Shraya, Vivek

Baby, You're Projecting

Mint

Multi-disciplinary artist Vivek Shraya has a body of work that crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theatre, and film. Among her list of accomplishments is an impressive catalog of music—including the Polaris Prize-nominated Part-Time Woman with Queer Songbook Orchestra (2017) and Angry by her band Too Attached (2018), which CBC described as one of “Canada’s most incisive, radical and galvanizing albums.” After twenty years of releasing music independently, Shraya will make her Mint label debut with Baby, You’re Projecting. Unlike her previous musical offerings, which were more sonically compartmentalized, Shraya endeavored to create a genre-fluid album. Inspired by great female-fronted pop records (including janet. by Janet Jackson, Sheryl Crow’s self-titled album, and Lemonade by Beyoncé), Baby, You’re Projecting holds the breadth of Shraya's sound and style in one space. Ranging from house to hip hop to country, her singular voice and songwriting holds the record together and resonates in every genre. Produced by and co-written with frequent collaborator James Bunton (Donovan Woods, Ohbijou), Baby, You’re Projecting is a break-up album that explores Shraya's tenuous relationships with men. The record also features performances by Alanna Stuart (Bonjay), Christine Bougie (Bahamas, Amy Millan) and Kimmortal. It is being co-released with a 12-minute film titled “He Loves Me Until He Hates Me,” set to songs from the record and directed by award-winning cinematographer Gabriela Osio Vanden. Taking inspiration from '90s classics like The Bodyguard and erotic thrillers, the film creates a meaningful (and playful) look at the unpredictability of masculinity—how it...

C.I.A. Debutante

Down, Willow

Siltbreeze

With their 3rd vinyl long player for Siltbreeze, CIA Debutante have successfully out-flanked those critics who have been forever chattering, "will they ever be as big as Artery?" To paraphrase Fred Ward in Tremors; "Artery? Hell, Clock DVA!" All bristling aside, such questions & answers don't carry much weight these days. Such is the language of pettifoggers. And who's got time for them? We're trying to sell records here. Down,Willow sees our heroes Paul & Nathan attaining S.T.A.S. (Superior Third Album Status), honing in with a top gloss of new & proto experimental, post-punk, recitation & vibe. Imagine fusing The Fall's Grotesque & Morton Subotnick's Sidewinder into a sole entity? Sure, there's going to be lots of sparks, flash fires, smoke of all colors + bickering, but from this vantage, what a light show! There's even some shredding on here that sounds like they may have lit this fucker with Martin Kippenberger's copy of Guitar Hero. Please take it off, it's too good! If you've been paying attention to the bands countless tape efforts, or just their recent vinyl outings, there's no denying the Mach thunder Down, Willow is gonna roll across thine cranium. And should this be your introduction to the band, feel free to pretend none of the aforementioned bullshit matters. And welcome, adventurous new listener!

Ascended Dead

Evenfall Of The Apocalypse

20 Buck Spin

***ON LIMITED SILVER W/ BLACK AND WHITE SPLATTER VINYL!!! Ascended Dead return like abyss winds surging skyward from the ninth circle of Hell. New album Evenfall Of The Apocalypse heralds the dawn of the final march to extermination via barely-controlled death metal chaos and form-destroying necromancy. Ascended Dead play death metal the ancient way with an intrinsically malign pedigree and methodical cruelty scarcely heard nowadays. Flesh-peeling intensity at warp-speed, technically-frenzied leads that cut straight through bone and a relentless annihilating force that rarely ceases long enough to take a breath. Yet amidst this fiery conflagration a wholly deliberate and fanatical attention to detail and craft remain undeniable, allowing the pandemonium a distinct structure and memorability. While the band has more than enough skill and ability to perform a darkly acoustic piece like “Passage To Eternity,” a rare moment of respite, repeated spins through Evenfall Of The Apocalypse only serve to perpetuate Ascended Dead’s inexorable place at the vanguard of violent real death metal, carrying the banner into the future.

Wong, Ryan

The New Country Sounds of Ryan Wong

Rocks In Your Head

The New Country Sounds of Ryan Wong, the latest offering by the Cool Ghoul and multi-hyphenate music man behind Supreme Joy, finds the songwriter charting sonic territories that might at first seem unfamiliar to fans of his past work in the Garage, Psych, and Post-punk genres. But under the wing of storied San Francisco scene scion Sonny Smith (Sonny and the Sunsets), Wong sidles up to a sound that bears a close kinship to the producer’s own playfully country-leaning works. New Country Sounds finds Wong’s boyish lilt exploring deep registers and deeper themes, coupled with unmistakably capital-C Country explorations on both guitar and steel. Wong the writer, however, continues to find himself owing more to Ray Davies than he does to Ray Price. Wong’s natural charm and humor set him apart from today’s crop of self- serious crooners. A laconic slacker sensibility persists throughout, lending Wong’s more winkingly macho moments an ironic distance that comes off cheeky rather than threatening

Midwife & Vyva Melinkolya

Orbweaving

Flenser

Madeline Johnston and Angel Diaz became close friends in 2020, regarding each other as a lifeline when things were difficult in their personal lives. This friendship was born from music but quickly became so much more than that. The two met in person in 2021, when Diaz came for a recording residency at Johnston’s studio in New Mexico. It was during this session that they wrote and recorded Orbweaving, in the heat of summer in the arid Chihuahuan Desert. Orbweaving combines the best parts of Midwife’s “heaven metal” and Vyva Melinkolya’s sentimental, classic shoegaze in a way that distinctively elevates both artists. The record explores themes of hopelessness, calling on a higher power, being alone, and the sublime horror of the natural world. Orbweaving seeks to thematically and sonically create a web like structure—a gauze of sorrow and visceral connective thread. At night, Diaz and Johnston went herping (a term used by herpetologists to describe looking for snakes and amphibians) along the empty roads near Las Cruces. The asphalt retains heat from the day, and the snakes absorb the warmth by writhing across the pavement. They found rattlesnakes, roadkill, and orb-weaver spiders. The track “Plague X” was inspired by the lifecycle of cicadas; whose seventeen year periodical cycle took place in 2021. The group of cicadas that emerged are known as Brood X. In a post-covid world, one is no stranger to living in a plague year. The violent arrival of Brood X cicadas are alluded to...

Impetuous Ritual

Iniquitous Barbarik Synthesis

Profound Lore

Australian death metal monstrosity Impetuous Ritual are unleashing their new album Iniquitous Barbarik Synthesis. It is the follow-up to 2017’s Blight Upon Martyred Sentience and presents itself as the most unnatural, abnormal, and nightmarish Impetuous Ritual offering yet.

Akasha System

Ancient Path Complete

100% Silk

Originally self-released as a digital-only EP in the summer of 2021, Ancient Path Complete folds four additional tracks into its sidewinding saga of hidden mesa house and aerodynamic electronics, delivering on its creator’s lofty vision of music “for looking inward, to the center of being.” These are songs of spiraling tides, spirit guides, and shadowy forward motion, drawn towards some shared beacon beaming like a low moon across the desert. Akasha System (aka Hunter P. Thompson) speaks of the album as born during a time of “personal darkness, confusion, and uncertainty,” but its exorcism produced the opposite – assured, expansive, and illuminated. It’s the sound of growth and change being sought and found, new trails taking shape, forking towards fresh horizons. Windswept, wistful, and blazed by an inner light, APC “continues the path onward into your pure, creative core… into healing.”

Akasha System

Phytopia

100% Silk

From the forests of Cascadia to the rippling tropics of the Gulf Coast, Hunter P. Thompson’s music as Akasha System both reflects and refracts the environment of its origin – equal parts mirror, mixing desk, and meditation chamber. His latest, Phytopia, skews even loftier, a private portal into a primordial world of mist and mystery, framed by crystalline rivers, rainbow canopies, and hanging gardens. He describes its wavelength as “a waking vision,” teeming with “life, chaos, and magic.” Crafted across the past three years in his recently departed Portland, Oregon basement haven, Green House, the album’s nine tracks unfold with a shimmering, cellular symmetry – prehistoric and preordained, lush ecosystems in hidden harmony. A composite of synths, software, and spatial finesse, this is Akasha System at its most attuned and eternal, a forever expanding universe of percolating rhythm and fragrant air.

Wave Temples

Panama Shift

Not Not Fun

Over a decade since its inception, Wave Temples continues to refine and refract the project’s visionary mythopoetic exotica. Panama Shift presents a 20-track kaleidoscopic star map inspired by “the euphoric cults, both then and now, that come and go in the vast ritual of night.” Bleached keys, devotional synth, and driftwood percussion align in minimalist vignettes shaded by tape hiss and field recordings of streams, waves, wind, and birds. Dedicated to the late Japanese-born American anthropologist Yosihiko H. Sinoto (whose portrait graces the cover), famed for his excavations throughout the Pacific and French Polynesia, the album embodies a similarly voyaging spirit: “chasing ancient mysteries… and rekindling with the esoteric journey of the human spirit.” This is music of forgotten shores, sea air, and saltwater shrines, echoing in shells scattered across the altars of Atlantis.

Wave Temples

Portals

Not Not Fun

Expansion pack of Wave Temples transmissions accompanying the Panama Shift vinyl suite. Its creator contextualizes Portals as the first volume in a tarot-style card game of the same name, to be used for divining prophetic strategies. Each of the 13 pieces here unfolds like a glimpse to an inner realm – or a past life. Hazed vignettes of primitivist anthropological fantasia, warbly and windswept, suffused with déjà vu. Insects and macaws sing from the periphery, while beach fires glow along an abandoned coast, the tide like a language lost in the tunnels of time.

Cport Cistema

Say It

100% Silk

Lithuanian producer Simonas Činga debuts as Cport Cistema with a 7-track slate of low-slung steppers, melancholic jack, and baggy breaks, born of the struggle “to say whatever comes, to speak up – to say it.” Recorded across the past two years largely in Kaunas, the songs swell and swirl with kinetic dreams from city streets in uncertain times. Crisp rhythms cut through cold air, laced in bass, breath, and samples both vocal and cinematic. It’s music of atmosphere and anticipation, attuned to heady heights just beyond the horizon. The spirit of Činga’s heroes (Vynehall, BoC, Djrum) echoes through these mixes but ultimately their motion and emotion maps a world unto itself – elevated, liberated, forever freshly coming into focus.

Lunar Chamber

Shambhallic Vibrations

20 Buck Spin

Lunar Chamber, a hitherto unknown being of mysterious consciousness, now present in the physical realm for the first time with debut manifestation Shambhallic Vibrations, a tale of a journey eastward in search of enlightenment and what may lie beyond. Ensconced in mysticism, the five track nearly thirty minute pilgrimage advances unflinchingly through insane crushing riffs, bewildering solos, tranquil acoustics and illuminated ascendent melodies. “Spirit Body And The Seeing Self” details the start of the journey, self analysis, and the attempts at launching oneself into said “beyond,” while “The Bodhi Tree” is a mirroring tale of Gautama Buddha himself, having meditated underneath it in Bodh Gaya approximately 2500 years ago, attaining enlightenment. “III. Crystalline Blessed Light Flows… From Violet Mountains Into Lunar Chambers” is the ultimate pinnacle of the tale. Having reached a spiritual plane, pulses of light and dark; the very fabric of space-time itself churns. Knowledge is abundant here. Eventually, one is brought full circle, right back where everything began in normal life; albeit with a new sense of everything. But there is so much more to learn… a yearning thirst. Offering a deluge of jarringly brutal metal, overwhelming progressive physicality and instinctively accomplished memorability inspired by Buddhism, the East and esotericism, Lunar Chamber have just begun their quest of ascension and enlightened knowledge.

Cutler, Paul B.

Les Fleurs

In The Red

Fans of the innovations and originality that sprang from the L.A. underground of the late 1970s and ’80s often ask, “What’s Paul B. Cutler been up to?” A vital participant in the Los Angeles music scene of that period as bandleader, songwriter, musician and producer, Cutler’s work—in particular his guitar playing—with The Consumers, 45 Grave, Vox Pop and The Dream Syndicate is still admired by fans and an influence on anyone interested in that period and the styles that developed from it. In 2014, “Ryan Adams contacted me and wanted to form a band. He loved 45 Grave, he wanted to do some goth / punk, whatever you want to call it. That’s right up my alley. He’s amazingly talented and inspiring to work with. We did that for a while, and I wrote a bunch of songs.” Enthused about his new material, Cutler continued recording songs with just his signature electric guitar style and vocals. As this was developing, another vet of the early L.A. scene—Brad Laner of Medicine and Savage Republic—got in touch with Cutler. Soon Laner was mixing, co-producing, playing keyboards as well as adding the rhythm section. The overall process took some time, with songwriting beginning in 2014. When reflecting on the music that comprises Les Fleurs, “To me, and it does not sound like it, but because of the philosophy I had while producing it, it’s punk. I come from the original punk, before it was a genre. Before it was a ‘sound.’ When I...

Zozobra

Bird Of Prey

Profound Lore

Taking its name from the 50-foot effigy burned every year by a hysterical mob during the Fiestas De Santa Fe in Santa Fe, NM, Zozobra is the brainchild of Caleb Scofield (Cave In / Old Man Gloom) and, to carry on his musical legacy, the two Zozobra albums Harmonic Tremors (2007) and Bird Of Prey (2008) can now be streamed everywhere on all streaming platforms once again. Also both albums will see their respective vinyl releases, the first time they will be officially issued on vinyl for widespread distribution (previous editions were tour-only editions and the Caleb memorial version). Following on the seismic heels of Harmonic Tremors, Bird Of Prey was originally released in 2008 via Hydra Head Records respectively and features drummer Aaron Harris (Isis), who also recorded and mixed the album. Scofield’s second full-length under the Zozobra moniker is a white-hot exploder shot through with snaking melody lines and implacable riffs. From front to back, Scofield’s signature roar is tempered by his own gleaming backup chants; meanwhile, an arsenal of guitars alternately churns and shimmers in the flames of Zozobra’s effigial namesake.

Zozobra

Harmonic Tremors

Profound Lore

Taking its name from the 50-foot effigy burned every year by a hysterical mob during the Fiestas De Santa Fe in Santa Fe, NM, Zozobra is the brainchild of Caleb Scofield (Cave In / Old Man Gloom) and, to carry on his musical legacy, the two Zozobra albums Harmonic Tremors (2007) and Bird Of Prey (2008) can now be streamed everywhere on all streaming platforms once again. Also both albums will see their respective vinyl releases, the first time they will be officially issued on vinyl for widespread distribution (previous editions were tour-only editions and the Caleb memorial version). Harmonic Tremors was originally released in 2007 via Hydra Head Records and features drummer Santos Montano (Old Man Gloom) accompanying Scofield. It was recorded and mixed by Andrew Schneider at Translator Audio in Brooklyn, NY with art and design by Aaron Turner. Harmonic Tremors deftly traverses the far-flung fields of transcendental space rock and explosive dirge metal with alternately snarling and oscillating riffery, crippling bass quakes, and apocalyptic proclamations hurled end over end toward the cosmic unconsciousness.

Andrews, John & The Yawns

Love For The Underdog

Woodsist

John Andrews is something of an open secret in a certain corner of the music scene: a versatile musician and animator. A film school drop out whose work hat-tips tradition as much as outsider anti-aesthetics. He’s spent over a decade on the DIY circuit, playing early house shows alongside then up-and-coming peers Weyes Blood and Daniel Bachman. Today he is still out there projecting his sketchy hand-drawn animations during his performances in coffee shops, small galleries and non-traditional venues. Andrews’ painterly approach now introduces the listener to his version of New York City, the place he was bound to end up after years of dwelling in Pennsylvania farm towns and New Hampshire barns. There is handmade vibrancy to the world he’s imagined here: intimate moments seen from the interior, looking outward from hole-in-the-wall restaurants, theaters and the fragments of peace found within the restless and dirty street corners. Love For The Underdog, his aptly titled fourth release with the Woodsist label, was tracked live to tape in various studios and apartments across the Empire State with help from his bandmates in Cut Worms’ touring outfit, Max Clarke, Keven Lareau and Noah Bond. Buoyant melodies are supported by timeless string arrangements, translated from Andrews’ head to page with the help of friend Simon Hanes. The string quartet follows the tradition of Francoise Hardy, Harry Nilsson, Margo Guryan and Belle and Sebastian, giving the whole thing a cinematic ambience with stark shadows of an Edward Hopper painting. The lyrics tie together narratives...

Tiny Ruins

Ceremony

Ba Da Bing!

Tiny Ruins, the project of New Zealand musician Hollie Fullbrook, are back with their fourth album, Ceremony, out on Ba Da Bing Records. The follow-up to 2019’s celebrated Olympic Girls, Ceremony goes deep into all the old and murky mysteries of what it means to be human—and sometimes it nearly goes under. Yet these songs also show how one can find the strength to swim from the shipwreck, push through the silt, surface into another new morning—another new chance. Ceremony washes in and takes one out like a strong tide, its songs “chapters” of a saga set on the shores of Tāmaki Makaurau’s (aka Auckland’s) Manukau Harbour. Known to locals as “Old Murky,” its western fringe of the Waitākere Ranges are home to Fullbrook. And while the harbour itself is a treacherous and oft-polluted body of water, move to one of its many peaceful inlets and it’s all tidal flats, shellfish and birdlife. “It’s beautiful but also muddy, dirty and neglected. It’s a real meeting of nature and humanity” says Hollie. The album’s songs took shape as she explored the turbulent landscape on foot with her two dogs. The things Fullbrook was struck by there are annotated across Ceremony (cover art by Christiane Shortal) as luminously as a naturalist’s scrapbook. After touring Olympic Girls both solo and with her long- term band line-up of Cass Basil (bass), Alex Freer (drums), and Tom Healy (electric guitar, producer) for eighteen months, Fullbrook returned home to the banks of Little Muddy Creek, exhausted...

O'Sullivan, Daniel

The Physic Garden

Vhf

Third in a trilogy of albums of library music miniatures from composer and multi-instrumentalist Daniel O’Sullivan (Æthenor, Ulver, This Is Not This Heat, etc) following 2020’s Electric Māyā and 2021’s Fourth Density. For heads, the term “library music” in 2021 might evoke dodgy Italian gray market LPs and crate-diggers hunting for “funky breaks”—but London’s venerable KPM Music is working with groundbreakers like O’Sullivan to open up new avenues for composers to experiment. The fifteen tracks on The Physic Garden are fully-formed and orchestrated compositions, which would be highlights on anyone’s release, never mind as incidental music. Of the music, O’Sullivan says: “The Physic Garden is an album of diverse instrumentals inspired by a swathe of verdant vistas from manicured gardens and follies to urban common land, overgrown and forgotten. Convalescent memories in the shape of psychedelic auditory botanics.” Key tracks include the droning acoustic folk of the title song; the Canterbury-esque rolling horn and woodwind melody of “Return The Heart” (with expert drum kit from Frank Byng); the prog-ish odd meter interlude “Buttercup Tea”; The quiet ambience and delicate melody of “Dusty Feather:”; and the Eno-like drift of “Vapourer Larvae.”

Sunburned Hand Of The Man

Hypnotape

Vhf

A genuinely sprawling collection of high-fidelity mutation music that suits the compact disc format perfectly, Hypnotape is the third consecutive Sunburned Hand Of The Man album of studio assemblages following 2019’s Headless and 2021’s Pick A Day To Die. Recorded throughout 2021 and 2022, it’s an album possessed with a peculiar runaway locomotion which jump cuts feverishly between unusual atmospheres yet maintains a beguiling consistency—throbbing, twisting, undulating rhythmic blast-offs suddenly kick the door down into serene realms of nuanced acoustic privacy which are unexpectedly plunged back, face first into a miasma of shirtless, raging thuggery, ad infinitum. The album is notable in the group’s monstrous catalog for a few reasons: first, it showcases founding member Conrad Capistran stepping out from behind the keyboards and electronics to spread his smooth, buttery baritone atop the majority of the tracks. From his velvet cooing above the pulsing whirlwind of opener “People Person” to his vivid and febrile musings as a trip reporter on the frontlines of the meltdown zone on “Roger” his honeyed vocals guide the listener Virgil-like through the inferno all the way to the album’s finale where he duets with Ron Schneiderman on the old Dino Valenti / Quicksilver chestnut “What About Me”. Secondly, it features the recorded debut of Sunburned’s longtime friend and collaborator Mark Perretta after years of touring with the group. Some may remember Perretta from his days stomping across the primordial Boston underground of the late ’80s / early ’90s with the mighty Subskin Cables or his...

Direct Hit / Decent Criminal

Split 7” + Beacon Comics #1

Dirtnap

Dirtnap Records will publish the first installment of Beacon Comics this Spring, packaged with a 7" record featuring a taste of Direct Hit's (Milwaukee, Fat Wreck Chords) dubiously-forthcoming album ("Wasteland"), and new Decent Criminal (Santa Rosa, Diised/Gunner Records) songs "Time" and "Dream" - each an alternate take, and a B-side off their forthcoming album, respectively. This lavishly packaged comic/7” combo is a one time only pressing of 500 and will only be available for a limited time. Get yours today! 

During

s/t

Chunklet

"During’s self-titled debut is a pipe bomb of originality, set to detonate and shake the foundation of the tired post-punk sounds of today when it hits via Chunklet on ______. And while some more obvious influences show across the ten track LP—like DEVO, Sonic Youth and Gang of Four—its strength lies in some of it’s wilder ideas and influences, creating a wholly new approach as yet unseen in the otherwise very tired genre of post-punk. 'I've always been super influenced by post punk stuff. The Fall is definitely up there, as well as WIRE and the Urinals, even the Gizmos,' says Fisher emphatically. 'The coolest thing about recording this LP was we didn't know what we were gonna end up with, it just sort of came out the way it came out. So while those influences are there because that's where we come from, none of it is totally clear because it’s jumbled up with so many of our other ideas.' Starting with a dizzying and frantic base, During's sound can best be classified using the hyper-cerebral approach of DEVO, garnished with touches of their more frenetic speedfreak acolytes Minneapolis’ Uranium Club. It’s from there that things drift into territories unseen, with a cold vocal delivery not unlike Mark E Smith, a quirky and free-spirited approach like the Cardiacs, atonal riffing that recalls Sonic Youth, and a mildly funk-focused bed to tether down the madness a la A Certain Ratio or the Contortions. All that comes baked in with the...

Wolfmanhattan Project

Summer Forever And Ever

In The Red

Summer Forever And Ever succeeds Blue Gene Stew, 2019’s debut by the Wolfmanhattan Project, a collective unit co-starring three musicians familiar to In The Red listeners: singer-guitarist Mick Collins, front man of the seminal Detroit-bred garage units the Dirtbombs and the Gories, singer-guitarist Kid Congo Powers who played in such legendary bands as the Gun Club, the Cramps, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and drummer-vocalist Bob Bert, whose skin work has distinguished albums by Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus, and Jon Spencer and the HITmakers. The group was founded as a studio project by three musicians who are kept busy by their primary bands. Blue Gene Stew was written and recorded quickly. Powers says, “I think that the new record was much more a group effort. I think there’s more of a group kind of sound, as eclectic as it is. I feel like we all played together, as opposed to playing on each other’s songs.” Bert notes that the band’s music is grounded in spontaneity: “Me and Mick went in and had a couple of rehearsals, and I would come up with a beat, he would come up with a riff. I still have a cassette Walkman, believe it or not, and we’d put it down on that. It wasn’t even a full song. We’d just put down a bunch of ideas. When it came to recording we’d lay down the basic tracks and work out different things, and a lot of it was made...

Hauras

Pervades

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Head to the western neighborhoods of San Francisco, and the city becomes a very quiet place after midnight. By 3am, one can almost hear the fog spilling past the sodium lights that illuminate a lonesome street corner at Judah and 15th. Whatever soundtracks that emerge from that time and that place inevitably embody that nocturnal atmosphere, a narcoleptic weariness, a waking dream of the insomniac. Such is the psychogeographical realm as channeled through sound for Hauras, the obliquely musical concern for San Franciscan Howard Ryan. In Pervades, Hauras returns to the fragments of guitar warbling through chains of echo and flange, his Basinski-esque loops of crushingly sad ambient melody, his EVP impressionistic vocals, and his curious interruptions from scanner radio. More than before, he expresses a confidence in his oblique craftsmanship that allows him to push the sounds to include a very compelling drum machine plus guitar noise track in "Stellaged." Richard Youngs, Gate, and Graham Lambkin all come to mind, as does the terminally obscure project Dial (Jacqui Ham's post-Ut band of similarly late nite expressionism). Pervades concludes a trilogy of recordings made during the pandemic era, that also includes In These Coming Days (2020) and The Glare of the Nave (2021). Inspired by Rinko Kawauchi and Audrey Szasz. Mastered by Brian Pyle

Vertonen

Einige Schadstoffe

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***In Einige Schadstoffe, we have quite the potent homage to the classic era of industrial noise. Think Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report, Come's I'm Jack, MB's Symphony For A Genocide, and even Nord's Ego Trip. The sentiment linking all of these records is a clinical detachment in the production and broadcast of scalding tone, sickly rhythm, and unclean readymades, emerging through the spectacle of the human conditions of alienation, paranoia, and cruelty. Ultimately, such works are intended as critiques by way of gonzo journalism, where the intent is not always what it seems. Vertonen, the longstanding project of veteran Chicago avant-noise technician Blake Edwards, masterfully recapitulates these strategies and affects, both aesthetically and materially. On Einige Schadstoffe, Edwards transmits feverish arppegiations cascading through nervous distortion, followed by plodding rhythms and dead-toned electronics that gird case studies on living monstrosities. There is also a rather clever, if oblique and almost Oulipian framework to the album. Plenty of breadcrumbs have been laid as to the nature of Edwards' puzzle, and we have already said too much about that.

Planning For Burial

Matawan - Collected Works 2010-2014 (Vol. 2)

Flenser

In 2017 The Flenser released a CD collection of material from Planning For Burial's early period entitled Matawan - Collected Works 2010-2014. Named after the bands long-term home-base in Matawan New Jersey, the collection included many of Planning For Burial's beloved rare tracks that originally appeared on seven inches, cassettes, or online. Since 2017, the band's own Thom Wasluck has re-examined the material found on the Matawan collection with the intention of releasing a vinyl version. This vinyl version of the second volume of the Matawan collection includes much of the first disc of the CD version tirelessly remixed and edited, and the inclusion tracks not found on the original edition specially prepared for the vinyl format.

Barth, Lauren

Stormwaiting

Spiritual Pajamas

“Driving up the coast highway from LA, once you hit Santa Barbara you are struck with a noticeable change in landscape. It is the gateway to the Central Coast, where the contours of the land begin to take on more dramatic inclines and feelings burn like wildfires. This was the childhood home of Lauren Barth, ranch-living and horseriding amongst the golden and dusty open ranges that still expand through parts of California. It is at these gates of change that Lauren Barth explores on Stormwaiting, her second solo effort and first on the Spiritual Pajamas label. “Behind the musical landscape of Stormwaiting, Lauren drew from a backstory she created as inspiration. A young woman and spiritual leader of a commune, blind yet finds her way by a heightened sense of awareness, is caught between the physical world of ‘Rialto’ and the spiritual—‘Morian.’ ‘Stormwaiting’ is slang for living in Rialto and the storm is the tempest within Morian. The cult’s most important message is one of Awareness. Like her protagonist, Lauren steps through these contemplations of change coming, treading one step at a time between the physical and spiritual realms, in a bittersweet anticipation of something upon us. Each song is like a deep breath in, an exhale, a pondering of the past and a wonder about the future with an acute awareness of each passing moment. “Barth is a true seasoned folk music player, evoking the California folk movement of the late 1960s like David Crosby (who also hailed from...

Infinity Ring, The

Nemesis & Nativity

Profound Lore

In the summer of 2020, the seeds for what would become The Infinity Ring were planted by Cameron Moretti, drawing together many musicians long active in the Boston metal, punk, and electronic scenes. The initial endeavors of the band started as an experimental take on dark folk music with added elements of drone and noise. The band eventually grew to be an alchemical fusion of experimental rock with many disparate strains from the post-industrial continuum, all delivered with a spiritual and mystic bent. The band’s output sits at the crossroads of many different styles, such as ominous folk, no wave, industrial, and black metal, with elements of occult and ethereal antiquarian sonics laced throughout. The band spent most of 2020 and 2021 experimenting in various studios around New England, deeply immersed in open-ended musical R&D. These sessions would eventually lead to the collaborative Ohr EP with Jarboe. In early 2022, the band set out in earnest to record its debut album, Nemesis & Nativity, at God City Studios in Salem, Massachusetts with Kurt Ballou. The album built on much of what came before, but with a more pronounced sense of ritual, atmosphere, and heaviness. During the creation of the album, genre conventions fell by the wayside and extreme experimentation was channeled, resulting in a sonic palette that morphs from elegantly haunted atmospherics to mystic ritual drone, brutalist industrial rhythms to passages of hallowed melancholy. In the live setting, the band is dedicated to bringing the same experimental and spiritual energy,...

Paint Fumes

Real Romancer

Dig! Records

***PAINT FUMES have survived a decade of being in Paint Fumes. No small feat for a group that's released 3 albums for 2 distinct and luminary labels (Slovenly and Get Hip), swaying their way between opposite ends of a sonic spectrum (garage and punk; old and new) on a no-fucks-given wrecking ball pendulum. Evolution occurred steadily from their earliest primitivism to more tuneful rockers. Real Romancer, the band's fourth LP is a whole new world of glam stomping', dual-guitar-with-added-bass hammerin' sounds taken to anthemic new heights previously unexplored by this born too loose group. If leader of the pack ELIJAH VON CRAMON's description of the band as "panic attack punk and power pop nightmares" rings true, this is Paint Fumes' KBD-benzo treat-all for a 12-song long wet dream.

Voidceremony

Threads Of Unknowing

20 Buck Spin

Upon the release of the first full length album Entropic Reflections Continuum: Dimensional Unravel it was instantly revealed that VoidCeremony were treading a path few walk. The album proved that death metal can be performed with the gliding, controlled chaos and smooth fluidity of a jazz quartet, while still leaving the listener holed up in a dungeon, low on HP, out of spells, and surrounded by deadly demons. Threads Of Unknowing is a journey which resurrects concepts on earlier display and summons evermore progressive and technical compositions. Mastermind and guitarist / vocalist Garrett Johnson and guitar virtuoso Phil Tougas (Atramentus, Chthe’ilist, Worm, First Fragment) share both vocals and lead guitar duties here, while bass god Damon Good weaves both fretted and fretless bass mastery and drummer Charlie Koryn encompasses not only speed and brutality, but a fine mix of precision and improvisation from jazz fusion. The end result is VoidCeremony and their signature sound: time-melting death black fusion. With an apt cover painting representing the lyrical and philosophical vision of an ancient and forgotten future, VoidCeremony itself seems to be operating on an alternate death metal timeline that once made itself known, but only briefly, and was soon left behind for more commercial appeal. Yet the portal has been re-opened and the merging of these boundless possibilities and directions are now being brought forth directly once again.

Miesha And The Spanks

Unconditional Love In Hi-Fi

Mint

Uncompromising, witty, authentic, inspiring–Miesha & The Spanks have established themselves as a rock ‘n’ roll force of nature to be reckoned with. The Calgary-based duo are equal parts searing guitarist / heart-melting vocalist and all-stage / all-star percussionist personality. Vexatious frontwoman Miesha Louie sets the steamrollers of love a-rollin’, ploughing through obstacles and destroying assumptions, like a red-hot indie music machine. Her new record Unconditional Love In Hi-Fi is her Mint Records debut; the album was produced by The Buzzcocks' Danny Farrant. The record's themes touch on personal and political topics such as parenthood and stories related to Miesha's mixed Shuswap heritage. Miesha and the Spanks have extensive tour plans following the release of Unconditional Love in Hi-Fi including the UK, Europe, US and Canada. RIYL: Wet Leg, Alvvays, Fleshwater, Black Mountain, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Joan Jett

Helena Celle

If You Can't Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don't Deserve Me At My Best

Night School

Dedicated 21st Century polymath Kay Logan continues to expand her soundworld in every direction at once with her Helena Celle alias. A maximalist internal landscape of broken Jungle patterns, distorted synths and heavily warped instrumentation bent out of cognisance, If You Can’t Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don’t Deserve Me At My Best is Logan’s most danceable, most fun and most gloriously congealed record to date. Conceived in part as a response to her 2016 debut release If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, You Don’t Deserve You At Your Worst, 2023’s update employs similar principles (degrading technology, the joy of chance, an outsider’s gaze onto the dance floor, an embracing of the occult) to delirious effect. If I Can’t Handle was lo-fi and fragile in its technoid recasting of dance music, here Logan’s confidence allows a frantic playfulness that retains the spontaneity of all her output. It’s the work of a creative spirit reveling in the possibilities of sound, rhythm, texture and pattern. Helena Celle’s music opens up psychic space in front of the listener and invites them in. In this world, sounds and tropes once recognisable are rendered fractal, spectral and continually melting in and out of recognition. Simply put, Helena Celle might be detouring Drum & Bass, Techno and Breakbeat with a prankster’s grin but the result is pure ecstasy crushed into a part of the listener’s consciousness hitherto untroubled.

Glittering Insects

s/t

Mind Meld

***"Following up Timmy Vulgar and Quintron with a Mind Meld threefer. The collective brains of GREG KING, RYAN BELL, and JOSH FEIGERT gives us GLITTERING INSECTS. An Atlanta "Ego Summit" written and recorded over the course of four weekend sessions. These three turned in the quickly thrown together EVOKER Tape as a companion piece for GG KING- Remain Intact LP back in 2020. I was so moved by it I asked if they would be interested in putting together a Mind Meld LP." "Glittering Insects and their self-titleddebut album takes the concept a bit further, exploring a trio of minds, bringing together Atlanta’s Greg King (GG King, Carbonas), Ryan Bell (GG King, Predator), and Josh Feigert (Wymyns Prysyn, GG King) for a collaborative effort. While all three members play together in GG King, Glittering Insects is assuredly something different, and it’s pretty astonishing. Written and recorded over a series of weekends spent in the studio, the album is made off-the-cuff, but you’d never believe it upon hearing it. The record trades in garage punk and beer soaked power-pop for something far more dense, sinister, and vastly expansive. Glittering Insects are entrenched in the weeds, tangling themselves ever deeper through an array of post-hardcore menace and death rock with touches of krautrock, black metal, and shoegaze adding impossible amounts of texture. The thing is though, it doesn’t really sound like any of those genres as the trio really only pull bits and pieces together to make something amorphous."—Post Trash

Dj Panthr

Jade District

100% Silk

The inaugural vinyl debut by Hunter Thompson aka Akasha System’s shadow self, DJ Panthr, is an 8-track technoid night ride inspired by the fern-shrouded neon streets of South Tabor, Portland, where the album was conceived and created: enter the Jade District. Simmering and serpentine, the songs slipstream from lithe to liquid to narcotic, traced in acid, dub, and deep house fog. It’s dance music as both reverie and nocturne, overcast and underground, the perpetual motion of mossy neighborhoods passing in the dark, streetlights smeared by rain. Thompson speaks of the “desolate peace” of sleepless dawn walks through Southeast Portland, tall trees silhouetted against glowing strip malls. The synthetic and natural worlds fused in greenery and concrete. Jade District feels both immediate and introspective, club tracks for midnight minds, born of distance, dreams, and things unsaid.

Indopan

Yupana

100% Silk

Named for a banned 60’s psychoactive stimulant, Indopan is the splinter entity of Irish producer Andrew Morrison, aka “tape throb” godfather The Cyclist. Its sound runs distinct but parallel, a fusion of blasted house and ghosted soul, smeared with dub, breaks, and redline grit. Yupana collects nine new tracks for a 50-minute trip through outer limits and altered states, cutting keys at the doors of perception. Smoky horns, snaky bass, smeared organ, and deep torch laments spiral through kinetic, kaleidoscopic strains of dizzy swing, dusty jack, and jittery acid. Alternately weightless and weary, tense and unhinged, Morrison’s mastery of mood, rhythm, and restraint hits a supreme peak here. This is music of liquid nights, chemical bloodstreams, and ancient sorrows, ebbing and flowing from lost roots to fractured futures, unbowed and unknowable.

Edren, David

Relativiteit Van De Omgeving

Not Not Fun

Antwerp synthesist David Edren describes his latest solo collection in conceptual terms: a harmony of space and time, elements and environments, perception and impermanence. Conceived in the morass of 2020, he began envisioning a widescreen suite of electronic compositions connected to the hidden rhythms of what surrounds and affects us. The 12 tracks of Relativiteit Van de Omgeving trace a chain of miniature terrariums, from misty meadows and moonlit gardens to cosmic vistas of asteroid showers. It’s music both subtle and symphonic, attuned to the sweeping planetary clockwork of water and wind, birds and insects, seeds scattered in soil forever being reborn: “skating the thin ice of ideas, like a heroic water strider.”

Golden Hallway Music

Rules & Chance Vol. 3

Not Not Fun

Manhattan’s resident innerspace organist Zack Tornaben centers the third installment of his ongoing Rules & Chance series on breath, tone, and the ancient Qigong practice, “Eight Pieces of the Silk Brocade.” Working once again with the classic Golden Hallway Music palette of a pair of reel-to-reel tape machines, a 49-key Acetone combo organ, and an 80’s synth clone, he records everything live without overdubs in sprawling séance sessions, then digitally transfers them for distillation into choice excerpts. Swirling, shivering reveries of skylines and stained glass, Tornaben’s process prizes intuition, intimacy, and “feeling around in the dark,” inspired by a pantheon of greats from the grand tradition of harmonic divination – Young to McClellan, Brouk to Battiato. Rules & Chance Vol. 3 gently expands his evolving lexicon of daydream minimalism, levitational and limitless, born of passing thoughts and everyday joys, rippling in the mind like light on water.

Kommand

Death Age

20 Buck Spin

Death Age maintains the armed to the teeth savage militancy of earlier material from LA’s Kommand, now taken even further into enemy territory with more grisly wartorn brutality than ever. Like the coordinated bombardment of an entire continent, Death Age is an air raid siren for imminent cataclysm. The ominous atmosphere on Death Age heralds the single-minded concentrated objective; to batter, demolish and destroy with no quarter given. Death metal of this kind taps into the most primitive, untamed instincts, advancing like a convoy of tanks through occupied territory, heedless of whatever or whoever stands in its path. From opener “Final Virus” to closer “Collapse Metropolis,” Kommand’s vision of a dystopian hellscape, cities permanently scarred by heavy weaponry, and those unfortunates who survived the onslaught never relents or offers respite. Death Age thus renders a terminal epitaph on the bloody trash heap of near-future history.

Spirit Possession

Of The Sign…

Profound Lore

Almost three years spent sharpening orthodox weapons, Spirit Possession reveal their second full length Of The Sign…, six schizo spiraling, deranged hymns of black heavy metal from a lost time. While the s/t full length was a raw blistering torrent draped in first wave blood, Of The Sign… seems to be thoroughly drenched in its epic, strange and primitive ways. A violent cacophony of insanity laden cavern vocals, labyrinthian guitar trilling, scalding drum brutality, and analog harsh-noise eruptions—these are sinister yet adventurous black / heavy / death abominations from a forgotten age. Erratic musical madness with improbable entrances, and impossible exits. Featuring S. Peacock (Ulthar / Pandiscordian Necrogenesis / Mastery ) on strings and vocals, and A. Spungin (Vouna / Ormus / Taurus ) on drums and handmade synthesizers. Recorded in the depths of the S•P Dungeon / and studio mixed at Menegroth The Thousand Caves.

Keithley, Joe

STAND

Sudden Death

After forty-five years of leading legendary punks D.O.A., the man they call Joey Shithead aka Joe Keithley, has a new solo album out on Sudden Death Records—don’t worry, D.O.A. is still touring! Stand has a rootsy, rebellious tone, as Keithley combines acoustic and electric guitar on this timely and politically charged album. Many have compared Keithley to a modern day Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger because he has spent a lifetime standing up for what’s right through his music and through his actions—Stand befits that ethic and long-held tradition. The songs cover a wide range of emotions. There’s timely political stuff like “The Warrior Lives Again,” “Fentanyl Blues,” “This Machine Kills Fascists,” and “Ginger Goodwin.” Poignant songs include “Lookin’,” “For A World,” “People Power,” and a cover of D.O.A.’s “2+2.” Keithley even digs into movies and TV with his spaghetti western-inspired “Man With No Name” and an ode to Star Trek called “Men For All Ages.” He really hits the mark, as he covers songs from his idols Johnny Cash, Leadbelly and Stompin’ Tom Conners. On Stand, one gets a wide array of Keithley’s talents: from his vocals that have never covered such a wide range, to his sterling guitar playing, to his powerful songwriting ability. To make sure the album had the right tone, Keithley got the right people to accompany him, which includes one of the best acoustic rhythm sections in Canada, Leon Power and Darren Parris, and also great keyboards from Chris Gestrin, with Jessie Zubot...

Why Bother?

A City of Unsolved Miseries

Feel It

***Mason City, Iowa's WHY BOTHER? return with A City of Unsolved Miseries, their third album in as many years. Their patented basement recording setup has yet again captured something magical, thirteen originals in all. From the fringes of a small, landlocked Midwestern city—Why Bother? have honed in on a punk sound that is original, self-driven and shows no signs of slowing. Swirling in darker thematics, such as the still unsolved 1995 disappearance of Mason City TV anchor Jodi Huisentruit, the album speaks to every outcast living out their days underneath dark, grey skies. However the music strikes you—Why Bother? have defined yet another chapter of their enigmatic existence with the genius sounds captured on A City of Unsolved Miseries. First pressing limited to 300 copies.