Atrocities, dictators and bodily functions, these are a few of Scott Walker’s favorite things. Throughout the dense lyrical jungle of Bish Bosch are examples of all these subjects amid dozens of other topics, all processed through Walker’s intense imagination. At times bewildering, amusing and disturbing, this is a magnificent album that continues from the same point where The Drift left off.
Two new shows just for you. We have squeezed out two extended release episodes for this weekend to get you through this week. They contain mostly new songs but there's also new issues from the vaults. The first show features music from Rider/Horse, Mint Field, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Anastasia Coope, ISAN, Stone Music, La Securite, Bark Psychosis, Jon Rose, Master Wilburn Burchette, Umberto, Wand, Tim Koh, Sun An, and Memory Drawings. The second episode has music by Laibach, Melt-Banana, Chuck Johnson, X, K. Yoshimatsu, Dorothy Carter, Pavel Milyakov, Violence Gratuite, Mark Templeton, Dummy, Endon, body / negative, Midwife, Alberto Boccardi, Divine. Cow in Maui from Veronika in Vienna. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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After a tantalizing two-year trickle of 12" singles and an EP, this unrelentingly bleak UK post-industrial duo have finally released a full album.  It was an event that I awaited with a mixture of anticipation and dread, however, as Raime had announced earlier that they had moved towards employing mostly live instrumentation, a decision that has historically not gone well for most electronic artists.  It certainly went well here though, as this is easily Raime's finest effort to date and a truly impressive evolution besides.
A surprisingly fast follow-up to the Afro Noise I album, Black Mamba already demonstrates an even further evolution of William Bennett's post-Whitehouse career, one that sees his work being utilized in documentaries about drugs and Snoop Lion (formerly Dogg).  While there was an overt intensity to the first album, via the rapid, claustrophobic drumming and dense atmospheres, here things are a bit more understated and pensive, but no less fascinating.
Novellino may be a relatively young artist in the world of minimalist sound, but these two distinct, but complimentary demonstrate that he is definitely not lacking experience or ability. In both a long-form single piece and a series of shorter compositions, he balances both the static and the dynamic to excellent effect.
Moving from minimalism to free jazz for inspiration, this new album by Eleh is inspired by the later period of John Coltrane’s career. Although elements of these two pieces have been utilized during recent performances, these studio versions are described as "magnifications" of those live sketches. Far from being jazz, this is not the notes Eleh is not playing but the synthesis of new notes and frequencies from the standing waves and intervals emanating from the grooves on the record.
Steve Hauschildt steps out on Sequitur to make a case for himself as a talented producer of meticulously sequenced pop music. Like Emeralds' latest effort Just To Feel Anything, this record is a logical next step for Steve; rooted in new wave, techno, and a blend of genre exercise and timeless cohesion, and while it's common for ambient or electronic groups to evolve towards making pop-oriented albums, it's still a pleasant course that unfolds when handled with skill and subtlety.
Matt Weston’s last release, the Organum-esque scrape and drone fest "Kidnapping Denials/Put on a Good Face" did an exemplary job at capturing him in his natural habitat as a percussionist, albeit a rather unconventional one. While that was based upon live recordings, his newest 7" is a bit more multi-instrumentalist and studio-centric in its approach. Made up of two rather brief pieces, it is a tantalizingly short yet fully engaging single.
Pornoise 1 KG is somewhat of a landmark release in Masami Akita’s sprawling, ever expanding and complex discography. Recorded in 1984 and issued multiple times as a five-cassette set not long after, it represents one of the first long form collections of Merzbow to have been released. Reissued here on six CDs (including the separately released Pornoise Extra as disc six), it makes for an excellent snapshot of what Akita first started out doing, and hints at what would come later in his long career.
I have long been a great admirer of Tom Ellard's prickly, erratic, and singular genius, but I completely slept on this deluxe reissue from Medical Records for much of the year, as I did not recall 1985's Stretcher EP as being particularly crucial or something that I would ever need to own on vinyl.  In that regard, I was mostly correct, but I was unaware that Stretcher had surfaced in so many different variations or that consolidating them all would yield an excellent double album.  Therein lays the genius of this reissue, as such an absolute avalanche of classic material from this era packs a lot of cumulative power.  In fact, this is probably the best single documentation of Severed Heads' golden age available: the brief window in the mid-'80s where Ellard’s deranged and perverse experimentalism started to take shape into eccentric and hook-filled pop structures.
As much as I love Throbbing Gristle, I've long viewed them as a Marcel Duchamp-like entity: bold, brilliant, and hugely influential, but dramatically less potent outside of their original context and in the wake of everyone who later built upon their vision. After a deep re-immersion in their work, however, I can honestly say that several pieces still sound remarkably vital even today and that this album remains a condensed and inspiring blueprint for being awesome (albeit an imperfect one).
