Today is a workday for us in Beijing, so there is no review today, but I did want to point you to an Indonesian band called Senyawa, who is featured on Rafaelle Pezzella’s incredible Unexplained Sounds Group‘s digipak retrospective called the Far East Music Collection. It is a reissue of three seminal compilations covering experimental music from China, Indonesia and the Far East in general. The set looks gorgeous, and Senyawa‘s contribution is mind-blowing.
Neither Merzbow nor Meat Beat Manifesto will need no introduction to connoisseurs of either Industrial music or the sound that made Wax Trax! Records famous. I never, in my wildest dreams, thought that these two would join forces for an album, and, miracle of miracles, their styles actually work well together.
The legendary Lustmord has a new album which releases on March 15, 2024. Judging by the one track currently available to sample, this will be a creepy, heavy album with all the horror of watching a Bosch painting melt while on acid. This will be that deep.
Prepare yourselves for January 19, ten days from now! The legendary Scanner (Robin Rimbaud in real life) has a new album out, “…a tribute to the early 1960s library music culture, applying crude techniques of electronic composition, using a mix of hardware and software. It explores a kind of musique concrète, electroacoustic character, in an otherworldly cinematic fashion.” This will be a departure from his more experimental work, and should be a joy to listen to. It will be released on Alltagsmusik, “a new label to release Scanner albums.”
It has been far too long since I’ve had the pleasure to review albums by Sonologyst, perhaps the finest dark ambient project to come out of Italy in the last decade and impresario of Unexplained Sounds Group, who have introduced dark music from all over the world. This album offers lush drones that wrap themselves around your ears. Best to let Raffaele explain further: “The new Sonologyst “sonic documentary” delves into the secretive realm of shortwave transmissions; a chronicle of clandestine shortwave transmissions culled from a span of nearly four decades (1982-2021). These mysterious transmissions – repetitive voices, signals, sound…
We had the pleasure of O Yuki Conjugate’s release earlier this year reviewing Volumes 3 & 4 of this series. The old quote still holds: ““Two years after the first two volumes of A Tension of Opposites (ATOO) were issued OYC return to the form they created to house their looser more exploratory works. ATOO allows them to expand their musical horizons and release their music more expediently. The original ATOO was born out of 2020’s virus state where both OYC members were left working in isolation. Two types of music emerged spontaneously, and rather than try to combine them…
Esplendor Geométrico was Spain’s first major Industrial band. This album was recorded in 2002 while visiting Beijing, and has been out of print until recently. This latest edition adds four more tracks to this classic LP.
Somnimage impresario Mykel Boyd, a stunningly good composer in his own right, has released a 20-minute work of a grim, hazy, yet beautiful soundscape where you feel trapped in the bowels of the set of a sci-fi epic.
A post-punk/ethereal gem has been bestowed upon us by our friends at Lost Tribe Sounds. Arrowounds tie together influences from bands like, “Can, Bark Psychosis, Young Gods, Slowdive, Durutti Column, Seefeel and much of early 4AD,” according to the band bio, but there is an element that makes this band something apart. Noise-rock, post-rock, and a more eerie feeling than their influences betray sets the band apart.
As I need a rest day (Beijing has been lovely to return to, but a challenge to adapt to), I leave for you a well-done video on the history of Industrial music and how it mutated into something very different from its original form.