Facialmess & Eugenics Council - 2000 - An Excercise In Self Worship 7''

 

Menschenfeind Productions – none

An Exercise in Self Worship places two very different forms of antagonism on opposite sides of a seven-inch record. Facialmess attacks through fragmentation, speed and disorientation. Eugenics Council approaches noise as physical confrontation, connecting crude electronics to the threat and spectacle of live action. The record lasts only a few minutes, but it captures a meeting between two projects that understood harsh noise not simply as distorted sound, but as a way to destabilize the listener’s position.
Released by Menschenfeind Productions in 2000 and limited to 200 copies, the split appeared at a point when Facialmess was expanding beyond straightforward harsh-noise collage. The original announcement described the project as the work of Kenny Sanderson, a British musician living in Japan, and noted that his recent material had begun introducing fractured beats into the usual cut-up violence. Eugenics Council consisted here of Rosemary Malign and D.N., a duo whose reputation was tied as much to dangerous live performances as to recorded electronics.
The title, An Exercise in Self Worship, is already loaded. It suggests vanity practiced as ritual, the private ego promoted into its own religion. Yet neither side offers anything resembling self-glorifying virtuosity. There are no solos, graceful demonstrations of control or heroic poses preserved in sound. Instead, both artists reduce identity to abrasive signals, damaged rhythms and acts of aggression. Self-worship does not produce majesty here. It produces confinement, repetition and a hostile fixation on the body.
Facialmess occupies a particularly unstable territory. Rather than allowing distortion to settle into a continuous wall, Sanderson cuts sound into rapidly changing units. Harsh frequencies erupt, disappear and return in altered forms. Rhythmic fragments seem to start in the middle of themselves, as though sections have been removed from an already damaged sequence. The editing is not used to create a smooth montage. Every transition remains exposed as a wound.
This method gives Facialmess an unusually nervous physicality. The listener is not overwhelmed by one sustained mass so much as struck repeatedly from changing directions. A dense burst of static may be replaced by a thin electronic whistle, followed by a crooked beat, a mechanical impact or a fragment whose source remains impossible to identify. The changes occur too quickly for the ear to establish a secure environment. Facialmess denies the passive immersion that even extreme volume can eventually produce.
The fractured beats are especially important. They do not turn the track into dance music, nor do they provide relief from the surrounding noise. Rhythm becomes another damaged object inside the collage. A beat appears with enough regularity to suggest a structure, then stumbles, disappears or is buried under distortion. The body receives the command to move, but the command has been corrupted before it can be followed.
There is a cold intelligence behind the cuts. Facialmess may initially resemble pure chaos, but the placement of interruptions suggests careful attention to expectation. Sounds are often removed at the moment when they begin to feel stable. A sequence may repeat just long enough for the listener to anticipate its next return, only for the track to replace it with a completely different texture. Repetition becomes bait.
The seven-inch format intensifies the method. Facialmess cannot rely on the long accumulation available on a cassette or full-length CDr. The side has to establish its language immediately. There is little introduction and no gradual preparation. The piece arrives already in motion, as though the needle has landed in the middle of an incident. Its short duration makes each edit feel more severe because there is no surrounding space in which the disturbance can dissolve.
Eugenics Council presents another kind of compression. The project’s original promotional material emphasized violent performances involving devices and objects that exceeded the ordinary limits of electronic music. Accounts associated with the group mention welders, explosives, signal generators, modified keyboards, chainsaws, motors, fire and even roadkill. Noise was only one component of an event designed to place the audience near actual danger.
None of that spectacle can be reproduced fully on vinyl. A recording cannot transmit heat from a welder or the uncertainty produced by machinery being swung near a crowd. Eugenics Council’s side therefore has to carry the implication of action through sound alone. The electronics feel less composed than activated. Rough signals grind against one another with the suggestion that something physical is taking place just beyond the microphone.
Where Facialmess fractures continuity, Eugenics Council emphasizes impact and threat. The sound is blunt, primitive and resistant to decorative detail. Distortion functions not as atmosphere but as force. Frequencies seem pushed until the equipment itself becomes unstable. Any recognizable rhythm is secondary to the sensation of machinery operating without a dependable safety mechanism.
The duo’s approach also complicates the relationship between performance and documentation. Eugenics Council became known for shows in which the production of sound could not be separated from visible acts of destruction. On a record, the listener receives only the residue: motors, metal, electronics and overloaded signals flattened into grooves. The missing visual component creates a strange absence. The audio sounds like evidence from an event rather than a complete representation of it.
That difference makes the pairing with Facialmess effective. Sanderson’s side is constructed through precise removal and rearrangement. Eugenics Council sounds as though arrangement may be overwhelmed by the materials themselves. Facialmess controls chaos through editing; Eugenics Council performs control as something constantly endangered. One side attacks the continuity of recorded time. The other attacks the boundary between a musical performance and an unsafe situation.
Despite those differences, both projects reject the idea that noise should become a neutral texture. Harsh noise can sometimes be absorbed aesthetically, turned into a dependable field of distortion that the listener enters for pleasure or meditation. Neither side of An Exercise in Self Worship allows that comfort. Facialmess keeps cutting the field apart. Eugenics Council introduces the suggestion that the field may contain objects capable of causing injury.
The record belongs to a specific underground economy. It was advertised through mailing lists, sold directly for a few dollars and pressed in a quantity small enough that most copies would circulate among people already connected to noise networks. The original announcement offered the seven-inch for four dollars within the United States, with cash or blank money orders requested. That modest transaction sat beside descriptions of explosions, chainsaws and hostile electronics. Extreme art moved through ordinary envelopes.
The Menschenfeind label was an appropriate home. Its name, meaning roughly “enemy of humanity” or “misanthrope,” gave the record an immediate ideological chill. Yet the release is more interesting than simple misanthropic theater. The title directs the hostility inward as much as outward. Self-worship is not presented as empowerment. It becomes a closed loop in which the self manufactures noise, receives it and mistakes the resulting intensity for transcendence.
That inward turn can be heard in the claustrophobia of both sides. Facialmess’s edits leave no stable exterior perspective. Eugenics Council’s electronics suggest an environment in which performer, machine and audience are trapped inside the same dangerous circuit. The record offers no clean moral distance from its aggression. The listener purchases the artifact, lowers the needle and becomes part of the mechanism.
The artwork and physical scale of a seven-inch further concentrate that mechanism. A small record usually implies a single, a quick statement or a collectible fragment. Here the compact format behaves like a sealed container for two incompatible reactions. There is no room for development toward a conventional conclusion. Each artist presents a compressed example of its method, then the side ends.
Because of that brevity, An Exercise in Self Worship works best as an encounter rather than a journey. It does not build a world and invite the listener to explore it. It opens two doors in rapid succession. Behind one is a room where sound has been sliced into twitching pieces. Behind the other is a workshop whose machinery appears to have been turned against its operators.
The release also captures a moment before digital distribution made obscurity effortless to overcome. A pressing of 200 copies could genuinely disappear into private collections, mail-order lists and incomplete discographies. The record’s survival depends upon rips, collectors and archives that extend its life beyond the fragile original run. Heard digitally, the music loses the ritual of turning over the vinyl but gains another layer of displacement. A scarce physical object becomes infinitely reproducible sound.
That transformation suits Facialmess particularly well. Sanderson’s work already treats recorded material as something detachable from origin, available to be cut and reassigned. A vinyl rip introduces additional clicks, compression and surface irregularities, turning the artifact’s age into one more layer of editing. Eugenics Council’s side changes more dramatically. Music originally connected to volatile live action becomes a file encountered in complete physical safety.
Nothing can restore the danger of those performances, and nothing needs to. The record remains compelling because the sounds do not depend entirely upon the mythology surrounding them. Facialmess’s editing is sharp, agitated and structurally alert. Eugenics Council’s electronics carry a diseased weight even when separated from fire and metal. The background deepens the record, but the grooves hold their own hostility.
An Exercise in Self Worship is a small document from a culture that valued extremity, physical objects and direct circulation. Its two sides disagree about how noise should move, but they agree that it should not sit politely in the room. Facialmess turns interruption into a weapon. Eugenics Council makes sound resemble the electrical residue of a destructive act. Between them, the seven-inch becomes less an exercise in admiration of the self than a demonstration of what happens when the self is locked inside amplification and left there to corrode.

Merzbow - 2025 - Sedonis

 

Signal Noise – SNLP001

Sedonis opens with motion rather than impact. “Sedonis A” does not drop a single immovable wall of distortion over the listener. A nervous drum-machine pulse pushes forward while bowed strings scrape and bend above it, giving the track a harsh but unusually open shape. The rhythm provides somewhere for the noise to travel. Instead of being trapped inside one fixed mass, the listener is carried through an unstable environment whose surfaces keep shifting.

That movement makes Sedonis one of the more immediately legible Merzbow releases of recent years. It remains severe, loud and densely layered, but its four tracks contain enough rhythm, space and contrast to reveal the decisions inside the pressure. Bursts rise and fall. Frequencies thin out. New layers enter through gaps left by the previous ones. The music is violent, but it is rarely static.

The first three tracks form a connected suite. “Sedonis A,” “Sedonis B” and “Sedonis C” occupy the first side of the vinyl and behave like different stages in the appearance of one large organism. Masami Akita associated the invented title with Barunga, the floating balloon-like creature from the Japanese television series Ultra Q. The image fits the music. Sedonis seems to expand, contract and change outline while remaining recognizably the same presence.

“Sedonis A” establishes that presence through bowed guitar strings, homemade instruments, computer processing and modular electronics. The bowed tones hover between string music and damaged machinery. At times they resemble an orchestra being dragged through a wind tunnel. Elsewhere they bend toward psychedelic guitar before being swallowed by the surrounding electronics.

The drum machine is crucial. Its pulse is too damaged to function as conventional dance music, but it keeps the track moving. Merzbow does not simply place noise over a beat. The distortion attacks the rhythm, buries it, and then allows it to reappear from another angle. The beat becomes another unstable object inside the composition.

“Sedonis B” begins with a more suspended texture. Bowed sounds spread into a scorched haze, creating a brief sense of space before the electronics tighten again. High frequencies gather over a shifting lower mass. The track seems to breathe through compression and release.

This use of relative emptiness is one of the album’s strongest features. Silence never fully arrives, but pockets of reduced density repeatedly appear. A thin tone may hang alone while heavier layers withdraw. A broken rhythm may surface for a few seconds before being crushed. These spaces do not provide comfort. They expose the scale of the next eruption.

“Sedonis C” is the most violent section of the title sequence. At more than ten minutes, it has enough room to develop the earlier ideas into a wider field of rhythmic noise. Percussion loops grind beneath layers of feedback and distortion, connecting the track to Merzbow’s long history of pulse-driven work.

The rhythm does not create order. It provides a framework that Akita can overload. Sections stretch outward, recoil and return with greater density. Feedback gathers into spirals. Low-frequency impacts interrupt the upper-register abrasion. The track often sounds like a swarm circling a damaged engine, but the image never remains stable for long.

What first appears chaotic is carefully distributed across the frequency range. High tones sting and slice. Midrange distortion provides the thickest surface. Bass arrives in less continuous but more physical bursts. Rhythmic fragments bind the layers together without making them predictable. The disorder is composed.

The closing track, “Monolith 4,” changes the album’s scale. The three Sedonis pieces suggest a mobile organism. A monolith suggests something fixed, singular and massive. At nearly seventeen minutes, the track fills the entire second side and acts as a broad counterweight to the concentrated activity of Side A.

It begins in a more spacious register. Distortion spreads across a burned, open field rather than striking through a dominant beat. Without a strong rhythmic center, time seems to widen. Some tones feel close enough to scrape against the listener, while others hang at a distance as electronic weather.

This is not ambient Merzbow. The sound remains hostile, but the hostility is spread across space rather than concentrated into constant impact. Long layers hover and split, revealing smaller movements underneath. The track creates the sensation of studying a vast surface and slowly discovering that every part of it is active.

Sharper events begin piercing the field as the piece develops. High tones enter with surgical force. Small rhythmic flickers appear beneath the sustained noise. These details prevent “Monolith 4” from becoming a simple comedown after “Sedonis C.” Its violence is slower and more patient.

The harshest moments arrive because the surrounding sound has been allowed to thin. A single high frequency can feel more severe than an entire wall of distortion when it enters alone. A sudden bass disturbance becomes enormous after several minutes of suspended space. Merzbow uses contrast not as relief, but as a way to sharpen impact.

The physical edition reflects the same combination of precision and abrasion. Signal Noise issued Sedonis in a limited edition of 300 copies with double sleeves and matching die-cut windows. The outer jacket uses heavy stock, silver printing and black letterpress, while the inner sleeve frames the record label through the cut opening. The design treats the album as a carefully constructed object rather than a disposable container.

That refinement does not soften the music. It makes the control behind the noise more visible. Sedonis is full of rough surfaces, but the presentation is exact. Even the small printing error on the back cover, which suggests two tracks on Side B when only “Monolith 4” appears there, adds another minor instability to the object.

Sedonis was recorded and mixed by Akita at Munemihouse in Tokyo during July 2024 and released in June 2025. The setup of computer, modular electronics, homemade instruments and bowed guitar-string koto gives the album a distinctive body. The unusual string textures prevent the record from becoming another purely electronic assault, while the drum machines provide enough movement to keep the density in motion.

The album is approachable not because it is gentle, but because its architecture can be heard clearly. The listener can follow the rhythms, hear layers enter and withdraw, and recognize the contrast between the three-part title sequence and the larger open field of “Monolith 4.”

After decades of Merzbow releases, it is easy for another album to disappear into the scale of the discography. Sedonis avoids that fate because it has a recognizable shape. The bowed strings, fractured rhythms, cloudlike expansion of the title suite and scorched space of the closing track form a complete design.

This is not simply another block of Merzbow noise. It is one particular creature appearing, changing shape across thirty-seven minutes, and vanishing before its outline can be fully understood.

Merzbow - 2025 - The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue

 

Room40 – RM4195

The Prosperity of Vice, The Misfortune of Virtue may carry a 2025 release date, but its nineteen untitled pieces come from a very different point in Merzbow’s history. Masami Akita recorded the music in 1996 as the soundtrack to Akutoku no Sakae/Bitoku no Fuko, a theater production by the Japanese company Romantica based on writings by the Marquis de Sade. Room40’s remastered edition retrieves that material from its limited original circulation, adds another piece from the same sessions and reveals a side of Merzbow that can disappear beneath the reputation for uninterrupted extremity.

This is not a conventional Merzbow album organized around two or three extended assaults. Its nineteen tracks resemble scenes, transitions, sudden entrances and isolated actions. Some last only a minute or two. Others have enough room to establish denser environments, but even these retain the feeling of music designed to accompany shifting bodies, lighting and dramatic situations. The brevity repeatedly interrupts immersion. A texture appears, establishes its own temperature and disappears before the listener can treat it as a permanent landscape.

The theatrical origin changes the function of the noise. Instead of behaving as the entire event, the music often leaves space for an event that is no longer visible. Certain tracks resemble cues waiting for an actor to enter. Others sound like the aftermath of an action occurring beyond the microphone. Without the original stage production, these absences become part of the album. The listener receives the architecture of a performance after the performers, costumes and scenery have been removed.

Akita’s sound during this period was capable of extraordinary density, but The Prosperity of Vice does not apply maximum pressure continuously. Heavy electronic masses appear beside thinner pieces built from scraping, metallic vibration, low mechanical movement and isolated bursts of feedback. The contrast is essential. One track may spread into a broad field of rumbling distortion, while the next exposes a handful of dry sounds separated by uncomfortable space. The album keeps changing its physical dimensions.

The shorter pieces are particularly effective. They do not have time to develop according to ordinary musical expectations, so they function as abrupt states. A grinding movement may begin as though it has already been running for hours. A shrill electronic tone enters, cuts across the room and stops. A cluster of impacts briefly suggests machinery, ritual percussion or objects being dragged across a stage. These fragments feel less composed toward conclusions than activated and then withdrawn.

That structure suits the source material. The title combines the ideas behind de Sade’s Juliette, often associated with the prosperity of vice, and Justine, associated with the misfortunes suffered by virtue. The pairing presents a world in which cruelty, manipulation and corruption are rewarded while innocence becomes a mechanism for producing further suffering. Merzbow does not illustrate that philosophy with recognizable narrative scenes. Instead, the music constructs an unstable moral atmosphere in which force dominates and no sound remains safely outside contamination.

The most violent passages do not necessarily feel triumphant. Distortion may arrive with enormous weight, but it frequently sounds diseased, unstable or close to collapsing under its own pressure. High frequencies tear across thicker layers rather than sitting cleanly above them. Low rumbles suggest a foundation that is moving rather than supporting anything. Vice may prosper, but the world it produces is not orderly. It is swollen, abrasive and structurally unsound.

The quieter sections can be even more disturbing. When the walls of noise withdraw, smaller details become exposed: a scrape, a pulse, a distant electronic vibration or a thin sustained frequency. These sounds create anticipation without promising a recognizable event. Because the music originated in theater, the empty space seems occupied by invisible movement. Something may be approaching, but the recording never identifies it.

This attention to isolated detail distinguishes the album from the popular caricature of Merzbow as a producer of undifferentiated volume. Akita repeatedly breaks large sonic masses into smaller components. Feedback, metal, rhythm and electronic debris are allowed to exist separately before being forced together again. The album demonstrates that his harshness depends upon arrangement. An explosion has greater force when surrounded by restraint; a high tone becomes more painful after the lower frequencies have been removed.

Rhythm appears in incomplete forms. Pulses rise beneath the distortion, but they rarely stabilize into grooves. Repeated impacts may suggest industrial machinery before slipping out of alignment. Elsewhere, movement is produced through editing rather than percussion, with abrupt changes generating their own jagged momentum. The theater soundtrack did not require a consistent beat. It required sound capable of altering the pressure inside a scene.

The nineteen-track sequence prevents any one technique from becoming definitive. Dense harsh noise, electroacoustic scraping, empty stage-like intervals and compact eruptions keep replacing one another. The album behaves like a cabinet of related devices rather than a single machine. Each device produces a different form of unease, but all belong to the same damaged environment.

Lawrence English’s remaster gives the material considerable depth without polishing away its abrasion. The low end has physical weight, while the sharper frequencies retain their capacity to wound. More importantly, the remaster preserves the distance between sounds. Quiet elements do not merely become pauses between loud sections; they occupy their own dimensional spaces. This makes the recording’s theatrical character easier to hear. The stage may be invisible, but its size can be sensed.

The additional track does not feel like a modern attachment placed onto an old album. It extends the collection’s fragmented logic, adding one more surviving room to an already incomplete building. Because every piece is untitled, there is no authoritative narrative sequence beyond the order of the recording. The listener cannot match a cue to a named character or action. The absence of titles forces the sound to remain open, severed from the precise theatrical moments it once accompanied.

That separation is one reason the album works outside its original context. The music does not require knowledge of the production to remain compelling. Its dramatic function has become abstract. Sudden density can still feel like violence entering a scene. A nearly empty track can still create suspense. A repeated mechanical sound can still imply submission, punishment or ritual without depicting any one of them.

The Prosperity of Vice also captures Merzbow during the middle of the 1990s, a period often represented by huge, brightly saturated works of harsh electronic overload. This soundtrack complicates that picture. It contains the expected brutality, but it also shows Akita working with timing, interruption and spatial restraint. The format required him to think not only about sound itself but about where sound could sit beside another medium.

The result is a Merzbow album defined by absence as much as excess. The original actors are absent. The theatrical images are absent. The specific meanings of the untitled cues are absent. What remains is the pressure those missing elements once required: nineteen chambers of distortion, scraping metal, unstable rhythm and charged emptiness.

Nearly three decades after its recording, The Prosperity of Vice, The Misfortune of Virtue no longer functions primarily as accompaniment. It has become a fractured standalone work whose dramatic world must be reconstructed entirely through sound. The stage has vanished, but the atmosphere survived.

Roedelius / Hausswolff - 2023 - Roedelius Hausswolff II

 

iDEAL Recordings – iDEAL211

Roedelius Hausswolff II begins with two hearts dreaming, although the music offers no certainty that they are dreaming the same dream. Hans-Joachim Roedelius supplies fragile melodic movement, while Carl Michael von Hausswolff surrounds it with slowly changing electronic pressure. One musician seems to be placing small lights into the room. The other alters the dimensions of the room itself. Across three long pieces, piano-like figures, suspended tones, low drones and almost imperceptible disturbances meet without being forced into a conventional foreground and background.
The album’s title is strictly functional. This is the second full-length collaboration between Roedelius and Hausswolff, following Nordlicht, but the plain Roman numeral suits music that does not need an elaborate conceptual frame. The three tracks are substantial enough to establish their own environments: “Zwei Herzen Träumen” lasts a little over six minutes, “Under the Ocean” extends past twelve, and “Ossuaire” occupies nearly eighteen. Together they form a gradual movement from intimacy toward depth and finally into something colder, more architectural and difficult to name.
The partnership initially looks like a meeting between contrasting generations and methods. Roedelius was born in 1934 and helped shape the exploratory German music of the late 1960s and 1970s through Kluster, Cluster and Harmonia. His solo work later emphasized miniature melodies, domestic electronics, hesitant piano phrases and a peculiar emotional openness that could sound playful, melancholy and peaceful within the same short piece. Hausswolff, born in Sweden in 1956, developed a body of work from drones, electronic frequencies, field recordings, conceptual systems and the physical behavior of sound in space.
Yet the collaboration does not operate through a simplistic division in which Roedelius supplies beauty and Hausswolff adds darkness. Roedelius has always contained strangeness beneath his gentleness, while Hausswolff’s sustained electronics can possess extraordinary calm. Their common territory lies in patience, restraint and sensitivity to small changes. Neither artist needs a crowded arrangement to create movement. A slight harmonic shift, a newly exposed overtone or one piano note appearing at the edge of a drone can completely alter the emotional balance.
“Zwei Herzen Träumen” is the shortest and most immediately tender track. Its German title translates as “Two Hearts Dream,” and the phrase suggests romantic unity, but the music avoids easy warmth. Roedelius introduces a sequence of soft, searching notes that seem to form themselves while being played. They are not organized into a polished melody with a clear beginning and return. Each phrase pauses as though listening to the atmosphere around it before deciding where to go next.
Hausswolff’s electronics remain broad and low behind these figures. The drone is not simply a cushion placed beneath the keyboard. It changes the apparent weight of every note. A chord that might otherwise seem delicate acquires a faint shadow. A high tone appears briefly illuminated, then seems to drift backward into the surrounding field. The two parts behave like independent bodies whose movements continually affect one another.
Roedelius’s playing has long been distinguished by its refusal of virtuoso display. His lines often sound discoverable rather than predetermined, as though melody were being found among the keys instead of imposed upon them. This can create an impression of innocence, but the simplicity is deceptive. The timing of the notes is exact in an emotional sense. A phrase may hesitate just long enough to create uncertainty, then resolve somewhere slightly different from the expected destination.
On “Zwei Herzen Träumen,” that quality becomes the human center of the piece. The notes do not conquer the drone or rise heroically above it. They remain vulnerable inside it. Hausswolff’s sustained frequencies sometimes appear protective and sometimes ominous. The music never decides whether the surrounding darkness is shelter, distance or danger. The two dreaming hearts may be together, but dreaming always contains the possibility of separation.
“Under the Ocean” removes much of the identifiable intimacy. The title shifts attention from hearts to an environment where ordinary movement, light and hearing have been transformed by pressure. The piece begins with a wide electronic tone that feels less like a musical note than a condition already in progress. There is no dramatic entrance. The listener arrives inside a depth that existed before the track began.
Lower frequencies create the sense of immense weight without relying on obvious volume. The music feels compressed by the space it describes. Higher tones drift slowly through the drone, resembling distant signals whose sources cannot be located. Some appear stable until another frequency enters and changes their shape. The piece develops through these minute interactions rather than through a sequence of recognizable sections.
Roedelius’s contribution becomes harder to separate from Hausswolff’s processing. Keyboard tones surface, but they no longer stand clearly in front of the electronic field. They stretch, blur and appear to dissolve into the surrounding resonance. It becomes possible to hear the track not as two musicians exchanging parts but as one combined instrument whose internal components remain partially hidden.
This merging is one of the album’s greatest strengths. Many collaborations preserve the signatures of each participant so clearly that the listener can mentally divide the finished music back into its sources. Roedelius Hausswolff II gradually resists that division. Roedelius’s melodic instinct remains audible, and Hausswolff’s frequency work is unmistakable, but the sounds begin changing one another at the level of texture. Melody becomes atmosphere. Drone acquires melodic movement.
“Under the Ocean” also demonstrates how effectively both artists use duration. Twelve minutes is long enough for the ear to adapt to the initial drone. Once that adaptation occurs, tiny disturbances become enormous. A new harmonic layer may arrive so gradually that its entrance cannot be identified, yet the entire piece suddenly feels darker. A faint pulse may appear beneath the sustained sound, creating motion without establishing rhythm. The composition seems almost motionless while continually changing.
The ocean is therefore not represented through recordings of water or obvious aquatic effects. Instead, the title frames a study of altered perception. Sound under pressure behaves differently. Distance becomes uncertain. Direction is difficult to judge. The listener hears events but cannot always determine whether they are approaching, receding or remaining fixed while the surrounding field moves around them.
“Ossuaire,” the final and longest piece, deepens the album’s sense of physical space. The French title means “ossuary,” a place where human bones are stored. After the dreaming hearts and the submerged landscape, the album arrives at architecture built around remains. The title introduces mortality without requiring the music to become theatrical or funereal.
The opening is austere. A sustained low tone establishes a large, nearly empty chamber. Above it, thinner frequencies gather gradually, forming a pale electronic light. Roedelius’s notes appear less frequently than before, and when they arrive they seem isolated by the scale of the surrounding space. Each one feels small but not insignificant, like an object placed carefully inside a room designed to outlast its occupants.
Hausswolff has often worked with sound as a physical and architectural force, and “Ossuaire” makes that sensibility especially clear. The drone does not merely fill space. It seems to define walls, ceiling and distance. Changes in frequency alter the imaginary structure. A rising tone can make the chamber appear taller. A thicker low layer can make the floor feel unstable. Resonance becomes a method of construction.
The piece is not dominated by dread. There is severity in its long tones and empty intervals, but there is also considerable beauty. Roedelius’s melodic fragments introduce warmth without turning the ossuary into a comforting place. Their tenderness is intensified by the knowledge implied in the title. Human expression appears briefly inside a structure devoted to what remains after human life.
As “Ossuaire” develops, the boundary between acoustic suggestion and electronic matter becomes increasingly uncertain. Some tones resemble bowed metal, distant organ, processed voice or vibrating glass, but none remains identifiable for long. The ambiguity prevents the track from becoming an illustration. It does not tell the listener what an ossuary looks like. It creates a sound-world in which material, memory and resonance have become inseparable.
The album’s emotional power comes partly from the difference between Roedelius’s age-old melodic instinct and Hausswolff’s almost impersonal electronic fields. By 2023, Roedelius had spent more than five decades making music from small gestures that resist grandiosity. His notes carry history without announcing it. They do not demand reverence because of his importance to experimental music. They simply appear, slightly crooked and alive.
Hausswolff does not treat those gestures as precious artifacts requiring protection. He places them inside environments large enough to threaten their disappearance. This is not disrespect. It allows the notes to retain vulnerability. A melody sounds more human when it is not guaranteed survival. Against the drones, each Roedelius phrase becomes a temporary event rather than a permanent statement.
The record can be described as ambient, drone or modern classical, but none of those categories fully captures its tension. Ambient music can imply unobtrusive atmosphere, while this album rewards concentrated attention. Drone can suggest continuity, yet the sustained tones are filled with subtle fractures and shifts. Modern classical may acknowledge the restraint and scale, but the music remains closely connected to electronic experimentation and improvisation.
The absence of percussion is important. Nothing measures time in a regular way. The listener cannot calculate progress through beats or repeated cycles. Time is instead perceived through changes in density and color. A piece seems to move because a frequency fades, a note appears or the emotional temperature lowers by a nearly invisible degree.
This gives the album a strange elasticity. Six minutes can feel expansive, while eighteen minutes can pass without a clear sense of duration. The music does not rush toward conclusions. Endings arrive as withdrawals, with sound gradually loosening its hold rather than resolving into final chords.
The collaboration’s origin in performances, festivals and installation work can be heard in this spatial awareness. Roedelius and Hausswolff first met through the collective sound project freq_out, where artists work with assigned frequency ranges to create a shared environment. That experience offers a useful key to their duo music. Each participant listens for what the other occupies and leaves open. The goal is not to fill every available frequency but to create a field in which separate contributions can coexist without losing their character.
The production preserves exceptional depth. Low tones feel physical without swallowing the finer details. Quiet notes remain distinct even when surrounded by dense resonance. Headphones reveal delicate internal movements, but speakers allow the drones to take on architectural scale. The record changes according to the room in which it is played, which feels appropriate for music built from spatial relationships.
Roedelius Hausswolff II is gentle without being reassuring and dark without becoming oppressive. Its calm contains unease. Its drones contain melody. Its most human gestures are surrounded by sounds that seem indifferent to human time, yet the record never allows those gestures to become meaningless.
The three titles provide a loose descent. Two hearts dream together. Consciousness moves beneath the ocean. The journey concludes among bones stored after identity has disappeared. But the album does not impose a narrative of romance, drowning and death. The titles remain doors rather than instructions. They deepen the atmosphere while leaving the music free to retain its abstraction.
What ultimately holds the album together is trust. Roedelius trusts that a handful of notes can remain significant inside enormous electronic spaces. Hausswolff trusts that a drone can change slowly enough to make the listener hear its internal life. Neither crowds the other. Neither tries to win the collaboration.
The result is an album of uncommon patience and quiet emotional force. “Zwei Herzen Träumen” presents melody as fragile contact. “Under the Ocean” dissolves individual gestures into pressure and depth. “Ossuaire” transforms resonance into a chamber for memory and remains. Across those three pieces, Roedelius and Hausswolff create music that feels vast without becoming inflated, intimate without becoming sentimental and mournful without announcing grief.
It is less a conversation between piano and electronics than a shared weather system. Notes appear, drones gather, distances change, and the listener slowly realizes that the smallest sound has altered the entire sky.

Pedestrian Deposit - MP3 PACK

 

RUTracker - 1.19GB

FOR UR CONSIDERATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skullflower - MP3 PACK

 

RUTracker - 2.39GB

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

Dropdead / Crossed Out - 1993 - Split 5''

Crust Records – none

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

Skullflower - (1994) Ponyland 7''

Sympathy For The Record Industry ‎– 275

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

SPK - MP3 PACK

 

RUTracker - 2.92GB

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