With One More Pass, Golgotha Communications Limited’s “Gatha Yasna” Could have Been Exceptional

I don’t know about you, but for me, one thing that acts like a real clear warning sign as to the likely merits of an album are glaring typos on the album artwork.  I know it’s very judgmental of me, but I can’t help but think that typos on the album artwork suggest sloppiness, a […]

“Rapida E Indolore” is Daniele Brusaschetto’s Existential Crises in a Sea of Distortion

The first thing to mention, perhaps, is that there’s an actual corpse glued to the otherwise minimalist cover art of this CD.  It’s a simple affair, with a plain white (though nicely textured and quite firm) paper CD cover, with the name of the artist and album title scrawled in unpretentious hand-written capitals—and, smack bang […]

Todd Anderson-Kunert’s “When There Is Nothing Left to Say” Finds Consciousness in the Unsilent

Until this album, I was of the firm opinion that I hate those experimental albums where they use super-high-frequency tones.  I am a huge fan of Otomo Yoshihide, for instance; yet, despite this deep and abiding love, I can barely listen to those albums of his that utilise the frequent application of super-high sine waves. […]

Mat Blackwell on Gnaw Their Tongues’ “Hymns for the Broken…”: “Fuck me—Just awesome.”

The art I love most of all comes embedded with a very specific kind of unavoidable challenge, namely:  The art I love most of all is art that surprises and/or shocks me in some way, giving me something that I have never experienced before.  The unavoidable challenge of such art is, once I’ve been surprised […]

Drohtnung’s “In Dolorous Sights” Is a Sprawling Orgy of Confusion

After the brief, cold Carpenter-esque synth intro—immediately bringing to mind the intro of Mayhem’s classic release Wolf’s Lair Abyss (one of the pinnacle moments of black metal’s many-spired history)—things get really ugly fast.  Shrieking torment and trebly blackened guitars are crushed by seriously distorted drums, the whole recording becoming an overdriven, overblown, and oversaturated mess. […]

Marcus H.’s Psychedelic Ambient Defies Categorization on “Splices and Phases”

It felt like a good sign when this album began with a recording of a coded Numbers Station (and if you haven’t ever heard them before, stop reading and go listen to the Conet Project immediately), and I wasn’t disappointed.  This album was great for all the right reasons. With its rich and dirty synths, […]

No Gods, No Masters: Living Dangerously with Al Namrood

.:.NO GODS, NO MASTERS.:. Living Dangerously with Al Namrood An Interview by Mat Blackwell ___ ‘A public beheading will typically take place around 9:00am. The convicted person is walked into the square and kneels in front of the executioner. The executioner uses a sword known as a sulthan to remove the condemned person’s head from […]

Strange Beauty and Big Beats Find a Curious Home on Amalgamated’s Self-titled Album

When I first heard this band, it was the disappointing Sparks II EP, which I described as, ‘[a] kind of rhythmic krautrock-tinged post-rock/art-rock’, which seemed ‘scared to really explore places interesting and new’. Yet, it had enough promise that I was really keen to hear the next thing they did: I ended the review by […]

Sindre Bjerga & Micromelancolié’s “Invisible Paths” Works to Evoke Something Undefinable

This release is darkly haunting, beautifully aimless, and full of emptiness.  The sound is rich with ambient hums like distant generators, machines in other rooms, traffic heard from deep below the surface, and the hiss of old cassette—that raw analogue sibilance that somehow emotionally taps into a feeling of space.  Among the field-recording hum and […]

The Living Beasts: Broaching Nekrasov’s Hermetic Realm

.:.THE LIVING BEASTS.:. Broaching Nekrasov’s Hermetic Realm by Mat Blackwell ___ Interviewing Nekrasov can be a hit or miss affair: He can be funny, scornful, self-loathing, or self-righteous depending on his mood, sometimes moving from one extreme to the other in the time it takes to finish a sentence, and he takes absolutely no shit. […]