As the fourth in their long standing domestic activity collaboration series, Marhaug’s harsh noise penchant meets Ratkje’s nuanced and bizarre collaborative techniques to create an album of random cutup sounds, occasional harsh noise blasts, and everything plus the kitchen sink instrumentation that rivals the absurdity of the Schimpfluch Gruppe crew in the best possible way.
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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Some nine years into this millennium, this former Wire member has released his first album's worth of new material (Ordier was technically an archival release from 1996) just as the decade winds down and another begins anew. Here the sound harkens back more towards his earlier work for dance and installations rather than the full force electronic noise of In Esse or the more electronica based sounds of Ab Ovo.
The idea of a journalist throwing a hat into the music creation and distribution business makes peers and fans alike cringe concerning the possibilities. Often the results are disastrous and quickly forgotten, yet here we stand face-to-face with Steve Lowenthal’s attempt at curating a series of acoustic guitar-based albums. Cleveland’s own Mark McGuire, renowned the synth world over for his work in Emeralds, is given a new and unique platform through VDSQ to show a different side of his creativity, and Solo Guitar Volume Two accomplishes just that.
For almost a quarter-century, Boredoms defined eclectic. Little said about them would hold up a few albums later. The band dashed expectations in a way that made even failed experiments seem exciting. Whatever they did, they did it weird; their genuine oddness was the thread that ran through their entire carrier. With their new EP, Super Roots 10, Boredoms break that tradition by relying on remixes to elevate weaker source material.
When I first threw this 12" EP on the turntable I wasn’t sure what to expect. The cover art gave me twinges of pretentious freak folk, while something in my gut said it was going to be another stagnant piece of guitar drone. However, it is neither, and I was quite happily surprised by the unabashed noisy sludge rock that followed.
One look at the sleeve of this 7" gives a good indication of what to expect. Being a 45rpm disc with 17 tracks total, it’s a good bet that the song list is really irrelevant. Upon listening, it is pretty much impossible (and unnecessary) to know where the tracks begin and end. But one thing is sure, it is a metallic grindcore blastbeat noise assault.
It seems that there has been a recent surge of interest in experimental music coming out of the People’s Republic of China in recent months, perhaps culminating in the recent Sub Rosa compilation that John Kealy 
Lasse Marhaug’s Pica Disk label is shaping up to be a powerful force in the world of noise. In the spirit of this year’s sprawling Incapacitants Box is Stupid collection, here the work of Yasutoshi Yoshida is compiled from rare tapes and CDRs, along with a nice smattering of previously unreleased tracks. It is a chance to hear the development of one of the modern titans of Japanese noise.
In 1973, Gary Higgins and his friends recorded Red Hash, an album that (completely unbeknownst to him) gradually became hailed as a lost psych-folk classic. More than three decades later, he returned to the studio to record this follow-up. The result is most definitely not another minor masterpiece, but it certainly is strange and memorable nonetheless (though often not for the right reasons).
Without doubt, this is the best rendition of Erik Satie’s marathon piano piece to surface. Performed last year in Brussels by Stephane Ginsburgh on Satie’s own piano, this is beautifully recorded extract from the mammoth work is breathtaking. Listening to this in the still of the night is anything but vexating. The calm, contemplative music brings about feelings of bliss and by the end of the recording it is difficult to be annoyed about anything.
