Mortiis- Reisine Til Grotter Og Odemarker

Check out this rare Mortiis video. A 24 minute music video. Crazy.

Mortiis is quite good, though. Dungeon synth done right. 

From The Vault: Head Wound City E.P.

I don't really like music that takes itself 100% seriously. It's never really jelled for me that an artist would ever think of art, something objectively valueless and disconnected with the base human experience, to be worth being upset over.

I think that's why I've never enjoyed records made by so-called "supergroups." The ego and self-seriousness in most of these projects is palpable. 

With that said, when a supergroup possesses a sense of fun and excitement about them, I almost always dig it. I think that's why Head Wound City appeals to me so much. It's all about fun.

Formed in 2005 by members of The Locust, The Blood Brothers, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Head Wound City play chaotic, noisey artpunk that takes the most distinctive elements of the bands it splintered from and ramps them up times 10. Gabe Serbian brings The Locust's spastic drumming and time signatures. Jordan Billie and Cody Votolato bring their distinctive throat/fret shredding from The Blood Brothers, while Nick Zinner brings a whole lot of, gasp, pop sensibility. 

They released a self-titled, 10-minute EP that very same year on Three One G Records and it's a banger. 

I'm a Taxidermist- I'll Stuff Anything is a highlight of the album. It's The Locust filtered through '79 punk steez and neon lights. There's a sweet double-time breakdown and power-electronics part somewhere in the middle.

Thrash Zoo is black metal with actual dynamics, a rare treat indeed. The vocals make my throat hurt in sympathy.

This album is definitely worth a listen. Grab it here.

Top 9 albums of the year

Well, it's that time of the year again, time for us to reflect on the great music that graced us in 2014. It's been a damn good year. Lots of amazing records to pour over. These are my top 10.

10. Copkiller- Alien Soccer

Another excellent  release from a label that only puts out excellent releases, Rainbow Bridge. Industrial pop meets avant-garde meets everything else. It could only have been produced in the 21st century by Justin Marc Lloyd, a person that I believe is looking toward the 22nd. An album in a league of its own. 

Buy here.

9. Waves Crashing Piano Chords- Young Mouth/ It wasn't even worth my back seat. 

A three minute blast of negativity from New York's only juggalo noise act. It's amazing that this album, recorded only with feedback and screamed vocals, manages to be 100 times more powerful than other albums made with twice the budget. 

buy it here

8. Aaron West and The Roaring Twenties- We Don't Have Each Other

This is the debut solo album of Wonder Years frontman Dan "Soupy" Cambell. I'm not exactly a fan of the Wonder Years, but I've always respected Soupy as a lyricist. This album really lets them shine through, telling a story of divorce, loss, and parenthood through the eyes of New Yorker Aaron West. The music is infinitely more restrained than the Wonder Years, closer to Bruce Springsteen than New Found Glory. An emotionally brutal effort and a job well done. 

buy here

7. Young and In The Way- When Life Comes To Death

A damn site better than Watain. All of the black metal showmanship with a thousand times more chaos. 

buy here

6. 

Compiled by Genesis P. Orridge of Throbbing Gristle, this is a compilation of spoken word and tape experiments from beat legend William S. Burroughs. If you want to hear the absolute genesis of post-modern art, this is what you want. 

buy here

5. Full of Hell/Merzbow

Less of a collaboration and more of a testament towards the Full of Hell Lads ability to use Merzbow's raw noise to craft great songs, this album is quality, from music to packaging. High Fells, in particular, is an amazing track. 

Buy here

4. Wolves In The Throne Room- Celestite

The first purely ambient excursion for the Washington black metallers, Celestite is surprisingly deep and fully formed. It is just as vital as any of their metal records, and one of the best dark ambient albums in a long while.

buy it here

read my interview with Wolves In The Throne Room here

3. Pharmakon- Bestial Burden

Margaret Chardiet, frontperson of noise juggernaut Pharmakon, will not let anything or anyone keep her down. Just as she was about to embark on her first European tour, she ended up severely ill. Undergoing major surgery, she was bedridden for nearly three weeks. As a result, this record is very much informed by the idea of health and body, of interconnecting systems and biology. It's skin-crawling, powerful stuff. 

Buy it here

Iceage- Plowing into the Field of Love

Iceage, with their third album, have made the best rock album of the last ten years. This is, without a doubt, the most complete and effective piece of sound art I've heard this year, a brilliant mix of post punk, noiserock, hardcore, and even country. Elias Bender Ronnenfelt is the best white singer I've heard recently. He's got something to say. You should listen.

Buy it here

From The Vault: Boredoms- Chocolate Synthesizer

Japan's legendary lunatics of sound Boredom's have a bit of a misleading reputation in America. Due to their association with Merzbow and the praise heaped upon them by noise rockers Thurston Moore and Justin Broadrick, music fans seem to want to peg them into the harsh noise/power electronics category. 

The reality is that Boredoms come as much from A Saucerful of Secrets as they do Metal Machine Music. Besides their early Boretronix releases, Boredom's releases fall firmly into the avant-rock category, with much of their music being extremely distorted ppsychedelicand kraut-rock. 

Their fourth album, Chocolate Synthesizer, released in 1994 in Japan and 2004 in America, is a perfect example of Boredom's ability to transcend genre without falling into free-form territory. It bounces among psychedelic rock, minimalist drum and bass, chanting, punk, powerviolence, kraut-rock, and synthpop with little regard for any kind of formality.

With that said, miraculously, Boredom's manage to always come back around, no-matter how much they stray into freakout jams, to the poppy psychedelic rock that make up the core of their music. This quality ads to Chocolate Synthesizer's woozy, bizarre sound.

The song Voredoms is a good example of this. Over its six minutes, it blasts through MC5-esque fuzzrock, walls of noise, groovy, ritualistic funk, gypsy-folk, minimalist prepared guitar, and krautrock, before looping back in on itself. Surprisingly, it works brilliantly.

Turn Table Boredoms is another highlight, a dirt-rock jam that sounds like Yoko Ono fronting the 13th floor elevators.

Vocals, provided by Yamantaka Eye, are nothing short of bizarre. They flit between grunts, gurgles, shouts, yelps, and, in occasion, clean singing. Oftentimes they are so buried under layers of tape delay that they're barely audible at all.

Perhaps the most interesting quality of this album is its childishness. Now, I don't mean this as a bad thing. Childishness is joyous. Childlessness is experimentation.  It's childishness that makes it's genre-experimentation work. Professional musicians, Miles Davis or Hendrix types, wouldn't have been able to make this music.

The album, originally very difficult to find, was reissued last year on 1972. Unfortunately, the label has since shut down.

Listen to it below. If you can find it, buy it. It's well worth it.

Korianteri- Olli Aarni- Review

Corianders, in folklore, are traditionally associated with healing and love, comfort and balming. They also have a hypnotic effect, garnering the nickname "dizzyweed" from farmers observing the effects of the plant on grazing cattle. 

Olli Aarni, a sound art project from Finland, uses their native "Korianteri," meaning Coriander, for the title of their new album. It's a fitting title. Something about the two tracks presented here is kind and soothing, maybe even childlike, in a way that experimental music rarely is. The music here is soft, floral, heady, and a little bit brilliant. 

The music is broken up into two fourteen-minute tracks, Korianteri A and Korianteri B. Both songs use the same building blocks of tape manipulated cartoon samples, radio static, low, hushed vocals, and throbbing, subtle ambience, but are remarkably different in tone. 

Korianteri A sounds much more, well, calming. It's the aural equivalent of someone rubbing your shoulders after work. It bleeds innocent, analog nostalgia, Saturday morning cartoons and cereal, ugly wallpaper and super 8 cameras. Even the buried, barely audible vocals have the cadence and tone of a Dad asking you about your day.

Despite it's homespun sound, the embeded, glitchy synth drones present in the track adds a particularly cavernous quality that conjures images of childhood imagination gone awry.

Korianteri B is as relaxed as the previous track, but in a very different way. Instead of sounding like a tape recorded suburban living room, it sounds alien, inhuman, yet somehow benevolent. It sounds like kind crop circles, altruistic wolves. There's slight menace there, enough to keep you waiting for harshness that will never come. 

This album is worth listening, if only as background noise. I appreciate the albums basis in actual tape-looping and antiquated samples. It's a refreshing change from the digital harsh noise that so many people pass off as avant-garde. Well worth a purchase.

Buy here

Top 10- Boyd Rice Records

I refuse to open up with segment with some boring, trite recitation about the controversy surrounding Boyd Rice's behavior, political ethics, or aesthetic choices. There is no mystery about what he has to say and to explore them in writing, at least superficially, is pointless.

With that said, Boyd Rice, over several different projects and collaborations, has produced a massive amount of sonic work over the years. These next 10, in no particular order, are my personal favorites.

Spell- Seasons In The Sun 

This album, a collaborative work between Rice and Strawberry Switchblade singer Rose McDowall, is a total novelty record. Unlike most novelty records, however, this one is still funny after repeated listens. It's a series of played-straight covers of 50's and 60's pop music with the lyrics changed to include references to suicide, hell, and death. I mean, who doesn't want to hear "Johnny Remember Me" covered by a new-wave singer and some weird misanthropist?

NON- Back To Mono 

The latest album by Rice's most known project is a beautifully produced album of shifting, dynamic sound. It's worth noting that Rice is an excellent sampler. On this records he pulls from everything from 60's girl groups to war sounds to speeches by cult figures. Brilliant. 

The Boyd Rice Experience- Hatesville

A decidedly retro sounding album, Hatesville is a hilarious mixture of spoken word, noise, and lounge music. It captures Rice's bizarre, early 60's space-age meets black social-darwinist aesthetic. Choice guest appearances by the likes of Joel Haertling and Shaun Partridge round out the album's sound with their own rambling wittiness.  In my mind, this is a more vicious contemporary to Ian Svenonius' Play Power album, basically a comedy album.  

NON- God and Beast 

This is the heaviest, if not the harshest, material from NON. Rice really seems to want to impart some sort of wisdom on the listener. That statement of intent is always heavy, regardless of the message. The music itself is punishing and bleak looping walls of sound. Daunting. 

Death In June & Boyd Rice- Alarm Agents

Neo-folk legends Death in June have collaborated with Boyd Rice on a number of occasions and it's really not hard to see why. Both have an obsession with the darker side of history. Whether or not DIJ embrace it to the extent of Rice is debatable, but nevertheless, they work well together. On this album, DIJ bring Rice into their world of masks and symbolism, with Rice's spoken word sounding more cryptic and mystical than ever. 

NON- Rise

This 12" single, released in 1982, is a part of the early vanguard of industrial music. This release would go on to be heralded by the likes of Moby and Marilyn Manson. Totally worth a listen.

Boyd Rice/Frank Tovey- Easy Listening For The Hard of Hearing

This LP, a collaboration between Rice and Frank Tovey, a.k.a. Fad Gadget, is an exercise in musical minimalism. Surprisingly understated for both men. 

Boyd Rice- The Black Album

The record that started contemporary noise and Boyd's career. Not bad for a prank. It plays on any speed. 

NON- Children Of The Black Sun

This release is pure ambiance, an uncharacteristic sound for NON. Unfortunately, it went relatively unnoticed. It's definitely worthy of more attention. 

Boyd Rice and Friends- Music, Martinis, and Misanthropy

Music, Martinis and Misanthropy is a sister record to Hatesville, a calm excursion into spoken word, lounge, and neofolk. The role call for this album is simply massive. Douglas P., Tony Wakeford, Michael Moynihan, the list goes on. This album is perhaps best known for producing the song "People," a biting neofolk song demanding the return of Vlad The Impaler, Genghis Khan, Diocletian, and other dictators. 

Check it out!

Genocide Organ-Archive IV Review+Stream

Genocide Organ are legends for a reason.

With their long-form, wildly experimental take on industrial music, they've carved a niche for themselves as both a creator of a genre, Death-Industrial, and for being providers of some of the wittiest, and most misunderstood, political commentary since Jello-Biafra.

So, it goes without saying that any day that Genocide Organ puts out music is a good day.

With their Archive series, Genocide Organ has been releasing unreleased material on 10" records. Archive IV continues this concept, presenting three tracks recorded in the early 90s. 

Genocide Organ stands out to me as the kings of harsh industrial for two reasons. One, they clearly have some ability as composers. Although their music is infected with immense, harsh, swelling noise and glitching and samples, the heart of it beats with some very pretty, minimalist compositions. Two, their choice of sampling, and the way they place their samples, is thought-provoking and often quite funny. 

These qualities are highlighted on this release, partly because it's short length. At three tracks, it's a short experience, but because each track contains everything I like about this group it's not something I mind. 

The centerpiece of this album is a fourteen-minute track called The Lesson: selected-dislective-lectured-a paradise for the sublocotenent. It's a mouthful of a title and a mouthful of a track. It begins with rythmic, pulsating noise and militaristic samples, slides into a dancey middle section, before collapsing back into samples and harsh noise. The track conjures images of a boy-composer using post-apocalyptic, bombed-out industrial wreckage to make symphonies, perhaps while hiding underground. 

The subsequent tracks are much shorter. The second, called The Lesson: lection for a riot, begins with the military samples that tipify Genocide Organ's sound. They're more frantic than they were on the last track. They blend well with the marching beat present throughout the track. They do a good job of conjuring a totalitarian fear. 

Surprisingly, the album ends on a very musical note. Nix-On, besides being one of the less obtuse references in a Genocide Organ, is a song that wouldn't be out of place on a Cold Cave or Lust For Youth album. It shows off the ability of the Genocide Organ creator's to actually write a tune. Sure, it's a tune dipped in feedback and screeching samples, but it's something you can hum.

I was always a casual fan of the group, but this Archive series makes me want to pay more attention. I think that Genocide Organ full-lengths might have been a little bit too thick and foreboding for me to really sink my teeth into, but these 10" are short enough for me to love and, if newer material reflects Nix-On, something that I can put on regular rotation. A great listen.