Xome & Death Squad ‘Life: Quit It/Automaton’ C-64 (Neural Operations)

This is one of four split cassettes which were originally shared by Death Squad in 1996, and were reissued by Michael Nine in 2020 alongside his early Off World Kick Death Square project. This cassette’s brief re-emergence adds a few more pieces of knowledge to the formation of both Xome and Death Squad, and had been a curiosity of mine for a while given the seemingly difficult compatibility of the two projects.

Xome’s early work is distant from the exuberant effects ping pong Bob Scott would come to master and particularly across ‘Life: Quit It’. These early experimentations utilise flows of dark distortion as their primary noise construct, “Xome Supreme Truth Cult” and “トラック野郎” only buoyed by extraneous inputs of what are predominantly voice – looped yelling and various chatter – after an intentionally slow and dreary start. The final two tracks, dominated by “Melt”, are a grab-bag of audio oddities with even less of the noise Xome would come to be known for, moments of distortion peaking to give some asphalt blur to what is otherwise a montage of slowed speech, found city sound, and God-knows what, inflating into a rumble of low-end which vibrates under flickering loops, messy media manipulation and what I think may be the cries of abused children’s toys.

While like most Xome material I suspect the end results are live-to tape mandates, there is preparation to the sampled, found, and pre-arranged sound which ensures plenty of change across the half hour notwithstanding the quite straight forward course of the generated distortion which is embraced. The exuberance of later releases manifests here as a delight in the various pre-arranged inputs, which even if somewhat crude add streaks of colour to the otherwise monochrome noise.

Death Squad’s ‘Automaton’ lacks the terrorising presence which the project later developed, but is a more fully-formed realisation of the project in comparison to the site of Xome’s branch on the evolutionary tree. While only given a single title the side is broken into seven or so shorter segments, at its best in painting grainy noise textures using rumbling analogue low-end, shortwave radio hum, dying consumer electronics and lungfuls of smoggy distortion.

There’s a choking haze to this material which would only become thicker and more hurtful as Death Squad finessed its sound, but on ‘Automaton’ it’s a viscous cloud, hanging in the air densely and being unavoidably inhaled. Clumps of obscured hazards cling to its particles, as drips of gargled high end are expectorated, dying equipment throbs smoke, and loops pump the sickly air back upon itself. The concentration of sooted noise glimpses only minimal movement in the worse afflicted pieces, ‘Automaton’’s segments tending to work small movements only to have those covered in yet more grime, although the loop-based portions tent to develop a circular breathing which develops slightly more clarity – and the end of the tape weighs the  atmospheric churn down to the ground, finally hitting the dirt with a more resolute low-end tremor.

While both projects were in 1996 still shedding their formative experience, Death Squad already sounds like it should be with violence and distrust growing over time behind the poisonous clouds of ‘Automaton’ and other mid-1990s works. Xome would ultimately find a joy in harsh noise which is only hinted at in ‘Life: Quit It’ – and only realised in the sound inputs, not the noise itself. Whether adjacent to later familiarity or not, this cassette is an insight into both acts: a chance to understand each a little better, both delivering competent material without either yet at the point which would be their ultimate contribution.

Bacillus ‘Anti-Vaxxer’ C-30 (Glossolalia)

Bacillus’ 1990s tapes hold a unique place in the American noise lexicon of that time, raw in a way which Macronympha and Richard Ramirez were not. The works created – a largely unchanged process, it seems – from mangled and destroyed records and tapes, broken consumer electronics, and strangling distortion derived from pushing levels to the maximum, but off-set against that dumpster diver creationism was a studious fascination with microbes, pathogens, and danger lurking in minutiae: a (literally) unhealthy death fetish far removed from the familiar violent tropes of harsh noise.

It’s no surprise that in this year’s pandemic Bacillus should re-(re-?)emerge, another viral wave to contend with on the cusp of the world retreating into self-isolation. The cassette documents recent measles outbreaks and the anti-vaccination hysteria which fuelled them, but its timing in relation to the current pandemic – not to mention the protests currently looking to undo social distancing and related protections – makes ‘Anti-Vaxxer’ unavoidably relevant as I stay at home to avoid a virus which is wreaking havoc in many corners of the globe.

In 2020 the works are often longer and less mercurial than the early Bacillus particles, tracks such as “Misinformation Spreads, Taking Disease With It” and “Fatal Risks Of Persistant Myths” dwelling on single or small groups of pathologies and “The New Rise Of Preventable Diseases” melting into a self-perpetuating spread of unchanging viscosity which reflects Peter Keller’s recent works of stasis more than the unsettled fearmongering of his old Clotted Meat Portioning cassettes. The noise is as nasty and rough as ever, but its agility is significantly declined, strength in self-generation favoured over unexpected jumping between patients.

“Outbreaks Of Disease Once Conquered” is a highlight for reverting to Bacillus’ familiar structural instability, jarring cut-ups, and stereo spectrum severance, but the nervousness invoked on earlier works is much harder to find on ‘Anti-Vaxxer’ when it settles into a pleading grind, that lurking fear replaced instead with a more suffocating insistence – periodically broken by samples which drive home the thematic masthead and also serve to break up heavier chunks of noise as in “Complacency Leaves you Exposed” (a technique which can either distract or dissect depending on timing and use). “ImmuNoCompromise” goes further in instead constructing itself from sampled material, swerving its gasping noise around what sounds like a high school argument, its loud voices competing in urgency with the constrictive noise for an unexpectedly memorable diversion.

While of the same strain as what came before it ‘Anti-Vaxxer’’s looser construction hints at the heavier end of the type of manual noise Expose Your Eyes and Dogliveroil realised – while still firmly mired in an mid-1990s Americanoise blown-out saturation informed – but informed by noise wall stasis and with samples almost a little too clean in their execution, as the main updates to Bacillus’ previously squalid but highly-strung noise vignettes.

The update in packaging is even more noticeable, Glossolalia using plenty of laser printer paper to deliver a folded A5 cover and a swag of research materials and collage materials, as well as an ampoule of vaccine so you or someone you love isn’t the next victim. It’s an extensive and acknowledging provision of space and resources, and a worthy addition to a discography which – even with a recent upsurge in cases – is still one of the rarer Americanoise of the last 25 years.

https://bacillus.bandcamp.com/album/anti-vaxxer

Kadaver & Vomir 'Kadavomier' CDR (Inner City Uprising)

Vomir has spent over a decade creating works of immersion, a celebration of stasis with which to shut out the world and be consumed by sound. Into that ideal Romain Perrot has this time allowed Kadaver’s Michael Zolotov some space to merge his flayed noise electronics, the two realising ‘Kadavomier’ as a single extended track on Australia’s Inner City Uprising label - or split across two sides of a cassette pressing on The Hills Are Dead Records for those needing a breather and a walk across the room inside their 68 minutes of listening. In addition to realising the collaboration in its unedited form the CDR adds seedy collage art from Cursed Earth Cassettes’ Ben Schmidt which I prefer to the cassette’s somewhat hastily realised cover, making the disc the preferred version (other than for analogue format snobs, of course).

After an opening grab of movie dialogue – the importance of which is lost on me – as expected Vomir sets up a dominating central deluge, a resolute current with a hefty mid-range span and peaking surface which runs the entire length of the hour-long piece. Kadaver then forms and moves shapes under the surface and slotted into Vomir’s strong current, strewing bubbles of flange, low-end shadow, and smaller distortion deviations through the choppy Vomir singularity, eventually building to add a rotary blade insistence, contact microphone creasing and unrestrained effect pedal squall in its closing maelstrom.

As its strongest the piece almost vibrates as Kadaver’s intrusions filtrate through Vomir’s central contribution, the final quarter of the piece swelling in size as violently created noise electronics are layered as much as possible over the mainstay timbre (still never fully obscuring it), but earlier subtler infusions cloud or even obscure Romain’s smouldering texture in a more cautionary way, as if probing for weaknesses before ultimately deciding that only an all-out assault is capable of taking down the Frenchman’s construct. Those earlier forays are difficult to catch but cleverly shape the bulk of the lengthy disc, giving ‘Kadavomier’ hints of life and movement even as one of its architects wants to smother all of that with a black garbage bag.

From afar ‘Kadavomier’ seems immobile but the collaborative injection scatters plenty of finely adjusted detail through the piece, creating a track which on close listen is far more turbulent. I struggle to fully appreciate truly minimalist and unchanging harsh noise wall creations, but ‘Kadavomier’ only takes what it needs from that subgenre, testing its capacities with finer perforations before pressing a major morass through; and giving unsettled home listeners like me points within the piece to locate, extract, and chase in development – all without compromising the focus of Vomir’s missive.

https://innercityuprising.bandcamp.com/album/kadaver-vomir

Beatriz Ferreyra ‘Echos +’ 12” (Room 40)

Beatriz Ferreyra’s work has found constrained dissemination compared to many other GRM alumni, only a handful of releases emerging in over 50 years of work. ‘Echos’ follows Room40’s Lawrence English performing with Ferreyra in Portugal and Brazil, as well as bringing her to perform in Australia in 2018, and is a significant addition to the Argentinian’s body of recorded work.

The title-track of ‘Echos +’ is a montage of looped, spliced and layered a capella vocals to four Latin-American songs, the focus on audible tape manipulation rather than any greater performer input or manipulation. Ideas are looped, cadences are ruined, and fragments multiplied across the eight and a half minutes of the piece, but the focus wears a little thin. Created in 1978 “Echos” is somehow the most familiar piece of the LP, its editing and layering reflective of the roots of electroacoustic music as no doubt linked to Ferreyra’s tenure at GRM, albeit but with a personal focus linked to the vocal performances which I find somewhat limiting in impact. As an exercise in technique the piece is clever, but I find its listenability more difficult.

“L’Autre … Ou Le Chant Des Marécages” (“The “Double” Or The Swamp’s”) is again derived from vocal performances, but with a performer input far more marked than the lighter touch of “Echos”. Elongated tones are seemingly constructed from teasingly slowed vocal notes, and create an immediate menace to the piece; “L’Autre … Ou Le Chant Des Marécages” frequently returns to the familiarity of those billowing stretches as a kind of comfort creation, but it’s its need to find that comfort which makes the piece special. Repeated sharp syllabic jabs and wilder yowled, yelled and yelped fragments – verging at its peak in near-riotous climax – lift the piece out of any languorous want, fiercely colouring the piece like blood spatter on snow. The breaths, tics and murmurs which skirted the edges of “Echos” are on this second piece part of a arsenal of honed, bright lashings, vivid punctures of sound which flash across the dark stretches of the piece: the “double” which the title speaks of, and which the liner notes describe as a paradoxal personality, split between vibrant colour and the dark subject of matter of Cendrars’ ‘Moravagine’ in a complex convergence of tonality, texture and dynamic impact.

The centrepiece of ‘Echos +’ is 2007 composition “L’Autre Rive” (“The Other Shore”) which assumes the entire B side, a haunting piece utilising percussion and additional electroacoustic sound. The sound manipulation is more integrative than the first side, the percussion performance itself  – such as the timpani swells which alchemise into circularities of sound, its tom rolls which billow reverbed smoke and a comet’s tail of electronics dust, a jazz cymbal riff swallowed by delay, and gong or cymbal scrapings which are stuttered and manipulated more into animal cries than any instrumental output – immersed in technique, and finessed with additional sound inputs.

The piece itself, inspired by the Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book of the Dead), merges those percussive shocks with dark swathes of largely ambient sound for a genuinely haunting affect making full use of the composed sounds and the spaces between them. The first half of the piece is littered with emergent scares of sparse percussion and sympathetically minimalist treatments, a more dominant sound input from Beatriz emerging moreso over the second tranche of the piece, which is in part led by set pieces of shock which are provoked by volume-driven swells of semi-orchestral noise or aeoliphone-type disturbance, and which rise up in volume and intensity as if reaching a skeletal arm at an unsuspecting passer-by. Beatriz’s heavier sound elements seem to include instrumental off-cuts, voice, reverb-heavy synthesis and even some jarring junk percussion-type elements played against Richard Aratian’s percussion performance, the electroacoustic elements initially structured around the percussive sparks before seeming to switch into a primary role over the later half of the piece. It’s an immersive, unpredictable and somehow darkly humourous piece which stands up to repeat listens – it’s had a lot here since ‘Echos +’ arrived – easily, never failing to engage, surprise and delight.

Moving on from the perhaps timid approach of its title track, ‘Echos +’ is electroacoustic music in full flight, constantly blurring the line between acoustic and imagined, between treatment and creation, and between Beatriz herself as performer and those whose creativity births her works. While distanced from modern experimental music in its genesis, the imprint of Ferreyra’s work is found in contemporary realisations of dark ambient and Dadaist sound creation, and is an excellent introduction for those genre dwellers who have yet to explore historical/academic works with a similar inclination.

https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/echos

The Gerogerigegege ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ 12” (FOAD)

Adherents know that while The Gerogerigegege may forever be labelled a noise project, it frequently – sometimes infuriatingly – isn’t. 2016 comeback album ‘Moena Hai’ was an exquisite combination of ambient craftmanship, field recordings and in-the-red shoegaze riffing which was somehow easily defining of the project even in its sprawl. But the following LPs were appropriated from 1970s pop schtick in that nonchalant fuck-you way the project delivers in spades, and newly self-released editions were a confusing mess of archival curiosities, self-bootlegged bootlegs, and a revised presentation of classic LP ‘Senzuri Champion’.

Within all that mess of culled cultural excess, lo-fi curiosities, rehearsal circumspection and hint of class, Juntaro Yamanouchi’s credentials as a noise artist lay untouched and seemingly uncared for in the project’s resurrection, but ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ is the exaltation of volume, distortion and abandon which has been lying in wait the last four years of the project (at least). ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ effects a more immediate and volume-dependent bustle than even ‘Senzuri Champion’’s centrepiece “Violence Onanie” but is similarly liberally noisy and unrestrained. The LP is a festering squall of high volume feedback and vocal noise, with a heavy Masonna feel in its slashes of shrieking vocal gibberish, cleaving feedback air, flip-switch effect injections and occasional pauses of equipment faltering in overheated exhaustion.

While the first side is utterly primal and unhinged, departing only from its shriek-and-howl template with a bath of reverb in final track “Piss Shower Telephone #4”, the second side seems to push some (probably sampled) junk clatter and movie script speech through its raucous amplification, those moments of performed downtime then fuelling spasmodic spurts of fierce movement, garbled vocal jags and greater equipment defeat/interruption.

Each side plays out as a single piece but let’s not forget that – of course – each isn’t. The LP purports to contain 13 tracks even if it doesn’t really, and to make it better the track titles are divine as only Juntaro could do: personal highlights are “Piss Shower Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon” and “Piss Purple Draank (T.V Bastard)”. For bonus points the pressing is a picture disc, cheesecake muscle men innocently handstanding, their smile and serene pose at dubious odds with the vibrant audio content.

I get why The Gerogerigegege is a difficult or taboo project for many, but any and all unpreparedness or selectivity is out: ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ has to be the exception for anyone yearning for liberated and deranged harsh noise with a juvenile fascination for loudness, feedback and human caterwaul. ‘Piss Shower Girlfriend’ is the LP which will yet again entrench The Gerogerigegege in the noise consciousness, and lead to a whole new round of disappointments as that newly attracted audience find the next few releases to bear no sonic resemblance or care for convention.

http://www.foadrecords.it/

Gnaw Their Tongues ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ CD/LP (Consouling Sounds)

If Maurice De Jong’s recent releases as Hagetisse, Golden Ashes and in duo Dodenbezweerder speak to different paths of black metal historicism, Gnaw Their Tongues is intent on abandoning that association. Only the final tattered remnants of Maurice’s genre trappings are still stapled to the project’s sickly flesh, little left of the beginnings of the project which seems to have occupied the nastiest and bleakest corners of Maurice’s attentions for well over a decade.

‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ strips away black metal’s layers of traditional musicality to reveal an impassive industrial inside, dominated by blocks of cold sound which have been deprived of melody to instead comprise a set of negatively charged drones owing more to the fringes of European postmortem industrial than its church burning miscreants, then sets in largely short-form compositions which share a dismal production robbed of frequency definition and often constrained from the strangled recordings into which Maurice places his textural aberrations.

Despite Gnaw Their Tongues’ rejection of musicality, percussion is an usual driver of ‘I Speak The truth, Yet With every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’; devoid of melodic form, its drone layers clutch at the trajectory given by the pieces’ rhythmic constructs. The burrowing insect slop which opens the title track, leading into a brief martial industrial refrain and more larval electronics layers, begins to writhe as sparse programmed percussion punches through its murky electronics – reducing its bass guitar to a mucousy substance which bulges as the percussive stabs jab it. Likewise “Purity Coffins” alternates its hellish windstorms with punctuations of tense electronics twitching at the provocation of its electronic drum flashes, the piece almost dramatic in its soundtrack-like percussive hits and orchestra-like swells of permeating sound, and “Abortion Hymn” rides free-form percussion into a storm of reverberated industrial spatter, bass guitar murmur and swampy vocal cries: only a few tentacles of mid-range slither emerge from the depressive mass of sound separately, to warily grasp around and retreat unsatisfied.

Other rhythmic constructs follow the turgid pull of the LP’s familiarly hateful textures, beginning with “White Void Black Wounds” commandeering a blast beat to then requisition it as a tool of war, as a frantic spray of artillery merges with seething distortion textures. The harrowing screams of “Here Is No Corruption” are only unleashed when its quaver drum pattern pauses to allow strains of vocals scrapings to emerge from the moist drone which blankets the track, its subtle pattern changes swamped by the clamouring spawn of the piece’s synth lines. Gnaw Their Tongues has never lurched closer to power electronics than in these moments of insistence, textures caught in the churn and seething in frustration as harrowing vocals whirlpool through the pieces.

While not afraid to borrow from the black industrial setups of MZ.412 and the drone-heavy suffocations of Urfaust, Gnaw Their Tongues brings a newly abstracted darkness to what remains, again somehow shaped by its percussive elements. “To Rival Death In Beauty” begins with grotesque vocals and a marauding synth line but is taken away by intermittent fragmentation of electronica rhythmic constructs, the piece managing to move its heaving carcass in time with the pulse set in motion by those early drum machine patterns. Even more absurd, a noirish wash permeates “A Sombre Gesture In The Faint Light Of Dusk” as faltering error messages and an unsettling bass refrain flare into more swollen pustules of greying drone mush, squirming electronics and dripping vocal screams – its urgencies dictated by the return of its percussive elements, as with closer “Shall Be No More” which ebbs and flows as tied to its rhythmic fortunes.

After half an hour of unpleasantness which plumbs the depths of Maurice’s late night self-torment, reflected in a constantly dismal production which has been stripped of any high end presence, “Shall Be No More” finally settles into ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’’s brief moment of normalcy. Weak rays of sun reach the later half of the track  to reveal an almost uplifting (at least comparable to the remainder of ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’) melody which brings the nightmarishness of the album to a close – as if acknowledging that the LP’s terrors must lurk in both literal and mentally figurative shadows, to be forgotten in the light of day but crawling back into consciousness when the evening arrives.

My initial listens to ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ thought that perhaps the project had spat out a release too reliant on the emotionless distortion textures which shadow much of the LP, but the shaping of ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ is a more complex ordeal than that initial impression, its grotesqueness worsened when you realise that even within that putrid production its parts are connected, and that mess is alive and responsive. Gnaw Their Tongues has picked at the rotted flesh of industrial culture for years, but ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ seems enraptured by the genre’s dark recesses, even as Maurice’s other projects pull threads of more familiar black metal out for focus. Earlier pleasure derived from the chaos and paraphilic pulls of power electronics has failed, leaving only the genre’s bleakest focuses with which to construct this album.

https://gnawtheirtongues.bandcamp.com/album/i-speak-the-truth-yet-with-every-word-uttered-thousands-die

The New Blockaders ‘Succès De Scandale’ C-38 (Advaita)

The New Blockaders’ contribution to the formative years of noise music is undeniable, however in recent years Richard Rupenus and company have lurched into a turbulent and less than satisfying new operation, uneven recordings and a number of unsatisfying releases casting shadow on the project’s legacy and creating a second stream of modern material which is far more difficult to pick through (if one can even locate and afford some of the more limited and extroverted items) and which constitute a more uneven presentation of the previous sonic and theoretical achievements of The New Blockaders through the project’s first two decades.

A seminal piece of The New Blockaders’ early works are recordings made at Modern Tower, captured and disseminated across official and unofficial releases in increasingly confusing edits, excerpts, reissues and revisitings. That horse is flogged again for ‘Succès Du Scandale’ which is described as incorporating excerpts from a previously unreleased 1984 performance at Modern Tower. Confusingly (and with The New Blockaders it could not really be any other way) the cassette’s Discogs entry attributes the affected piece to Richard and Philip Rupenus alone, excluding mention of recent The New Blockaders members – and suggesting the piece’s usage of the 1984 recordings is more extensive than a brief sampling.

That suggestion is borne out in the material, “Succès De Scandale I” an orgy of destruction with its unstoppable central cavalcade of tearing and screeching junk metal laced in a light tape distortion, and boosted by hardier kicks, thuds and smashes on either side of the stereo spectrum which fly out from the fringes of the piece. The central smash-up is glorious in itself but so insistent as to be desensitising, the harder garbage can kicks needed to give “Succès De Scandale I” its staccato impact – also summonsing a low-end growl to lurk in the vacant space of the piece. While denser than The New Blockaders’ early work – speaking to the track’s modern input – there is also the same celebration of anti-music, a joy of nothing found in the refuse of industry which links right back to ‘Changez Les Blockeurs’ even if the work itself isn’t to the same level of achievement.

The modern recast is in side B’s “Succès De Scandale II”, the scrap metal storm of “Succès De Scandale I” confined within a casing of hissing near-white noise, the previous threshing reduced to a sense of movement under the dominating thick layer of noise treatment, with almost continuous layers of contact microphoned detritus also scorched in withering distortion and welded against the piece’s torso. Fewer sonic fragments are let loose from this second dervish; outside some stuttering electronics murmur there’s little no lower frequency responsiveness, only small particles of feedback and occasional electronics residue escape from the densely packed centrifuge.

The small spaces between the elements of “Succès De Scandale I” are removed for “Succès De Scandale II”, condensing those destructive forces into a suffocating press of intentionally lifeless sound, the acoustic movement of the early material smothered into a more dispassionate expression of the project’s nothingness than the sonically powerful smash and crash of Messrs Rupenus’ 1980s junkpile.

Clearly Richard Rupenus isn’t up for debating what his legacy should be, and it’s for none of us to say. ‘Succès De Scandale’ has closer ties than many recent works, obviously in its borrowed sound componentry but also in being packaged with a t-shirt bearing The New Blockaders’ manifesto on its back. I can’t say I’ll be wearing that any time soon, but I don’t know if my fashion choice is a doubly negative anti, or par for the expectation.

Incapacitants’ Toshiji Mikawa adds some liner notes further emphasising the historical relevance of ‘Succès De Scandale I’, and given his acknowledged inspiration from early The New Blockaders recordings his assessment of the recordings – particularly “Succès De Scandale I” –  adds some credibility to ‘Succès De Scandale’ as an historical bridge. The cassette isn’t heyday Rupenus classicism, but it is a more resonant and rejective take on The New Blockaders than I’ve extracted from other recent releases.

Moral Order ‘冠状病毒’ and Mark Solotroff ‘You May Be Holding Me Back’

 

I have long maintained a want to have, and therefore review, a ‘physical’ music collection. The industrial underground will, no doubt, emerge from the current COVID-19 pandemic as resolute and bloodyminded as it ever was; but as the world retreats indoors, the smallest reassessment one can do is to move online for new music.

Both these releases snapshot the current pandemic, Spain in the grip of a surge in COVID-19 cases and the USA lurching into shutdown in reaction to a domestic crisis which may or may not – I’m not here to navigate that debate – already be committed to mirror the worst of what Europe is seeing. Moral Order’s track is destined for a 19 copy “friend’s edition” cassette, but is effectively unleashed as an online release for those outside that immediate circle. Mark’s tracks were intended for another long-form cassette (which may or may not happen post-pandemic), but likewise for now presents in online reality. Both releases are available on Bandcamp, and I purchased both on Friday’s day of fee waiver (I also don’t propose to navigate the controversies of that), with a view to making some small contribution to those in the musical community who are having their lives up-ended by society’s current upheaval and the march of COVID-19.

Title track "冠状病毒" is the invasion of infection, a striving synth drone the centre of the track but carrying a viral load of troubling components in its course. An early vocal manifestation is just the beginning, snippets of rotted voice and other small particles quickly bolstering the track as the central synth bubbles, higher registers festering and provoking swollen fissures of antagonised overtones. The track builds to add a mixture of sickly upper register drone and resonant high tones, the former vibrating in contained infestation as "冠状病毒" is overcome and ultimately wracked with contagion.

A reflection of humanity’s current plight, "冠状病毒" is short in length and quickly overcome despite initial symptoms being mild. The track may not be the reminder the world needs right now, but the tracking of contamination is superbly captured within Moral Order’s Spanish confines.

Notwithstanding its pessimistic title "A Distant Problem Coming From China" carries some sense of optimism, the recording seemingly coming at the closing end of Fernando's isolating lockdown after the rapaciousness of disease sent everyone indoors to manifest "冠状病毒". Flickers of disease still haunt the track - but its isolation manifests in a central rhythmic pulse and later repetitive melodic fragment, the two propelled by some subtle low-end groove to give some momentum to the world's plight even as shrill synthesizer calls and delayed spoken word interject as continued warnings. If "冠状病毒" acknowledges the onset of disease "A Distant Problem Coming From China" may be the passage through it, a hesitant progress to elements of normalcy even if swarmed by reminders.

If Moral Order is the sound of disease, Mark Solotroff’s work is redolent of isolation. ‘You May Be Holding Me Back’ treats field recordings with careful synthesizer infiltration, the sounds of the city kept at bay through “A Literal Territory Occupied Literally” by a thick treatment of billowing synth fog, an insistent dying wind chime, and a slow delay which accents moments of occasional field recording clarity. The claustrophobia is gradual in onset but intense: slivers of Mark’s field recordings emerge as increasingly worrisome moments while the bilious synth coagulates unperturbed, smothering the broader city’s interactions in its cloud.

The isolating effect in “All In The Straw Together” is even more intense, the walls having closed in and starting to crawl with visual infestation. The field recordings are barely discernible and the thrum of the city has disappeared, replaced with a multi-layered haze of vibrating high end hallucinating and cyclic mid-toned insomnia. “All In The Straw Together” doesn’t pretend isolation is loneliness; rather, isolation manifests as apparitional disturbance wrapped around a depressed core, flickering in and out of reality as images of the chaos outside manifest as self-isolated mania.

The race to return to normalcy will come, but impacts of the current pandemic won’t be forgotten. Within that are the artistic impressions, both negative – so many working in the arts are struggling for income at the moment – and positive – already we have two embedded artists offering up, almost instantaneously on completion, reflective creativity. Both releases can be streamed for those needing sound as an escape from their own difficulties; they can also be purchased and downloaded by those with more at their disposal.

https://moralorder.bandcamp.com/track/-

https://marksolotroff.bandcamp.com/album/you-may-be-holding-back

Linekraft 'Subhuman Principle' 12" (Tesco Organisation)

Early Linekraft took a very literal approach to industrial music, mechanised operations dominating Masahiko Okubo’s transition from the rhythmic noise of formative trio Mothra to his own project. Over time that rigidity has drained from Linekraft, the ‘Engineering Analysis Of Inner Death’ LP on Hospital a modern masterpiece of heavy junk abuse and dark industrial which coalesced the shift from the constructed to the deconstructed.

Perhaps recognising that ‘Engineering Analysis Of Inner Death’ was pushing Linekraft toward K2-like junk noise territory, ‘Subhuman Principle’ is more muted, the explosive noise of an LP for Hospital channelled into a rough power electronics shape which shows undoubted awareness and fondness for Tesco’s roster – in particular through a heavier synthesizer presence than previous work, and a militaristic hue to the sounds and compositional implements being utilised.

Side Irrigation takes up arms from the opening chaos of “Archaic”, “No Loss In Weeding Out” settling into a worrisome air-raid siren, with garbled fast-paced speech picked up like the tendrils of isolated radio transmissions – adding urgency to the scenario before explosions of junk metal, heavy synth fumes, and searing vocals crash around the track. The sampled speech disclose militia training drills as the sky darkens and conflict looms on all sides, “Hunger” continuing the guerrilla approach with further siren strafing, sampled voice transmissions and flashes of artillery fire. That hesitancy escalates into utter battlefield confusion on “We Will Burn The Old Grass”, echoing trigger snaps of electronics and steelcap thud building against spoken vocals, while arcs of artillery fire span across the sky: not the obvious evocation of an all-out noise assault, but a carefully plotted replication of heat, recoil, and disorientation.

Side Factory steps away from conflagration, dominated by “Non Human Animal” which wanders through the post-apocalyptic remnants of industry, sirens dying as an ominous synth drone underpins heavy junk metal kicked into long delay, with fires of sulphuric distortion still flickering until met by heavier junk/distortion abuse which covers the track in blinding soot and clingy fallout.

The flash backs don’t take long to return. “Death Is The Surrender” seems to audibly rewind the earlier sirens of Side Irrigation, rife with shellshocked vocals dripping in chemical filtration, reverse impact detonation and fragments of sampled instructions. The only overt rhythmic component to the LP is in penultimate track “Stand Alone” but the effect is terrifying, its returning march of war surrounded by hostile vocals, continued synth strafing and insistent PTSD pulsing; “Modern” then closes with a chilling minimalist refrain and final uproar of vocals and cruel junk metal kicking.

The alignment of Linekraft with Tesco’s familiar phraseology permeates ‘Subhuman Principle’, but without shifting the project off-axis. There’s still plenty of bruisingly resonant junk metal which crashes through the LP – only now it’s the discards of armaments and shell casings, rather than oil drums and wrenches. The result is a re-weighing of Linekraft to meet the pointed hostility of ‘Subhuman Principle’’s subject matter which – given how powerful and redolent the material is – I find entirely sincere.

https://tescogermany.bandcamp.com/album/subhuman-principle

Kneeling Knave ‘Skin Presence’ C-30 (Chondritic Sound)

In addition to curating the active Altered States Tapes label, Melbournian Cooper Bowman fuels the creative components of his label with his lo-fi techno work as Roman Nails, and brooding industrial project Kneeling Knave.

‘Skin Presence’ is Kneeling Knave’s first release since 2017, further distancing the project from the monotonal synthesizer-shaped rhythmic industrial at its origins – but not forgetting them. While tracks such as the title track and “Stamina” still work that familiar blinking pulse, much of ‘Skin Presence’ builds with a more sophisticated use of rhythm. “Clinician’s Perspective” encourages an almost Calypso-like drum machine beat to meet its otherwise minimal synth pulse, and “Guerrilla Logic” pieces together its rhythm from fragments of piano, synth thud, junk clatter and an irregular gated noise. Both would be deeply flawed in the wrong hands, but each walks the tightrope to keep to ‘Skin Presence’’s centrally dour mannerism.

Outside those deeper rhythmic constructs “A Failing System” layers a simple metronome click with carefully laid tones which flicker in and out of synchronisation, and “Derange Or Damage” builds haunting tonal fluctuations with a siren-like insistency giving only the lightest metre to the piece. The willing development of both tonal and rhythmic constructs is the path to closer “House” which takes the cassette’s development to its farthest, the finale verging on electronica with its blissed-out swells of soft tones and coordinated percussive patterns.

While ‘Skin Presence’ uses Cooper’s gruff vocals to anchor the work to the power electronics/industrial idiom, a technique which weights even those tracks most sparsely impacted, “House” deserts that feature to add a few more paces between it and Kneeling Knave’s thudding beginnings. Like all of ‘Skin Presence’ “House” is measured in its pace and cautious – even reluctant – in its presence, the genre dissipation still leaving plenty of identifiers which keep “House” tied to Kneeled Knave’s sterner moments.

The gap between releases may not have yielded an abundance of new material, but what’s here is an increased confidence in straying beyond the borders of the early industrial influences which feed Kneeling Knave. As a glimmer at the end of an otherwise sombre experience, “House” gives only a small swipe of colour to an otherwise intentionally dreary experience. That final uplift to ‘Skin Presence’ hints at possibilities to broaden Kneeling Knave’s experimental musical reach, but whether that would work on a wider scale while keeping the project genre-grounded, is for another time.

https://chondriticsound.bandcamp.com/album/skin-presence