Review: Belief Defect's Moe Espinosa and Luis Flores bonded over a love of early industrial music - and even now, some six years on from the pair's debut album, its influence is still very much in evidence. But that doesn't mean that this, their eight track sophomore effort, harks back to the days of Throbbing Gristle et al. Rather, the Berlin duo take their taste for the uncompromising and sonically shocking and twist it into new shapes, equally informed by experiments from the leftfield of electronica and sharpened up by acute sound design. 'Apprehension Engine' is technically ambient - it's certainly beatless - but the way it steadily frazzles and burns itself up is edgy and unsettling rather than being chill out material. 'The Witching' splices doom-laden, deep voices with lumphammer kick drums, while 'Celebrate Me!' is a gloriously half-Suicide, half-Autechre mix of cyborg aggression and throbbing sequencers. Not one to be listened to with the lights off we reckon... It'll be all fright on the night!
Review: Fresh from releasing a swathe of conceptual full-lengths, Los Angeles threesome Clipping have returned to their hip-hop roots via a mixtape style album reflective of their hip-hop roots. Of course, this is not hip-hop in the classical sense. According to the accompany sleeve notes, Dead Channel Sky is a collection of cuts focused on the present, dually inspired by the histories of cyberpunk and hip-hop. In practice, that means fast-flowing and lyrically dextrous rhymes, of course, but also beats that variously sample, chop up or reference everything from 90s rave classics, the rock-rave big beat antics of the Prodigy and Nine Inch Nails stail industrial grit, to TB-303-laden acid house, the dark and doomy trip-hop of Mezzanine-era Massive Attack, drum and bass and experimental electronica.
Review: First released 22 years ago at the turn of the millennium, Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil has been described as one of Coil's most "mind-altering creations"; given the fiercely experimental and often otherworldly nature of their catalogue, that's some going. The album, which has now been fully remastered, was one of the first things Coil recorded following their relocation to Weston-super-Mare, and sonically it's as bleak, windswept, and barren as the town itself seems out of season. It's full of droning tones, modular blips, metallic melodies, slowly shifting ambient textures and musical motifs that lap in and out like waves. Furthermore, the album's standout moment, the near 14-minute 'I Am The Green Child', is like some mutant, experimental sea shanty crossed with a hypnotic ambient-industrial raga.
Review: Throbbing Gristle co-founder and all round British experimental electronic institution, Cosey Fanni Tutti returns with 2t2, a new full-length set for release through her own Conspiracy International label. The new nine-tracker extends the tracked terrains of 2019's Tutti, blurring personal reflections on years of loss and upheaval into prosthetic electronic soundscapes. The record unfolds over two contrasting halves, one beat-driven, the other more introspective, yet it also keeps anchored to a certain ground point emphasising resilience and focus. Lead cut 'Stound' features overtone chanting, which Cosey describes as a way to channel inner strength: "allowing the sounds to permeate and soothe as well as create a sense of power."
Review: Current 93's latest album, Sketches of My Nightmares, is a collection of fractured musical scribblings that evoke a sense of dreamlike wonder and disorientation. The album is a tapestry of skittering sounds, strange tape loops, and other outlandish noises that weave together to create a haunting and evocative atmosphere. One of the highlights of Sketches of My Nightmares is Tibet's haunting vocals. His voice is both ethereal and powerful, conveying a sense of vulnerability and longing. The lyrics, which are often cryptic and enigmatic, add to the album's dreamlike quality. Overall, Sketches of My Nightmares is a masterpiece of avant-garde music. It is a record that is both challenging and rewarding, and one that will leave a lasting impression on the listener.
Review: Einsturzende Neubauten's description by label Potomoak - as a band that constantly evolves - is accurate enough. Over forty years on from their debut album Kollaps in 1981, Rampen appears as the latest and most unruly incarnation of their sound yet. Here, Blixa Bargeld, N. U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit, Rudolph Moser and Felix Gebhard present their least predictable and conventional sides: APM is described as alien pop music; the songs therein have been specially crafted not only for our universe but for every adjacent parallel universe to ours, with every slight multiversal variation in humanity's collective tastes held firmly in mind. The album fully lives up to its billing as anti-pop as alien pop, its challenging twists and turns fully sating the difficult whims of society's outcasts and cosmic punks.
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