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

Sverre Larssen ‘Wind Harp Recordings 1976-1977’ 12” (O. Gudmundsen Minde)

The history of experimental music is not just in the hallowed names, records, and studios of current remembrance, but in the forgotten developments, obscurities and isolations which are lost in time, of which were never really found to begin with. The intersection of experimental music with other creative – and non-creative – disciplines is an essential part of the cross-pollenation of ideas and techniques which has fed the development of outsider music, and is convergence which has frequently incorporated the earth’s natural elemental forces – the power of which has the capacity to dwarf any electronic creation.

Sverre Larssen was a Norwegian businessman who in the early 1970s constructed a wind harp – in his case a twelve-stringed instrument, capturing the interaction of the wind with the instrument’s strings via contact microphones – through, it seems, a combination of engineering ability, rudimentary external instructions, and a healhy does of intuition. This LP on O. Gudmundsen Minde releases the only available recordings of Sverre’s creation, obtained from his family and publicly available for the first time.

Even across multiple recordings the LP is essentially one – albeit beautiful – outcome: a low tonal drone with slight fluctuations and imperfections, from which a prism of harmonic overtones and sympathetic vibrations come and go, the resilience on the initial octaves giving way to a looser structure in the upper layers of Larsen’s captivating drones.

Where the pieces differ is in the depth and strength of that harmonic overlay, “Nordavinden I” quite strong in its base layer and minimalist in its higher registers, whereas “Nordavinden II” emphasises a mid-range tonal sheen almost absent from the first track. The environment itself is also a variable, the wind more audible on “Sonnavinden” as it merges with the spiralling overtones emitted from Sverre’s wind harp. But even from that singular realisation the result is captivating, the gorgeousness of the kaleidoscopic harmonic movements more than enough to move these recordings beyond ‘simple drone’ descriptors.

I have only two disappointments, entirely contradictory and born from my abhorrent mono-lingualism. The first is the disappointingly short blurb on the back cover, and lack of other historical materials or analysis. For what is promoted as a special historical find, the importance or context of Sverre’s work is difficult to appreciate from the confined description on the back cover. The second is the interviews which pad out the B side, all in Norwegian and featuring only a few gusts of musical content. I’m sure these would be satisfactorily (or at least somewhat) expository if I could understand them (correcting my first criticism), but as it is the B side comes up short.

Even with that possible insight obscured, the beauty of Sverre’s work is standalone enchanting, and  I don’t need an historical context to listen to this LP enraptured. Those with an interest in the works of Alan Lamb or Alvin Lucier’s classic ‘Music On A Long Thin Wire’ will have a (or at least, my) starting point for Sverre Larssen’s work, but the musicality which Sverre extracts is all his own.

https://ogudmundsenminde.bandcamp.com/album/wind-harp-recordings-1976-1977

V:XII ‘Rom, Rune and Ruin: The Odium Disciplina’ CD (Aesthetic Death)

Daniel Jansson has an impressive history in underground music, gaining notoriety in the projects Blodulv and Keplers Odd before emerging on the Cold Spring label as Deadwood, a project merging chaotic black metal elements with hardened power electronics. V:XII draws again on that history, but largely maintains a clear separation from Daniel’s earlier work.

“The New Black” opens ‘Rom, Rune and Ruin’ with emphasis on Daniel’s soulless vocals by subduing the piece’s other elements. The various vocal styles, borrowed from Daniel’s musical history, are key to ‘Rom, Rune and Ruin’ and emerge from “The New Black” through a minimal irregular rhythm, short crescendos of synth, and looming low-end waterforms which all lurk in the track’s subzero blindness, establishing a strong current of dark ambient which flows through the sleeper of the CD.

What follows is “Madr”, a central legacy track which cleverly captures a strong black metal sensibility while remaining rooted in the project’s power electronics/industrial intentions, a melodic refrain and sung vocals buried under the hateful synthesizer, drum machine bursts and grim vocals which dominate the piece as they suffocate, strafe and castigate the track respectively. I haven’t before heard something so melodically capable retain such a strong genre focus and external harshness, and as only the second track on the CD “Madr” quickly sets the bar high, its glimmers of musical legacy giving brief breaths of hope in the ebbs of an otherwise dominating piece. If Deadwood was a merger of black metal’s more raw and unforgiving tendencies, “Madr” acknowledges the genre’s slow melodic abilities without drawing too much attention.

“Yawning Void” and “Vanagandr” likewise bridge the same gap, the former importing semi-melody in its abyssal low-end synth haunt, similar to “Madr” in affect but stripped of everything except synthesizer and vocals; the latter corrals its melodic elements from a transparent synth drift, adding a slowed heartbeat pulse and glacial chill without tipping the piece fully into dark ambient territory. Shards of desolate musicality lie at the core of V:XII’s work, permeating these few tracks in a less subtle way than elsewhere on the CD and tying V:XII to its history.

“Twining Rope” follows as a more straight ahead death industrial work, chilling synth despondency moving into snowstorm flange which is swirled around a mordant rhythm and tectonic effected vocals, a bleak outlook repeated on “Djavulsogon - Deconstructing the Bloodwolf” which strips V:XII down to a basic track of bleak synthesizer and gruff vocals, and the driving drum machine thud and wisps of electronics which underpin gruff vocals on “Ururz” for a strong hint of Trepaneringsritualen’s ritualised industrial rawness.

Penultimate track “BAHF” is the merging of the disc’s various ideas, a slow musical pulse running through the piece as it bursts forth with hardened power electronics vignettes, lulls into slow ambient drift, and a closing harder rhythmically edged apex – again tied together with hoarse vocals which push the piece through its permutations. “BAHF” manages to tie the threads of ‘Rom, Rune and Ruin: The Odium Disciplina’ together and inject some greater compositional movement, without ever sounding incongruous or too stretched.

While each track presents as a standalone creation, ‘Rom, Rune and Ruin: The Odium Disciplina’ has a dark chill through its entirety: an unshakeable iciness which – while familiar to fans of the genres V:XII draws from – cuts across the CD’s genre references and permeates to the unbeating heart of the CD. The clear and nuanced production serves to detail that encompassing frost’s impact on all the timbral components of ‘Rom, Rune and Ruin: The Odium Disciplina’, burying the listener in its dark Arctic scenery down to the last snowflake. In execution and effect V:XII delivers within genre expectations, while adding a clear imprint of its own.

Mo*Te ‘Anti Is Anti Is Anti’ C-30 (New Forces)

Fumiyuki Nagura’s time as Mo*Te in the 1990s seems larger in retrospect; constituted by a handful of self-released cassettes and some choice extensions into the small label underground of the time, boosted by selective and highly treasured split releases: in both audio content and packaging those efforts are some of my favourite relics of that time. The work resonates the best features of that era: incessant harsh noise electronics with movement and innate understanding, utterly heavy in delivery and tinged with dark social unease.

Mo*Te’s surprising return in the 2010s has been sporadic but so far without misstep, shifting away from the cathartic insistence of the 1990s work and tentacling into new ideas without abandoning the project’s roots. A recent CD boxset reissue by Industrial Recollections and Audio Dissection collects Mo*Te’s early output on his own Uncut label, and is the perfect realisation/diffusion of the project at its best, also setting a backdrop for new work ‘Anti Is Anti Is Anti’ which casts a long shadow.

A side “Be Lacks Human Feelings” unleashes a brief storm of crisp fury before settling into rather placid waves of electronics, stabilising as a stereo split of two streams of live-to-tape noise which pool around a thudding heartbeat pulse which fades in and out throughout the piece. The focus is on mid-range saturated distortion textures, but flighty filter plumes also flock to the track, glaring from the sluggish grind of “Be Lacks Human Feelings” as its linear textures start to move, weave, and multiply; a few higher waves of fury peak during the piece but they’re quick, falling back into the unthreatening current of the piece. Those peaks of harshness betray the overall timidity of “Be Lacks Human Feelings”, missing the encompassing fervour of Fumiyuki’s 1990s output which the piece seems to want to tribute, but also wants to distance.

The second side is a recording of a May 2019 live collaboration with Freaks Idol, the rugged recording returning caustic flavour to the work but also charcoaling the piece quite severely –  meaning large stretches are reduced to near impenetrable cinder. Heavy flange, shredded feedback and vocals, and singed chunks of the duo’s noise barrage make it out of the tar pit to give the piece strong hints of what I’m sure was a fervent live set, but as with “Be Lacks Human Feelings” – although for different reasons – the collaborative piece misses, more than it attains, Mo*Te’s golden age sweet spot.

If ‘Anti Is Anti Is Anti’ is Mo*Te’s attempt to return to those halcyon early years, in looking back it probably misses why Fumiyuki’s drift into adjacent genre expression was needed. As a hit of regression ‘Anti Is Anti Is Anti’ marks what it set out to do, but doesn’t master the same wide-eyed solvent inhalation-fuelled insatiability which struck ‘Life In A Peaceful New World’ or ‘Taste Die Mad’. Maturation can be a bitch, but pretending it didn’t happen is rarely an option. ‘Anti Is Anti Is Anti’ is not a bad cassette, but it’s not a legacy note for Mo*Te, and not what the project now best has to focus on.

GX Jupitter-Larsen 'Characterized'

Psychiatrist Ewen Cameron ended up being a compensatory and reputational nightmare for the Canadian government, after the behaviourally and psychologically devastating impact of his psychiatric experiments – in part delivered as contractor services to a subproject within the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program – were revealed in later decades (a fate not limited to Cameron, and not the only part of Cameron’s life or practice deserving of criticism). A feature of Cameron’s work was the use of repetitive spoken words, delivered in isolation and as part of an arsenal of techniques intended to psychologically deteriorate a patient – in the undelivered hope that a new construct could then be inserted.

Alvin Lucier’s seminal minimalist work ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’ also realises degradation through repetition, a piece of narration repeated through recording and tape playback, degradation, room atmospherics and frequency emphasis emerging from the process to realise something new from the repetitive process. It may be no coincidence that a classic image of Lucier in performance – used recently on the excellent ‘Illuminated By The Moon’ boxset – makes Lucier up to resemble an involuntary subject.

Both serve as experiential reference points for ‘Characterized’, a piece for radio authored by GX Jupitter-Larsen and which aired on Australia’s Radio National in May 2015 after an earlier airing in the United Kingdom. The piece subverts GX’s entropic intentions to bore away at psychiatric wholeness by the use of its own unstable repetitions of a few central spoken phrases, taken from Chelsea Manning’s testimony as part of the judicial process which led to her conviction and imprisonment for Espionage Act violations. Cameron’s work is part of the MK-ULTRA legacy which continues to inform interrogation ‘techniques’ carried out by America agencies.

After those initial few words provide the unstable point of our trepanered opening, silence, Manning’s text expands from a selection of opening single word repetition to short passages sampled from her testimony and underpinned by extended exhalations of hollow feedback, the content deformed by edited stutter and cacophonous layering, and with doubt clinging to the words as glitch and decomposition take root by operation of GX’s own clandestine techniques. Ultimately the words are unstoppable, their initial probing and hesitancy coaxed on by the smaller repetitions into greater segments, layers and disclosures, ‘Characterization’ ending with a denser selection and longer phrases than the small fragments which opened it.

While the promotional blurb says that ‘Characterization’ was created with the intention of capturing a dream state, its sound creation carries an abuse focused on isolation and degradation through repetition (Anthony Adeane’s book ‘Out Of Thin Air’ explores the intersection of dream states and interrogation techniques and is a fascinating bisection of crime confessions) which is initially more dismal than that description suggests – ultimately triumphed, however, by Manning’s testimony revealing itself in spite of the sonic attacks on her voice which reflect the social, judicial and political attacks on Manning’s name, character and conduct.

The skill of repetition is to locate purpose, something Lucier and Cameron share even if their worlds never collided. GX Jupitter-Larsen does so with ‘Characterization’, the work far more immersive than what its somewhat simple creation would ordinarily carry. My single point of concern is that some background knowledge/context is unfortunately important for appreciation – a listener coming in with no information may only hear repetition and glitch, without the techniques or content carrying the power that GX’s choice of character imbues in the piece. A power of radio is the excitement of discovering the unknown, turning the switch to hear something new and undeniable. While ‘Characterization’ sensibly disseminates by public media it also arguably suffers from that too, the potential impact of discovery lessened by what I consider to be the necessary immersion in the story which the piece portrays.

An archive of the Radio National broadcast of 'Characterized' is available here:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/soundproof/characterized/6445292

Deathprod ‘Dark Transit’ 12” (Smalltown Supersound)

The release this year of ‘Occulting Disk’ marked the end of a 15 year wait for a new Deathprod full-length, a near-silence punctuated by occasional projects which gave no real confidence that Helge Sten was planning to again unleash his Audio Virus in any type of cataclysmic quantity. The unforgiving may hear the austerity to ‘Occulting Disk’ and wonder why it took 15 years to gestate, but the black majesty of Deathprod was never so concentrated or engulfing as in the project’s return. The new double LP reflects the dispassionate and unrelenting menace at the heart of a black oil slick, which uses unsuspecting currents to form engulfing shapes of suffocating sable. ‘Dark Transit’ is the surprise follow-up, a limited EP released for Helge’s performance at the Oslo Opera House on 10 November 2019 after which the remaining copies found their way overseas.

“Transit 1” layers an unsettling lower tonal drone with a flickering high register, newer drone undulations entering the piece to tilt it in all directions until the vessel is capsized and subsumed by the nighttime waves – only to find lingering high tones attaching to the sinking lifeless mass, slowed screeches of the final gasps of oxygen trailing from the corpse of the piece as it sinks to the bottom.

“Transit 2” is almost impenetrably dark; a single low synth line modulated and reverberated slowly and almost undetectably before rising slightly in register and with a glimmer of light, allowing shrouded tones to break off – only to wither and fall into the shadows again – before itself retreating slowly. “Transit 3” then quickly closes the second side by reminiscing the grim weather patterns of ‘Morals and Dogma’, a blustering tonal expectoration which arcs while wavering in a cross-wind, pungent as its edges singe while in momentum, then chilling as it falls to the ground.

I was all in once I heard Deathprod in 2004, so anything stylistically on message is going to be embraced. These new recordings do make the listener work a little harder to extract that same lifeless joy, but it’s there: in the unflinching black palette, and in the finer details eking out of the central viral pit Helge Sten lays down so expertly.

The same tundral bleakness shapes ‘Dark Transit’ as it did ‘Occulting Disk’, again distilling Deathprod to its concentrated essence. The project has always shrouded itself capably, Helge’s concoction of electronics unremittingly dismal and dark – however the project’s return seems all the more inwardly inspired, drawing strength from its own minimalism and taking ink from its own unbeating heart. ‘Occulting Disk’ is described as an ‘anti-fascist ritual’, however the answer isn’t political correction but decimation: we are all equal in death. I was always going to champion ‘Dark Transit’, but fuck it I do so with no doubt.

Dead Boomers & Dustin Johnston & Shayne Bowden 'The Next Action' C-20 (Deterra)

Shayne Bowden’s Deterra label has diminished its output of late, but a string of great cassettes were released earlier in the decade which seemed to unfortunately escape their deserved audience. This split/collaborative release is one of the last of them, and its under-assuming profile should not diminish its worth.

Over their side-long collaboration Shayne and Actuary’s Dustin Johnston lay down a thick and satisfying stretch of industrial-tinged noise, Shayne setting the pace with a mix of flowing distortion and strong scuffs of beaten contact microphone clatter, a simple modern harsh noise bounty which is counterpointed by wilting high-end tones and soaring electronic chirp from Dustin. The obvious separation in register stakes out sonic territory well, but even with that definition the interplay is meaningful – the rise and fall from each makes sense – and “We Jam Lexapro” achieves more than its constituent parts would suggest: proof, were it needed, that modern noise has a workable space between wall stasis and textural/spatial disruption.

Dead Boomers’ time exploring the boundaries of their sound is over, the campervan pulling into the driveway in time to launch into the pernicious “A Gentle Occasion”, a tense piece of marching synth rhythm, clawing feedback, and spacious howled vocals. This is the duo at its familiar best, the piece apparently a live recording – a setting the duo have long commanded – which gives a sweaty sheen to its simmering.

According to the liner notes “Annual Rite” is a contemporaneous recording to "A Gentle Occasion" – but there’s no sense of audience, a greater volume, and a very different feel, hinting at Red Wine And Sugar’s use of extended text, but here with a backdrop of industrial drone/ambience. It’s settled and safe after the turmoil of “A Gentle Occasion”, the vocals spoken evenly and soaked in effects rather than the power electronics gruffness of the opening track – but without effecting an anti-climax or losing the duo's steely resolve.

In 20 minutes ‘The Next Action’ covers a lot of ground, but not so diffusely as to lose focus and with not a wasted moment to be found. If not hitting their full audience by now, clearly all artists involved should – and check out the great artwork to boot!