Over the span of a far-too-short 20 minutes, Ritual Howls manages to plow through a variety of styles that all rank amongst my favorites, with a lo-fi level of production that would make any "true kvlt" black metal band jealous. Even with all this ugliness, however, the material is more memorable than dissonant and at times leans into true song structures that are more memorable than what similar artists usually do.
Give us an hour, we'll give you music to remember. This week we bring you an episode with brand new music from Softcult, Jim Rafferty, karen vogt, Ex-Easter Island Head, Jon Collin, James Devane, Garth Erasmus, Gary Wilson, and K. Freund, plus some music from the archives from Goldblum, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery. Rubber ducks and a live duck photo from Matthew in the UK. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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This is the solo debut from Burch, who is probably best known for being the man behind The Spring Press label. Using a palette of consisting primarily of acoustic guitars and modular synths, Jeff offers up two very different long-form pieces.  While the lazily drifting ambience of "The Nine Points" definitely misses the mark for me, the jangling, mesmerizing psychedelia of the closing "La Perouse" is intermittently spectacular.
It has been five years since Benjamin Finger released his masterpiece, 2009's Woods of Broccoli, which makes it as good a time as any for him to release a thematically similar successor.  Though not quite a full reprise of Woods' lushly hallucinatory aesthetic, The Bet's warped piano-and-sound-collage miniatures make for yet another warmly beautiful trip down the rabbit hole.  Nobody does fractured dreaminess better than Benjamin Finger.
After what almost seemed like a begrudging festival reunion to play Streetcleaner, it was exciting to see that the pieces were coming together for a true Godflesh reunion, and even more so when the likelihood of new material appearing got higher and higher. Unexpectedly announced as a precursor to the upcoming full-length album, Decline & Fall sounds as if it could have been recorded around 1993 through 1995, because it has such archetypical Godflesh sound, which is reassuring to say the least.
A lot of excellent music has come from the recent spate of noise musicians turning beat-ward, but there are a number of comparatively underappreciated and overlooked techno artists like Perc and Ancient Methods who have been producing similarly scary and crushing industrial dance music all along.  One of the best is Berlin's Kareem (Patrick Stottrop), who has reanimated his dormant Zhark Recordings label with this four-song salvo of bludgeoningly heavy beatscapes.  I am not sure that this is necessarily Kareem's finest release ever (people love Druids), but it is unquestionably a seriously strong contender.
As elements of New Orleans Bounce music has been slowly drifting outside of its largely southern borders, Big Freedia, also known as Freddie Ross, has become the unofficial ambassador for the genre, making various high profile TV appearances and rather memorable live performances.  Just Be Free is his first true full-length album, and has the polish that could gain new fans, but never strays far from his roots and manages to stay undeniably fun.
On paper, this album seems like a lock for one of the most fun and memorable releases of the year, as Drew Daniel is one of the smartest and most innovative artists currently working in electronic music and he and his talented friends are reinterpreting some of the most spectacularly self-parodying music ever recorded (the album's subtitle is "Electronic Profanations of Black Metal Classics").  The reality, however, is more baffling than anything.  While Heathen certainly boasts a couple of inspired moments, its bulk lies somewhere in an unsatisfying no-man's land between one-note joke, head-scratching pastiche, and weirdly reverent homage.
There has been an unusual amount of excitement about this debut and for good reason: Eric Holm takes a very cool and inspired idea and executes it beautifully.  Culled entirely from contact mic recordings that Holm made from remote telephone poles used by military listening stations in the Arctic Circle, Andøya is an unexpectedly rhythmic and haunting series of meticulously crafted industrial soundscapes that occasionally blur into weird minimalist techno.
Capturing a single performance between these two titans of improvised music, labeling this three-plus hour set as "intense" would be doing it a disservice. Recorded in 1996, after Keiji Haino and Peter Brötzmann had worked together in the studio setting some time prior, so the two artists had some previous interactions to build from. Here augmented by the full Fushitsusha trio of Yasushi Ozawa and Jun Kosugi, it all comes together with a primal intensity few can match, and well up there with the best moments in both artists’ catalogues.
