Jah Excretion/Animal Machine – ‘high times’ split cassette:
Animal Machine -heavy rend, torn tissues, lacerating turbulence, harsh churn & raptor electronics at speed. Largely aggravated & fulminating with electronic animosity, some traces of Glitch & chaos-pad palpitations & circuit-burn with varying dynamics of incision & collision. Harried & roughed-over by digital bellicosity, solid metal work & full-contact, surging harsh moil are in a constant theater of destruction. This is aggressive, fast, harsh, raw, quality Stridor with glitchy-digital-antagonism skewing the final voltage for that hard-cardio adrenaline flux, endorphin-overlap & near-death sugar-rush ….. totally fucking delicious. The sound/mastering on this session is also brilliant (loud, rotund, belting) something that can ruin or dampen other Animal Machine editions due to poor dubbing or production that lack both physicality & clarity. This excellent release has unfortunately been limited to just x25 hand numbered copies.
Jah Excretion from Japan give us a long lozenge of distorted, reverby, oscillating, echo-addled, psychedelic open-air billowing. Its fairly monotonous but possesses certain trance & atmosphere quirks that function given the right mood or moment.
Rauha Turva, 2012
Tokarev/EIAE-7”EP:
Excellent, obscure, harsh lo-fi electronics from Italy’s underbelly circa 2002-003. Currents of raw, piercing feedback, tatty, primitive, ploughing stridor, overloaded, hissing vocalized animus, distorted samples (Thatcher, disorder, unrest, Nuclearization) & uncomfortable bombinate frequencies. This kind of messy, personal & esoteric noise are a real pleasure. The B-side, consisting of “invocation” 1 & 2, is more Death Industrial & drags in synths. Extremely eerie & unsettling…powerful, dread laced, sombre & sepulchral. The initial piece is the strongest, & works like a series of cut-scenes, carefully connecting to restore some subterranean channel. Nice thick black card sleeve with bronze print, odd imagery & practically no information given. A fine production from a cult act. Limited to 300 hand numbered copies.
Disorder Nouveau
Mourmansk 150-logic of war 12”LP:
What an LP! Superb political noise from 2001, self-billed as “HARSH ELECTRONICS MEDICINE” from wayward French renegade. Scalding, ripping, shredding, grating, harsh manhandling & cacophonous comminute, irate & hysterical feedback or “Sour Milk” cross-currents, massively distorted vocals to the extent of nare complete indecipherability further crippled by socio-political samples from seminars, broadcasts & documentaries running through a mire of coarse & volatile discordance munitions. Powerful, violent, chaotic, balancing on the barrier between total mono-negation & oblivion & more constructive/pluralistic quality harsh extirpation with shrewd attention to placement & propping. This is a classic LP that captures the capricious M150 in one of his best modes & moods serving ultra-harsh & assaulting chaos charged to bursting with ungovernable, rejectionist, confrontational energy & subcultural militarism. The 9 tracks are largely dissimilar & alternating, all using different source/materials/equipment with a variegating repertoire of themes, styles & prep – leading to a diverse result throughout. This is crippling, extreme-electronics severity, running battles, & street conflict & amok urban guerrillas tearing through a besieged republic in full-blown government emergency. One of the greatest & harshest noise bands of all time on plenary draconian form. Blade Records was yet another early emporium of Italy’s small, indeterminate & abstruse noise-industrial-electronics patchwork that included some great & obscure treats on labels such as Butchers House & Spatter.
1999-2001, Blade Records
Nee! – does noise belong in music? CD:
All the custard! In one giant tub of discontinued ice-cream with too much yellow-dye in the finish. You know all about Nee! Cos’ you take your Noisecore seriously & understand all too well this outfit as one of the most dogged, spasmodic, straying & skewed that ever heaped gunpowder into the muskets chamber. Lumping the lunacy on with great heaping wads, it’s a three piece from the Netherlands spraying crazed evacuations of rabid, nonsensical Blurcore-Gunk, plastered in distortion adhesives & absolutely sodden with gravity blasts. & somehow it soars even higher. Its 1996 (& 97 & 98) here, so golden globules in tow yah? No one’s playing by conventional rules or integrationist adherence, Nee! Have no lyrics, follow or display almost nothing credible, discernible, comprehensive or identifiable, have odd & portentous art & imagery, elliptic song titles, tons of imaginary friends & puff giant orange smoke-rings sticky with weird odours from mouth like receptacles direct into your face. Hard-to-corner Grind/Noisecore & extreme sub-genre suffix miscellanist garble with funny, child-like, silly-arse, hyper-niche kids plastecine-animation cartoon-series that only ran for one season but reverberates cult allegiance & enduring significance for small groups of hermetic odd-balls that walk miles every day in bare feet & aprons style vocals. Narcotics, certainly something psychedelic, have obviously contributed various compounds to whatever takes responsibility for this wonderful splurging. On top of this, you have some really nifty, tight & ornate double-kick confection, controlled high-hat stabs & other ‘pro’ coordination & scripted or structured weaves to keep things fluctuating & interpersonal between licks. Most of the time its hyper-blasting blur-shred with the Muppet that got banned in the first few episodes for frightening kids in the audience & damaging equipment raining total paroxysm fits of scream-orgy spew on your exposed innards. the drummer Michiel is outrageously rapid & clearly clawed-out a bunch of speed trophies for his generous bundles of destroying tenderization blast magnanimity (still, even today, very few noisecore drummers are even close to this lunatic 90’s bedlam, which is really quite some achievement). These guys were fuckin’ nuts! One of the very best, the most original & the hardest annnd! – absolutely on the “No-Skool Noyzcore” or Gunk angle, with grit & muscularity rather than just winkle-wave & drib-drab. Atrociously, they seemed to just drift by without getting the dues they so obviously secured. Their refusal to conform to customary norms & the fact that they were pitching their peers of a precipice with far superior speed & velocity was probably the trigger for this ignorance. They self-released as well, like so many of the most interesting bands, something that often gets the scenes heckles in a bind. Well, decades down the line, Mortville, the label that released Nee’s first piece of vinyl, a split with Warsore in 1998, which I actually have an original of, have taken the initiative to jam the bands entire back catalogue onto one disc. That consists of about 155 songs in 77 minutes! Absolutely one of the best & fastest Noisegrind bands of all time with precious Gunk octane-ultra-slake jetting out of dorsal slats.
1996-1998, Mortville Records
Mortalized & Guilty Connector-concerto for harsh noise grind #1 3”CD:
Super alluring conceptually, this ambitious & intrepid expedition into prime Noisegrind exaltation between scrum-gentry Guilty Connector & puffed & gleaming Deathgrind getup Mortalized falls way short of the brilliance it pursues. GxCx are capable of pristine destructive delicacy, & deliver here, typical Kohei weapons-grade harsh maul & brawl along with some deft experimental contortions – nothing to fault & a wealth of welter. Mortalized however, were a Deathgrind band from Kyoto – frankly, its some of the drabbest & stultifyingly generic, used-dishcloth, affordable window-wipe that sags significantly towards the Metal side of the idiom with barely any Grind credentials present. Its further pacified by very poor stamina, machine-washed over-production & a pronounced lack of speed with super domesticated blastbeats. Mortalized’s crippling unoriginality & shopping-display-sheen is countered by GxCx’s savage trounce, the combined result being an acceptable degree of barbarity & high-voltage stridency that resembles gunk/noisecore with one collaborator overcompensating & consolidating the inferior participants anaemia. The one-way steroid transplant also smothers Mortalized, making them sound a bit more chaotic & unpredictable (they are otherwise routinely boxed & dull) in the eventuated outcome, which works massively in the sessions favour. A better running mate would of resulted in a much greater episode. However, there is some success & even novelty in this troubled misalliance & the ‘third result’ collateral that ensues. Not sure how concerted the editing & overlay process was either? It feels a bit rushed, random & frivolous with a slapdash, toss it on & be done with it strategy (this could of course be totally incorrect) playing out in an overdub scenario rather than live, real-time interaction. Duration is meagre with an insubstantial length that seems unsatisfyingly brief, almost incomplete for a 3”CD. Still, some nice use of interregnum compositing, varied electronics & field recordings (the classic GxCx natural sounds samples). Despite the flaws & detractions, this is an important release regardless of ambiguity & rampant flaws. The territory is commendable, the concept, the attempt & the final result still bares teeth. The Stridor is excellent with some droll & expansive software based manipulations of ransacked materials. The finalized clatter also works, & delivers the rare & vintage collision of quality harsh noise interacting with an intense kinetic genre, something that happens all to rarely.
2006, Bloodbath Records