or construct a montage of dramatically recognizable sources. It remains close to a narrow family of textures until familiarity begins dissolving them.
Metal rubbing against metal initially announces itself clearly. After enough repetition, it stops representing metal and becomes a moving band of frequency. The mind then searches for another image: machinery, insects, wire under tension, a distant train, a hinge turning in an abandoned building.
Those images are not supplied by the artist. They are side effects of the ear attempting to stabilize uncertain material. Do You Believe in a Pencil? keeps removing that stability by allowing each texture to change just enough to escape its latest interpretation.
The seventy-three-minute reissue intensifies this process. At that length, the piece cannot remain an interesting miniature study. It becomes an environment, then a condition. Listening changes from identifying sounds to living temporarily among them.
This duration also exposes the physical setting in which the record is heard. A refrigerator starts, a vehicle passes outside, the listener shifts in a chair. Domestic sounds join the recording so easily that the boundary between album and room becomes unreliable.
That is one possible meaning of belief here. Believing in the pencil means accepting that no object is acoustically insignificant. The smallest tool can reorganize perception once attention has been applied long enough.
Yet the record does not sentimentalize smallness. It does not turn unnoticed sounds into precious little miracles. Its textures can be dry, irritating and stubbornly uneventful. The pencil does not become magical because an artist has touched it.
Instead, Small Cruel Party makes magic appear as a problem of scale. Move close enough and the object becomes a landscape. Remain there long enough and the landscape becomes abstract. Step back afterward and the ordinary object has not changed, but confidence in its ordinariness has weakened.
The original 1991 CD belongs to a period when producing an hour-long compact disc of such private, reduced sound was itself an unusual commitment. CD promised clarity, permanence and uninterrupted duration, qualities more commonly used to showcase elaborate production. Small Cruel Party used them to preserve friction, room tone and microscopic uncertainty.
The format allows the piece to proceed without the side break demanded by vinyl or cassette. Even the original two-part structure does not behave like two equal sides of an object. Beginning and ending seem less like separate tracks than two labels attached to the edges of one extended listening act.
The later reissue’s single-track edit makes this logic explicit. The work is not a collection. It is a line drawn very slowly across seventy-three minutes.
A pencil makes a line by leaving part of itself behind. Every mark slightly reduces the graphite core. Writing is controlled erosion.
Do You Believe in a Pencil? works through a related process. Objects rub, surfaces lose material, tape records the residue and listening wears away certainty about what produced it. By the end, the pencil has not delivered a message. It has demonstrated that every message begins with friction.
The question remains unanswered because answering it would shrink the record back into an idea. Small Cruel Party keeps the object open, poised between tool and sound source, evidence and joke, recognizable thing and inexplicable vibration.
The pencil lies on the table exactly where it was left. After seventy-three minutes, it is much harder to believe that it is doing nothing.

VA - 2008 - North Korean Compilation 'Juche'

 

DPRK – none  351.06MB FLAC

Do You Believe in a Pencil? begins by making the question feel less ridiculous than it looks. A pencil is among the least mysterious objects in a room: wood, graphite, paint, metal ferrule, eraser. It is cheap, portable and nearly silent until a hand puts it against a surface. Small Cruel Party removes the hand’s obvious intention and listens to what remains. Scraping, rubbing, faint impact and environmental residue slowly enlarge until the familiar object becomes difficult to distinguish from the room around it. Belief enters where identification fails.
The 1991 CD was originally divided into a beginning and an ending, without a conventional middle announced between them. That structure immediately shifts attention away from songs, development and climax. Something starts, something eventually stops, and the long region between those facts remains open to examination.
The 2022 reissue joins the two sections into one seventy-three-minute track, making the work’s continuity even more severe. There is no track change offering reassurance that one idea has concluded and another has begun. The listener must determine whether a faint shift in pressure represents a new event or merely a different angle on the same one.
Small Cruel Party was the work of William Key Ransone, whose recordings consistently focused on sound as matter rather than sound as illustration. Do You Believe in a Pencil? does not appear interested in composing a portrait of a pencil, imitating writing or turning stationery into a cute conceptual instrument. The title behaves more like a challenge to attention. Can an ordinary object support sustained belief once its name and practical use have been stripped away?
The recording’s most recognizable materials are metallic. Thin surfaces rub together, scrape, tremble and occasionally strike with a dry, enclosed resonance. These sounds do not carry the monumental weight of industrial noise. They remain small enough to suggest objects handled close to a microphone, where slight friction becomes enormous because distance has been removed.
Contact-microphone and close-miking practices changed experimental music by revealing that objects contain internal acoustic worlds unavailable to ordinary hearing. A table is not simply a flat support. Metal is not one stable timbre. Wood does not remain quiet until struck. Pressure, grain, vibration and surface resistance all produce activity before anything resembles a musical note.
Small Cruel Party treats that hidden activity without turning it into demonstration. The listener is not guided through an educational sequence of object A, object B and object C. Sources overlap and lose their names. A scrape may resemble metal, stone, graphite or a damaged tape mechanism. The ambiguity is part of the composition.
Low-fidelity environmental sound surrounds these close details. Room noise, distant movement and recording-system hiss prevent the central objects from appearing in isolation. Nothing has been cleaned for display. The work preserves the atmosphere in which the sounds were captured, including whatever cannot be separated from the intended action.
That dirt matters. A perfectly silent studio would make each microscopic event feel scientific, presented beneath glass for inspection. Do You Believe in a Pencil? sounds inhabited. The room remains active around the object, and the recording equipment announces its own limitations.
The result is sometimes described as half-drone, an accurate phrase because the piece sustains continuity without relying upon one pure held tone. Its drone is assembled from friction, environmental residue and the persistence of listening. A sound fades, but another occupies a similar range. The surface changes while the pressure remains.
At ordinary volume, much of the record can seem nearly empty. Increase the level and a dense field begins appearing: faint grains, low rumble, thin metallic whistles and movements that may have been present for minutes before attention recognized them. The recording teaches the ear to stop waiting for something important to happen.
This is not silence in the Cagean sense of proving that absolute silence does not exist. Small Cruel Party is more tactile and less philosophical in presentation. The question is not whether the room contains sound. It is how close listening changes the apparent size of an event.
A pencil moving across paper may be trivial from several feet away. Placed against a sensitive microphone, it becomes abrasion, impact and repeating resistance. The mark left on the page is visual evidence of a physical struggle: graphite breaking from its core and being caught by paper fibers.
The title’s wording makes that simple process strange. “Do you believe in a pencil?” is not the same as asking whether pencils exist. Belief implies doubt, faith or an invisible power operating through the object. The pencil becomes a tiny religious problem.
Experimental music often gains authority through severe titles, scientific terminology or references to philosophy. Small Cruel Party chooses a phrase that could have been spoken by a child, a prankster or somebody beginning to lose confidence in the stability of ordinary things. Its humor keeps the work from becoming pompous.
The question may also point toward notation. A pencil is a tool for planning music, writing scores, making corrections and preserving compositional decisions before sound exists. Do You Believe in a Pencil? largely rejects that kind of visible order. Its events feel discovered through handling and listening rather than executed from a page.
If the pencil represents composition, belief in it means trusting that marks can govern sound. Small Cruel Party turns the relationship around. The object produces sound before it produces instructions, and those sounds resist being written down in any useful conventional notation.
How would a score represent one metal surface rubbing another with slightly changing pressure for several minutes? How would it distinguish intended room noise from accidental room noise? Notation could describe actions, but the recording’s identity lies in tiny consequences that no instruction could reproduce exactly.
The original beginning-and-ending division quietly acknowledges this resistance. Those titles describe placement rather than content. They do not claim that a section is about metal, wood, belief or any particular emotion. They indicate only where the listener has entered and where the listening period will terminate.
Inside that broad frame, time becomes granular. Long stretches seem motionless until a small alteration suddenly reveals how much has changed. A rough surface grows smoother. A metallic vibration loses energy. A low environmental tone becomes noticeable only when it disappears.
The record’s patience never becomes soothing in the manner of ambient music designed to soften a room. Its quietness can be uncomfortable because it places responsibility on the listener. There is no melody to follow and no dramatic rhythm promising that attention will be rewarded at predictable intervals.
Instead, the work produces a mild state of suspicion. Every faint sound might matter. Every scrape may contain another scrape beneath it. A moment that appears accidental may have been carefully placed, while a seemingly deliberate gesture may be nothing more than the room intruding.
That uncertainty is where Small Cruel Party differs from more theatrical forms of musique concrète. The recording does not rush through startling contrasts or construct a montage of dramatically recognizable sources. It remains close to a narrow family of textures until familiarity begins dissolving them.
Metal rubbing against metal initially announces itself clearly. After enough repetition, it stops representing metal and becomes a moving band of frequency. The mind then searches for another image: machinery, insects, wire under tension, a distant train, a hinge turning in an abandoned building.
Those images are not supplied by the artist. They are side effects of the ear attempting to stabilize uncertain material. Do You Believe in a Pencil? keeps removing that stability by allowing each texture to change just enough to escape its latest interpretation.
The seventy-three-minute reissue intensifies this process. At that length, the piece cannot remain an interesting miniature study. It becomes an environment, then a condition. Listening changes from identifying sounds to living temporarily among them.
This duration also exposes the physical setting in which the record is heard. A refrigerator starts, a vehicle passes outside, the listener shifts in a chair. Domestic sounds join the recording so easily that the boundary between album and room becomes unreliable.
That is one possible meaning of belief here. Believing in the pencil means accepting that no object is acoustically insignificant. The smallest tool can reorganize perception once attention has been applied long enough.
Yet the record does not sentimentalize smallness. It does not turn unnoticed sounds into precious little miracles. Its textures can be dry, irritating and stubbornly uneventful. The pencil does not become magical because an artist has touched it.
Instead, Small Cruel Party makes magic appear as a problem of scale. Move close enough and the object becomes a landscape. Remain there long enough and the landscape becomes abstract. Step back afterward and the ordinary object has not changed, but confidence in its ordinariness has weakened.
The original 1991 CD belongs to a period when producing an hour-long compact disc of such private, reduced sound was itself an unusual commitment. CD promised clarity, permanence and uninterrupted duration, qualities more commonly used to showcase elaborate production. Small Cruel Party used them to preserve friction, room tone and microscopic uncertainty.
The format allows the piece to proceed without the side break demanded by vinyl or cassette. Even the original two-part structure does not behave like two equal sides of an object. Beginning and ending seem less like separate tracks than two labels attached to the edges of one extended listening act.
The later reissue’s single-track edit makes this logic explicit. The work is not a collection. It is a line drawn very slowly across seventy-three minutes.
A pencil makes a line by leaving part of itself behind. Every mark slightly reduces the graphite core. Writing is controlled erosion.
Do You Believe in a Pencil? works through a related process. Objects rub, surfaces lose material, tape records the residue and listening wears away certainty about what produced it. By the end, the pencil has not delivered a message. It has demonstrated that every message begins with friction.
The question remains unanswered because answering it would shrink the record back into an idea. Small Cruel Party keeps the object open, poised between tool and sound source, evidence and joke, recognizable thing and inexplicable vibration.
The pencil lies on the table exactly where it was left. After seventy-three minutes, it is much harder to believe that it is doing nothing.

Urn - 2025 - Demon Steel

 

Osmose Productions – OPCD551  343.33MB FLAC

Demon Steel has the kind of cover that should be painted across the side of a van immediately. A skeletal spider-demon crouches in the snow, scraping a bow across a glowing cello while a dead cardinal or bishop looms behind it, wrapped in a tremendous red cloak. Chains run through the scene. Hooks pierce the figures. Snow falls against a deep blue night while the instrument burns with yellow light, as though infernal music itself has been trapped inside the wood and is now melting its way out. This is not tasteful ambiguity. It is heavy metal artwork performing a flying elbow drop from the top rope.
All Things Rotten gives the image the dense, hand-painted quality of an old fantasy paperback discovered beside a pile of damaged role-playing manuals. The central creature is immediately absurd and genuinely sinister. Its long bone limbs radiate outward like the spokes of a wheel, giving the composition violent motion even though the figure remains planted in the snow. The cello’s curved body mirrors the demon’s abdomen, making instrument and creature resemble parts of the same anatomy. It does not simply play the music. It appears to produce the music through its own burning organs.
Behind it, the clerical figure contributes another layer of sacrilege. The enormous mitre and crimson robes evoke religious authority, but the face beneath them has rotted into delighted corruption. The bishop does not recoil from the demon. He appears to conduct, supervise or enjoy the performance. Church ceremony has become a frozen outdoor recital for monsters.
The chains complicate the relationship. They might restrain the creatures, connect them or function as the strings of some larger unseen instrument. Hooks enter from outside the frame, suggesting that even these demons are being manipulated by forces beyond the picture. The entire image feels trapped inside a cosmic torture device that has somehow formed a band.
The snow is what makes the cover truly wicked. Fire and hell imagery are expected from blackened thrash metal. Snow introduces an opposing element, placing the molten instrument in a landscape cold enough to preserve the dead. Yellow flame, red robes and blue ice collide with the same directness as Urn’s music, where venomous black metal, charging thrash and proudly melodic heavy-metal leads are forced into one body.
“Retribution of the Dead” raises that body from the ground. Immense chords, pounding drums and repeated cries of “Rise!” turn the ninety-second introduction into a resurrection scene. It is simple, theatrical and completely committed. Urn understands that an opening does not need to conceal its purpose. The dead are commanded upward, the snow cracks and the record begins moving.
“Heir of Tyrants” immediately demonstrates how far Urn has traveled from the rawer blackened thrash of its early years. The attack remains fast and hostile, but the guitars are packed with melodic detail. Leads climb above the rhythm, solos cut across the verses and the chorus carries the broad shape of traditional heavy metal without cleaning the dirt from its boots.
Jarno Hämäläinen’s voice sounds aged in exactly the right way. His rasp is no longer the thin shriek of somebody trying to appear inhuman. It has become a dry, commanding croak, roughened by decades but capable of cutting clearly through the guitars. Occasional clean or semi-clean wails add a wonderfully battered grandeur, like a tyrant attempting to sing from a throne while the palace collapses.
“Are You Friends with Your Demons” takes the album’s ridiculous-serious balance and places it directly in the title. The question could sound like a slogan printed on novelty merchandise, but Urn treats it as a legitimate spiritual inquiry. The chorus rises through layered guitar lines while the rhythm keeps charging beneath it. The demons are not hidden psychological metaphors waiting to be decoded. They are drinking companions, commanders and permanent household residents.
The addition of a second guitarist allows Demon Steel to remain busy without becoming confused. Arto Järvinen and Pasi Salmio divide rhythm, harmony and lead work until nearly every song contains some small guitar event worth following. One instrument gallops while another curls around it. A solo appears, vanishes and leaves a melodic fragment behind. The songs remain direct, but their surfaces are continually active.
“Burning Blood’s Curse” is among the clearest examples. Its main riff has the clipped physical force of thrash, while the leads brighten the song without making it friendly. The contrast recalls the great trick of classic heavy metal: melodies can be memorable without becoming soft, and speed can create exhilaration without reducing menace.
Urn has no interest in black metal purity. Demon Steel openly allows Iron Maiden-like gallops, Running Wild-sized choruses and flashes of melodic death metal into its infernal machinery. “Turbulence of Misanthropy” practically rides into battle, its title joining atmospheric chaos to ordinary hatred of humanity. The track keeps expanding through melodic leads until its misanthropy begins sounding strangely victorious.
That triumphant quality is central to the album. Urn does not create the defeated, frostbitten atmosphere associated with much Finnish black metal. These songs raise fists. They want movement, volume and the pleasure of recognizing a riff when it returns. Evil is presented as energizing rather than spiritually exhausting.
“Iron Star” could almost serve as the album’s alternate title. Iron supplies weight, weapons and machinery. A star supplies guidance, distance and impossible fire. The song joins them through rapid drumming and a galloping central riff that seems designed to pull an entire festival crowd forward.
Kari Salminen’s drumming gives the album its momentum without turning every track into a blur. Double bass drives the faster sections, but his best work appears in the transitions, where a change in cymbal pattern or kick placement turns one riff from attack into anthem. The drums remain physical and clear throughout Tomi Uusitupa’s mix.
The production is polished enough to expose every melodic guitar line but retains enough grit to prevent the record from sounding like a modern power-metal album wearing corpse paint. Bass remains audible beneath the rhythm guitars, drums strike rather than click and the vocals retain an unpleasant human grain.
“Wings of Inferno” slows the record into a heavier stomp. Its broad rhythm allows Hämäläinen’s voice more room, and his rough clean singing gives the track the feeling of an infernal drinking hymn. The song demonstrates that Urn’s power no longer depends upon constant acceleration. At mid-tempo, the riffs gain mass and the album’s heroic-metal tendencies become even more visible.
“Cold Void Skin” brings the cover’s freezing landscape back into the music. The title imagines emptiness not as an abstract space but as a surface capable of touching and enclosing the body. The guitar melodies retain brightness, yet the rhythm beneath them feels colder and more severe.
“Ruthless Paranoia” shifts closer to blackened thrash, with sharper riffing and a nervous forward snap. Paranoia is perfectly suited to this kind of guitar movement because every lead seems to look over its shoulder while the rhythm continues running. The song contains one of the album’s strongest balances between Urn’s old savagery and its newer melodic confidence.
“Predator of Spiritforms” closes the album by giving invisible beings a natural enemy. Its title sounds like an unused monster from a 1980s sword-and-sorcery toy line, which means it belongs perfectly beside the spider-cellist on the cover. The track gathers the album’s gallops, snarls and bright lead guitars into one final pursuit.
Demon Steel is not trying to reinvent blackened thrash. Urn’s influences stand in plain view: Venom’s filthy momentum, Germanic thrash, Scandinavian black metal, traditional heavy-metal melody and the epic charge of bands that understood leather, spikes and ridiculous language as essential creative tools.
The achievement lies in how naturally those elements now fit together. Earlier Urn could sound like a violent band occasionally discovering a memorable riff. Demon Steel sounds like a band building entire songs around riffs worth remembering while refusing to lose the violence.
That maturity never becomes respectable. The record still contains demons, burning blood, tyrants, infernal wings, ruthless paranoia and predators hunting spiritual entities. Nothing is softened by irony or explained through sophisticated symbolism.
The cover makes the same commitment. It could only belong to a metal record, and preferably one purchased because the artwork was too insane to leave behind. The spider-demon keeps sawing at its molten cello while the dead bishop watches, chains tightening and snow gathering around their feet.
Whether they are imprisoned, performing or summoning the album itself hardly matters. The bow continues moving. The instrument burns brighter. Somewhere inside the ice, demon steel is being forged one riff at a time.

Oranssi Pazuzu - 2009 - Muukalainen Puhuu

 

Violent Journey Records – VJR020  293.78MB FLAC

Muukalainen puhuu begins with a crow circling somewhere beyond the edge of the atmosphere. “Korppi” emerges through a thin psychedelic guitar figure, pulsing bass and keyboards that seem to illuminate an abandoned landscape from below. The rhythm moves with deliberate simplicity, allowing each repetition to loosen the music from ordinary time. Then Jun-His enters with a scorched rasp that belongs unmistakably to black metal, but the world surrounding him has already drifted far beyond the forest.
Oranssi Pazuzu’s debut did not sound like a metal band cautiously adding psychedelic decoration to an established style. The five musicians approached black metal as one unstable element among several. Tremolo guitar, harsh vocals and blast beats could appear beside krautrock repetition, dub-like bass, primitive synthesizers, surf guitar, free-form noise and the glowing organs of late-1960s psychedelic rock.
The band’s name announces the collision. “Oranssi” means orange in Finnish, while Pazuzu is the ancient Mesopotamian wind demon made famous to modern audiences by The Exorcist. Color and demonology, sunlight and possession, cheap brightness and ancient dread are welded together before the record even begins.
“Korppi” establishes the method with unusual confidence. Its central groove is almost relaxed, built from bass and drums moving in a circular pattern rather than charging toward a conventional climax. Guitar lines appear at the edges like signals caught by damaged receivers. The harsh vocal does not dominate the arrangement. It moves through the sound as another hostile frequency.
Black metal traditionally places nature outside civilization, using mountains, snow and forests as symbols of purity or isolation. Muukalainen puhuu looks upward instead. Its landscapes are planetary, chemically altered and psychologically unstable. The wilderness is no longer a remote Finnish woodland. It is the distance between recognizable human thought and whatever may be speaking through it.
“Danjon Nolla” increases the motion without abandoning hypnosis. The bassline carries a dark psychedelic swing, while guitars repeat short figures until they begin bending around the rhythm. Keyboards glow behind the band rather than supplying grand symphonic atmosphere.
The title refers to the Danjon scale used to measure the darkness of a lunar eclipse, with zero indicating an exceptionally dark moon. That astronomical idea fits the music’s peculiar light. Muukalainen puhuu is not completely black. Orange, violet and poisonous green seem to leak through its darkness, creating the impression of an eclipse viewed through contaminated glass.
Jun-His’ vocals are essential because they prevent the album’s psychedelic drift from becoming comfortable. His voice sounds dry, distant and badly damaged, as though transmitted from a body that cannot survive the environment containing it. The words are Finnish, but their emotional function remains clear even when their literal meaning is unavailable. They arrive as warnings, observations or involuntary communications.
“Uraanisula” moves closer to radioactive blues. Its title suggests molten uranium, and the guitar has a liquid, corrosive quality. The riff does not cut with black metal’s usual frozen sharpness. It bubbles, stretches and leaves residue.
Ontto’s bass repeatedly becomes the album’s central instrument. Rather than remaining underneath the guitars, it supplies many of the most memorable movements. Its warm, rounded tone connects the record to psychedelic rock and dub, giving the music a bodily pull even when keyboards and guitars are attempting to leave the planet.
Korjak’s drumming is similarly resistant to genre discipline. Blast beats appear, but they are only one available form of motion. He uses tom-heavy patterns, rock grooves and steady motorik repetition, allowing the songs to build pressure without depending upon constant speed.
“Kuolleen Porton Muistolle” makes the dub connection explicit. Its title translates roughly as “In Memory of a Dead Whore,” but the music is less interested in narrative shock than diseased atmosphere. Bass and drums create a hollow nocturnal pulse while echo seems to open chambers around the instruments.
Dub production traditionally removes expected elements, leaving bass, percussion and reverberation to expose the skeleton of a song. Oranssi Pazuzu performs a related operation upon black metal. The guitars occasionally retreat, revealing how much threat can be generated by low frequencies and empty space.
The track feels like music leaking from a club whose occupants disappeared several hours earlier. Rhythm continues after the social purpose of rhythm has vanished. Echo repeats gestures nobody remains to answer.
“Muukalainen puhuu” gives the alien its voice. The title track begins with a patient, almost ceremonial movement before harsher guitar and vocals enter. The alien does not arrive through a cinematic spacecraft or electronic special effect. It speaks through the band’s existing instruments, taking possession of bass, organ and distorted guitar.
This is one of the album’s central ideas. The extraterrestrial is not necessarily a creature outside humanity. It may be the voice produced when consciousness becomes unfamiliar to itself. Psychedelia has always used outer space as an image of inner transformation. Oranssi Pazuzu turns that voyage hostile.
Evil’s keyboards and percussion are especially important here. His sounds do not imitate expensive analog grandeur. They hiss, wobble and flicker with the unstable charm of old science-fiction equipment. A note can resemble an organ, laboratory oscillator or warning system without settling into one identity.
The title track gradually gathers intensity, but its climax remains strange rather than triumphant. The rhythm tightens, vocals become more urgent and the guitars rise, yet the song never offers the clean release expected from a rock crescendo. The transmission simply becomes stronger.
“Myöhempien Aikojen Pyhien Teatterin Rukoilijasirkka” carries the album’s most enormous title, translating approximately as “The Praying Mantis of the Theatre of Latter-Day Saints.” It is absurd, occult and faintly comic, a combination Oranssi Pazuzu handles better than solemn cosmic language.
The track is also among the record’s most violent. Tremolo guitars and rapid drumming drag the music closer to traditional black metal, but keyboard flashes and shifting rhythms prevent the attack from becoming straightforward. The praying mantis is an ideal creature for the band: alien in appearance, patient, devotional in posture and violently efficient once it moves.
Oranssi Pazuzu’s humor matters. Cosmic and occult music can easily become self-important, especially when song titles suggest galaxies, demons and altered consciousness. Muukalainen puhuu maintains enough weirdness to puncture its own grandeur. The band sounds genuinely committed to its atmosphere without behaving as though every synthesizer noise has revealed a sacred universal truth.
“Suuri Pää Taivaasta” translates as “A Great Head from the Sky,” an image that belongs equally to religious vision, hallucination and cheap horror cinema. The track begins with slow, ominous movement, allowing the title’s gigantic head to remain suspended above the listener before the band grows more forceful.
The atmosphere here is less an open space voyage than a psychedelic horror film. Organ tones hover, guitars scrape and the rhythm seems to move through fog. The great head does not explain its presence. It simply occupies the sky, large enough to reorganize everything beneath it.
This refusal to explain gives the album its power. Later Oranssi Pazuzu records would become more elaborate, heavier and more compositionally controlled, but the debut retains the unsettling quality of musicians discovering a language while already speaking it.
“Kangastus 1968” directly invokes psychedelia’s historical period. “Kangastus” can mean mirage, and 1968 functions as both a year and a compressed cultural symbol: political revolt, psychedelic expansion, communal dreams and their approaching collapse.
The music does not imitate one specific 1968 band. It creates a mirage of the era through organ, loose guitar, repeated bass and studio haze. The past appears in distorted form, viewed across four decades and filtered through Finnish black metal.
This is not nostalgic revivalism. Oranssi Pazuzu does not attempt to restore psychedelic rock’s lost innocence. The band assumes the dream has already curdled. The bright colors remain, but they illuminate paranoia, environmental danger and mental disintegration.
“Kerjettiläiskirkko” closes the album with its longest journey. The title means “Beggar Church,” joining religious architecture to poverty and exclusion. The track begins with a slow, stalking bass movement while keyboards build a dim sanctuary around it.
The church does not sound grand. It feels assembled from scraps, occupied by people denied entrance elsewhere. Guitars growl and shimmer above the rhythm, occasionally opening into wider psychedelic space before collapsing back into the central pulse.
As the piece develops, the album’s opposing forces stop behaving like separate genres. Black metal is no longer the violent material and psychedelia the atmospheric material. The repetition itself becomes oppressive. The keyboards become threatening. Even the groove begins to feel like entrapment.
The album cover captures this fusion through a landscape that appears biological, planetary and painted under chemical influence. Its orange and dark tones suggest sunset on an unfamiliar world, but forms within the image resist stable scale. They might be mountains, tissue, smoke or organisms growing across the surface.
Nothing on Muukalainen puhuu appears fully solid. Guitar riffs bend, rhythms circle, voices arrive through haze and the landscape seems capable of breathing. The record’s relatively rough production strengthens that instability. Instruments overlap, edges blur and certain sounds appear to leak through the walls of the mix.
Later Oranssi Pazuzu albums would achieve much greater sonic depth. Kosmonument expanded the cosmic narrative, Valonielu sharpened the songwriting and Värähtelijä transformed repetition into immense psychedelic architecture. Muukalainen puhuu is smaller and less controlled, but its uncertainty cannot be recreated through refinement.
The band already possessed its essential identity in 2009. Black metal could provide hostility without establishing boundaries. Psychedelia could offer expansion without becoming gentle. Krautrock repetition could create trance, while dub could turn absence and bass into forms of menace.
The alien does not speak in a language humanity has never heard. It uses familiar materials incorrectly. A black-metal scream drifts across a bass groove. A blast beat interrupts an organ meditation. A surf-like guitar line bends beneath radioactive clouds.
By the end of “Kerjettiläiskirkko,” the transmission has not been translated. It has changed the receiver. The orange demon remains somewhere inside the machinery, speaking through static while the instruments continue circling an unfamiliar sun.

The Haters - 2025 - New York About The Polywave

 

Troniks – TRO-361  380.17MB FLAC

New York About the Polywave begins with a clock being attacked by tools designed to move earth. “Digging Through Time (#436)” documents The Haters at TV Eye in Queens on February 22, 2025, with GX Jupitter-Larsen scraping a shovel against a large wooden clock while John Wiese and Crank Sturgeon scratch and sand their own shovels. The resulting sound is immediately harsh, but describing it as harsh noise captures only the acoustic wreckage. The real composition is the collision between objects, actions, history, audience and the absurdly literal idea of digging through time.
A shovel normally enters soil. A clock measures the interval during which the digging occurs. The Haters force both tools into the wrong jobs. The shovel does not excavate earth; it abrades the clock. The clock does not measure the performance from a safe distance; it becomes the material being worn down.
That reversal belongs completely to GX’s world. Since forming The Haters in 1979, he has treated noise less as a musical genre than as the audible residue of actions performed upon objects. Grinding, scraping, punching, sanding, drilling, tearing and breaking are not methods used to create expressive textures afterward. They are the event itself. The sound proves that surfaces met and neither remained unchanged.
The first track runs for more than seventeen minutes, long enough for the scraping to lose its identity as one action. At first the ear follows the scrape of metal against wood. Gradually, those sources widen into abrasive bands of sound, bursts of lower impact and unstable friction. The clock and shovels stop behaving like props and become an electrical weather system created through physical resistance.
John Wiese’s presence adds density and quick internal change. His work often turns noise into an accelerated field of cuts, pressure shifts and sharply articulated detail, but here he submits that instinct to the action’s simple material logic. Crank Sturgeon brings his own long history of amplified objects and homemade performance systems. Three distinct approaches meet around the shovel, one of humanity’s oldest practical tools.
The crowd is not merely listening. After GX throws the oversized clock into the packed room, the audience smashes it. That destruction completes the piece by removing the division between performer and witness. The clock passes from controlled abrasion into collective demolition.
Noise performance often praises participation while keeping the important equipment safely onstage. The Haters hands over the central object and accepts whatever form the action takes next. The audience does not improvise a tasteful response. It destroys the thing placed within reach.
“Digging Through Time Encore (#436)” exists because the audience demanded another round. An encore is usually a repetition of pleasure after the official performance has ended, a familiar song returned as reward. Here the encore extends a destructive process whose primary object has already been damaged.
This produces a peculiar problem. Destruction does not reset between performances. A song can be played again using the same chords. A smashed clock cannot be restored to its earlier condition for a clean second pass. The encore therefore begins with altered material and a changed social atmosphere. The crowd now knows it can intervene.
The eleven-minute recording sounds rougher and less ceremonially contained. The action has crossed the threshold from presentation into aftermath. Scrapes and impacts no longer announce a new object under examination. They continue working upon whatever survived.
The numbered performance titles give these events an archival precision that contrasts beautifully with their physical disorder. “#436” places the Queens show inside a sequence extending across decades. The number does not explain what happened, but confirms that the action belongs to an ongoing practice rather than a spontaneous outbreak.
This is one meaning carried by the album’s title. “Polywave” is part of GX’s private vocabulary of measurements, forms and conceptual units. The exact term resists ordinary scientific definition, but its function is clear enough inside The Haters’ universe: reality can be measured through systems invented specifically to expose the instability of ordinary measurement.
New York is “about” the polywave rather than simply located inside it. The title makes the city sound like evidence offered in support of an impossible theorem. Three venues, three decades and several generations of objects become coordinates in a personal system whose units include decay, repetition and audience behavior.
“Dirwyn (#284)” jumps backward to June 7, 2001. This variation of the Dirwyn performance was staged at Scrape & Pry gallery and used an amplified calculator pressed against a small fan, with GX’s Untitled Title Belt providing additional sound.
The objects are smaller than the clock and shovels, but the conceptual mechanism is similar. A calculator represents exact operation, numerical certainty and the transformation of input into answer. A fan produces repeated mechanical movement without arriving anywhere. Pressing the calculator against the fan places calculation inside a cycle of impact.
The contact microphone enlarges that interaction until small plastic mechanisms become violently present. What might look pathetic from across a room becomes enormous through amplification. Buttons, housing and spinning blades generate a coarse mechanical vibration that sounds more industrial than the objects deserve.
That mismatch between source and result is one of The Haters’ great pleasures. The work does not require expensive machinery, military hardware or an abandoned factory. A calculator and fan contain sufficient violence once their intended functions are interrupted and their friction is amplified.
The title belt adds theatrical authority. Professional wrestling has long occupied GX’s conceptual universe because it treats performance, conflict, costume, physical impact and invented measurement as one system. A title belt certifies victory inside a contest whose rules are both real and theatrical.
Calling it the Untitled Title Belt creates another useful contradiction. It grants status while withholding the name of the achievement. The belt has authority without a stable category, much like the polywave itself.
The recording’s fifteen minutes accumulate through repetition rather than narrative progression. The calculator keeps contacting the fan. The action becomes rhythm without agreeing to become music. Mechanical cycles appear, distort and wear their sources.
The physical deterioration is important. Repetition in electronic music can be theoretically endless because a loop remains identical. The Haters’ repetitions change because objects wear down. Plastic cracks, paper tears, metal dulls and motors strain. Entropy edits the composition from inside.
“Clici-clic (#155)” returns to December 8, 1991, when three members of The Haters performed the first clici-clic action at Generator Gallery in Chelsea. Each used a handheld hole punch fitted with a contact microphone to pierce hundreds of holes through paper and cardboard.
The hole punch is nearly perfect Haters technology. Its purpose is to remove small circles from a surface. Every use creates emptiness while producing a tiny piece of material as evidence. The object does not draw or build. It subtracts.
Amplification turns each subtraction into a blunt, snapping impact. Three performers repeating the action generate a dense pulse that resembles primitive machinery while remaining visibly connected to office supplies and manual labor.
The title copies the action’s sound like a word invented by the tool itself. “Clici-clic” is childish, mechanical and exact enough to enter GX’s private lexicon. It names neither an instrument nor a genre. It names a repeated event.
Over sixteen minutes, the piece creates rhythm more openly than the others. The punches fall at irregular but accumulating intervals, producing a collective choreography of pressure, release and perforation. Paper gradually becomes less capable of remaining a sheet.
Every hole increases the surface’s vulnerability. Eventually the object carrying the action begins losing the structural continuity required for more holes. Destruction creates its own limit.
This early recording also shows how consistent The Haters’ practice has been. The objects and venues change, but the essential grammar remains intact: choose a simple action, amplify its physical consequences, repeat it until deterioration becomes visible and allow sound to function as evidence rather than decoration.
New York About the Polywave is therefore not merely a live compilation. It is a thirty-four-year comparison of the same conceptual organism adapting to different rooms. Chelsea in 1991, a gallery in 2001 and a packed Queens venue in 2025 become three stages of one extended erosion.
The album also preserves the changing relationship between The Haters and their audience. “Clici-clic” presents performers carrying out a disciplined action. “Dirwyn” centers a compact object system. “Digging Through Time” throws the main object directly into the crowd and allows collective destruction to become the ending.
The performances grow more socially porous while retaining their severe simplicity. No elaborate explanation is needed once the clock enters the audience. The crowd understands what to do because the object has already been framed through scraping and noise as something available for transformation.
The CD turns those physical events into fixed recordings, creating a contradiction The Haters has always carried. Entropy is temporary and irreversible, but documentation can be replayed. The clock is gone, the paper remains punctured and the calculator may have stopped functioning, yet the sounds begin again whenever the disc is played.
That repetition does not restore the objects. It produces another layer of distance between action and residue. The recording becomes a second surface upon which the event continues wearing itself down.
The New York setting matters because the city has repeatedly offered The Haters spaces where art, noise, spectacle and participation overlap without requiring comfortable boundaries. Galleries and clubs become laboratories for actions too blunt for conventional concert language and too loud to remain private conceptual gestures.
Yet the album does not romanticize New York underground history. The earliest recording is not presented as a sacred relic, and the newest is not treated as proof of triumphant survival. All three are materials placed beside one another to show that time itself can be scraped, punched and handed to a crowd.
The Haters has lasted because the work was never dependent upon technical novelty. A better synthesizer cannot make a hole punch obsolete. Digital production cannot replace the specific fact of a wooden clock being destroyed by people in a room.
New York About the Polywave makes that fact audible. Numbers become titles, tools lose their assigned functions and simple actions grow enormous through repetition. The clock measures nothing after it enters the crowd. The calculator produces no answer. The hole punch keeps making emptiness.
Across thirty-four years, the surfaces change. The polywave continues.