Top releases of 2023

Started by WCN, December 19, 2023, 11:43:56 PM

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absurdexposition

In no order, although the MNEM tape was the most played

BARSTOOL MOUNTAIN - Tightrope Walker LP (Absurd Exposition)
JOE COLLEY - Pleasure Pressure LP (New Forces)
GREEN TEA - Snowblower CD (New Forces)
LIVSKRAFT LP (Förlag För Fri Musik)
MATTIAS GUSTAFSSON - Nedbyrtningen CS (Hästen & Korset)
MNEM - Heart of Complex CS (Satatuhatta)
MOLENA with THE RITA - Barre CS (Absurd Exposition)
SPRING OF LIFE - Interface CS (self-released)
WORTH - Hamper CD (Aussaat)
ZK - Discordia CS (Absurd Exposition)
Primitive Isolation Tactics
Scream & Writhe distro and Absurd Exposition label
Montreal, QC
https://www.screamandwrithe.com

DBL

There's still a ton of stuff (including absolute must-haves like Sadio, Contortus, Mogao, BU...) from 2023 I intend to check out but haven't yet, and many releases still need a few more spins before I've formed an opinion on them, but these at least are definitely on the top list for me. All very different, and each of these feel like they keep giving and growing more with new listens.

Amek-Maj - Kolem 3" CD
Hattifnattar - Watcher Of The Skies CD
Moozzhead - Thighmaster CD
Pain Appendix - Toward Infinity CD (reissue)
Rusalka - Base Waters CD (reissue)
Steel Corset - Body Belt CD
Stinkfinger - Secret And Inward Ejaculations Of The Heart CD
Tyhjä Pää - Prolonged Troubles In Concentration And Memory ‎CD
Umpio - Sin Memoria CD

Also these have got to be mentioned simply due to being such heavy and challenging but also very intriquing ones to listen to:

H.Ö.H - Epäjohdonmukainen CD
Residual - Forcing The End 3" CD

Bloated Slutbag

Quote from: Bloated Slutbag on January 07, 2024, 05:15:32 PM
Quote"Even junk metal, which has to be the tritest, most played out shit in noise/PE aside from feedback"

Instant never-read-this-person-again moment.

Will qualify slightly to concede that I generally agree with the overall sentiment of the post into which this quotation was placed, not to mention nicely presented blurbs on the list of releases in question, so hope there was no offense.

Just the quote itself leaves me a bit. Well, maybe shoulda gone into the humor section. Like start by bashing on the use of feedback, then junk metal...might as well start attacking the loudspeaker, the recording medium, and the whole idea of listening to sounds as a viable proposition.
Someone weaker than you should beat you and brag
And take you for a drag

Bloated Slutbag

#33
Three for me:

terma - I/II
Been listening to this daily for the past week or so and am in the process of mustering words. "Seismic, 'cousmi semi-organic flushes fluttering fleeting disturbance, distemperment, detritus" seems, word wise, inadequate to the task, but very possibly a good start. Starting with a decisive consumption of the time, good and well, vested into myriad acousmatic products, acquiring steadily burgeoning waves of mass and depth, time well rewarded, to be sure, the earholes precipitously adjusting to the progressively deeper penetrations, acclimating to a whole-brain consumption of the the first order. So to say, a richly rewarded investment of the attentions into overlain intertwined tapestries always intimating at revealing still more in the blushing provisions arching and gracing amongst the multihued phenomenological disconcertments. In a word, kills. Definitely not quite what I was expecting, but on second thought not too far removed at least as far as the truly epic proportional dimensions of the pure ah auricular weight, if that makes sense. At this precise moment (on the white side or possibly the black...but a good ways into it in any event) I feel like my brain is fucking exploding. But, like, in a good way.

Artbreakhotel/Knurl - Scrap Metal Labyrinth
Repeat out loud: Artbreakhotel. Knurl. Scrap Metal Labyrinth. Don't even care what it sounds like with a concatenation like that. But then here's Knurl going into rare and much coveted harsh acoustic mode. Like, all win all day (some assembly required, minotaur not included).

North Shield - Seine and Frozen Red
In the art-concept-sound-total-package category, all win all night. Textured tendrils plying partially concealed crevices licking lollygargled tertiary tundras freezedried flickering flits of, red. And I'm not just saying that as a, like, well, a freezedried tundrite. I mean, sure I am. But. Could be my vote for sleeper of the year.


Bunch more, in particular order of a non-linear variety:
(couple technically 2022 but not for me at least)

Thomas DeAngelo - Voiceprints & Aircuts: Sound Poetry by Other Means
Charitably repurposed dis-gurgitants betray their doubly cruel dialectical originalities in unfashionably isolated bursts, emphasis on bursts, mediated by the fiscally imprudent timbre of metal trash cans stuck on funnel-rinse, with un-neatly snapped bobbles of tape ribbon clocking up the overtime, figures. Complete pile of pschitt, worth it for the essay alone, itself superseded by the program notes über alles.

KNSK – Murska
Y'know, sometimes people take the words "industrial music" a tad too literally. Jean-Marc!! You cut that out right now! – Momma Vivenza

terma - I/II 
"Seismic, 'cousmi semi-organic flushes fluttering fleeting disturbance, distemperment, detritus"  see above commentary

Artbreakhotel/Knurl - Scrap Metal Labyrinth
Does what it say on the tin (obviously). (see above abbreviated commentary)

North Shield - Seine and Frozen Red 
"Textured tendrils plying partially concealed crevices licking lollygargled tertiary tundras freezedried flickering flits of"  (see above abbreviated commentary)

Mot – Callous
What it say on the tin. Subject thy precious 'holes to the worst indignities cause they bloody deserve it, emphasis on bloody, or would deserve it if sentience of some strap were to be slap-or-dained, why slaaaaap not?

Mot – Disorder
Does what the earlier mentioned (not this one) say on the tin. Well-ordered indignities served up snug n burnt raw for your precious holes' precious holes.

MO*TE - Kill The Sun
Or don't, see if I care. Soundtrack to solarcides in slooow spirals steadily ascending to ponderous faux epic proportionals proportionate to faux epics shot through clustered wormholes a treat.

Tyhjä Pää - Prolonged Troubles In Concentration And Memory
Damn, forgot what I was gonna say about this one. Probably something about it being good or somethin'. Squirrel!

The Keraunograph Ensemble – The Omnipresent Volume II: The Tower of Preparation
Masterpiece of dense tapestral foreboding, and, um, what was it? Grace. Singed weave and bowed metal assembly, achieving by successive grades a succession of some necessarily cataclysmic prefiguration.

The Day of the Antler - Love Beyond Love
Like, totally lives up to the project name, which is saying plenty. Diverse antler-ing or branching out, in all, and every, and very nicely captured, direction, a tour de force caught in the sights but please please please don't pull the tri-

Asshole.

Cyess Afxzs - No Bull One Left Behind
Size matters laddy, and that's noo bull.

Cyess Afxzs – Richter
At least an 8.0, on the scale, but the russian judge gives it a 2.

Cyess Afxzs & Scathing – Sunken Dimension
With the rich full bodied weight of the world balancing on them hefty shoulders, it is eminently evident that size (still) matters. Degrees or allotments of intervals, times, to achieve the prescribed and necessary sinking into multidimensional hue, of the sort I tend to ascribe more readily to the weirdly named project than the other but apparently or by accounts not. All killer no

Worth – Hamper
Necrotic penetralia creeping in well amped globular space, awash in a consummate glossy lipped huffjobbery, arid aggressions spun out amid still harsher-er dis-gratitudes. Spin a few times, rinse, repeat, fluff dry.

Violent Shogun - Breath & Steam
Steamy sultry breathy sister to a lovingly textured New Dark Age.

Violent Shogun - New Dark Age
Mature muted sleepy eyed sister to a lovingly textured Breath & Steam.

Violent Shogun – Peace
Glorious all-consuming tempest before the calm, unlikely to qualify as anyone's sibling, gender unspecified, but what in the sublime clusterfuck of ragged metals and broken-down textural blurrt do I know? (Answer: very little).

Amek-Maj - s/t
Softly penetrating layers into layers into...proverbial pot-bellies of mech-anical, mani-anical, flatul-anical, belching beast du jour.

Impakt – Burnout
Face, meet fist. Again and again and again. At speed. Hella speed. Full metal racket, thwaaackit, of most impactful or'deur.

Cov Ops - New Agenda
Culture freedom gender history religion will. I think I liked the old agenda better. Heaaaavy penitent machines convulsing to a conditioning operant apparent (or so they say...). Ingest with pinch of salt, pepper spray, and full tabasco-lar hosing.

Green Tea – Snowblower
Fully flushed flights into smothering drift and sway, refrain from consumption of the yellow, gooo green!

MNEM - Heart Of Complex
Be still the complex shuddering machinations of my darkly shrouded heart!

Un Regard Froid – Exofile
Looks cold, cold as a thing to which it would be ill-advised to attach the tongue, but hots dang them some chromium plated anglings for exposed jugulars, can-tankerous collapsible metal bodies filled to the brim and bursting. Well as far as the earholes report, hot hot hot.

Ochu – Lähmung Des Wartens
Starts out real unassuming then assumes plenty, plenty wide open yet consumptive as skinny skivvies bedecked listener dutifully assumes the position, and the pain aka engorged auspices of acousmic glamor, is brought, cold. Hard. Like steel, mon.

H.Ö.H – Epäjohdonmukainen
Episodic rips ruptures of the internal parts, including parts you didn't want to know existed, picking fights with dry heaving spells 'o spasmic snuffla-blurrt, their corroded dregs seeking comfort in a lurched stuttering pathos.

H.Ö.H – Tukkeutunut uniperäinen mania
Methodically cobbled together dilapidations shining bright into bloodshot eyeballs prized-open-with-scary-lookin-metal-implements. Please for the love of hough! leave me slumber o cruel (if let us say rather rumpled) cassette ribbon!

Corral Shut / Residual / Tyhjä Pää / Haudat – Corral Shut / Residual / Tyhjä Pää / Haudat
Weirdly consistent digging into the grits and kernels of a particular, or particularly textured, agglomeration of none-too-disparate vision, sufficient to invite at least the barest suggestions (of the suggestion) of genius.

Umpio - Brain Pain
Full and flatulating working over of brain pan, aka channel pain, so good it (always thought it) wanted to hurt (but were probably afraid to ask)

Umpio - Sin Memoria
Taking a hefty clanking sledgehammer to tiny twitching remnants of a de-cum-re-pressurized brain pain, above, scattered into a somehow reassuringly thriced-removed-from-hinged shatter-splat oblivia'd oblivion.

Primitive Wings - Slow Urge
"ill-capacitated bilge-crusted abrasions sure if not quite clean, more munificently mangled 'n molested through ye olde macro grade meatgringer, savaged by yo momma, like, flatulent strangula hawked 'n blurted through knotted sphinct constrictia" (commented)

Primitive Wings - Morphosis
"channeling of the not quite broken spirit of beloved if badly broken-down machinery fruitlessly fighting its fubar'd on the fritz quintessence, tenderized with hot tenderlovin' attention to the infinitesimal, sneaking in on technicalities because that's what technicalities are for" commented

Murmer / Fowl - Balcony
Of that soaring feeling first posited by the illusion of safety, dissociative discarded textural dis-gruntlements tendrils threads abrasions gruntling passages worn raggedly raw, of murmer most fowl.

Rotmans - 490/504
"Burnt fur, amplified. Fuck, is the whole tape like this?
Answer: no"
(briefly half-arsed commented)

Viodre - Drawing Horses
"constant game of re-orientation, perhaps not mis-orientation. But like. And really really going hard in the directions, convincing, right. Convinced at this moment, or perhaps at the previous moment because like this moment is fucked. But back to that moment, previously described. Knowing what it's about. Till not. At which point." (proto-moronic-grade commented)

Sadio - Voyeur Seeks
Nothing discreet nor clean about this vibrating filth throb deluge. Get your filthy mind out of the gutter and back in the sewer. Where it belongs. Beloved on principle alone.

T. Mikawa - Cloud Carpet Bombing
For those whose faces require a mote of studious scouring off. Aka, "spastic, maybe, spasmic, certainly, stripping back sensibility, sensory debility, pissin harrderr, spiraling razors up the hidey hole, spearing smearing spiraling squealy-mouthed piggypeaks, up up and away through tubular glassy-smooth chambers of zzzzziiiip yeeeOWch jeezus mother of"  (commented)

Corral Shut - Sheer
Significantly more punishing than entirely necessary, but (spoiler alert) entirely necessary (it turns out)

The New Boyfriends - Universal Noise
Take you some Jean-Claude Eloy Gaku-No-Michi, right, noise them shits up, like, twelve notches. Add water and stir. There, deep down in among the merzembryos, spy the cacophonic glimmerings of an intra-versal nonverse being unbirthed.

Mattias Gustafsson - Nedbrytningen
Even without the poor bird getting hosed, utterly smothering of the will to challenge supremacy

Toanche Dwelling - 🜨  <- yes that symbol to the left there is in the title position but discogs is probably just be fucking with me.
"Smudged and winking, wrinkling, fatal flaws in time-space, cycled circling spiraling in upon the breaking nay broken point(s), where the points (hope to) forget they were there and (if capable of anything beyond the profound and edifying numb) were (or would otherwise have likely to have been) glad of it"  (commented)

Barstool Mountain - Tightrope Walker
One fat flatulent tightrope walker, lemme tells ya. physics defying 'Stool, what can possibly go wrooooooooooo....

Organ Of Corti - EA & Other Works
From the visual presentation and title almost as though some crap left over, but only OOC does crap left over like this

Artbreakhotel - Junk Aranea
Could not have chosen a better title myself. or wait, maybe I could: Buncha Metal Junk Flopping About An Entropic Ariana, Film At Eleven. those seeking release titling services pls inquire within
Someone weaker than you should beat you and brag
And take you for a drag