graham lambkin/jason lescalleet - the food chain b/w nice ass 7"graham lambkin side of this totally caught me by surprise. if i heard this in a blindfold test i'd instantly guess it was rudolf
eb.er or raionbashi. recordings of what sounds like some animal (a lion?) growling/grunting, a group of people moving through a room (possibly a museum or some tourist attraction), a police raid. rough musique concrete. jason lescalleet side begins with some electronic gadget stuck in a loop (camera shutter?) before the kool aid gets switched with purple drank and it feels like your brain is entering hibernation mode. a melodic piano phrase enters with some processed field recordings and finishes out the side. not too far removed from the more recent idea fire company material. pretty expensive for a 7" (£10 ~ €12/$16) but very highly recommended
jason lescalleet - songs about nothing 2xcdfirst cd was initially very different to what i was expecting, far more digital/laptop sounding than his usual output, but fuck me, it's pretty jawdropping. his referential tendencies (annihilate this week, this is what i do) are taken to a ridiculous extreme here. outside of the album title and the artwork, all the track titles are word-plays on those of songs about fucking and the track lengths are all the same as those of their fucking counterparts. second cd is more familiar territory, long tape piece, up there with the best of his work. either of these discs on their own would've made my album of the year shortlist, the two together seals the deal. the contrast between the two discs works really well also
michel chion - diktat 2xcdcomposed in 1979 but not released until 2010. a sort of radio-play based around melchisedech, an old testament figure from the book of genesis. the text is in french, german and "blave", melchisedech's imaginary native language. i've pretty much lost what little french i used to have and don't speak german (or blave!) so the narrative goes straight over my head unfortunately (the liner notes are only printed in french also and i've never been able to muster up the patience to sit down and try to decipher them). the music is incredible though. it's amazing that something like this could lie unreleased for so long. of all the grm-associated composers, chion always seemed to me to be one of the composers least concerned with musical theory and more focused on sounds/modes of listening. his stuff still sounds radical to this day ... wild and non-academic (even though he is very much part of the academic establishment), sounds like it could easily have come from today's "noise underground"
the haters - in the shade of fire cdclassic haters elements are all present ... glass, fire, hiss. superb and totally ahead of its time
wolf vostell - dé-coll/age musik cdoriginally released in 1983, reissued by tochnit aleph at the tail end of last year. collection of pieces ranging back as far as 1959. totally mindblowing, couldn't do this justice so gonna quote from the liner notes ...
Quote from: Wolf Vostell, 27/04/1980
Since 1958 I use the term "dé-coll/age musik" to describe acoustic processes that stem from the phenomena of random decompositions. A light bulb breaks, posters are torn off the wall - and these processes are retransmitted by acoustic amplification. The shock of falling objects, the screams of humans in danger, the sounds of car crashes, the white noise of a tv-set, the sound of an out-of-tune radio, all the sounds of the body etc have this become my contribution to fluxus music.
fuck! if in the shade of fire is ahead of its time, where does that put vostell!? the crudeness of some of the pieces, rather than sound dated, make this sound even more contemporary. i'd call it proto-noise but the proto part might imply a similarity rather than an actualization. couldn't recommend this higher, some sound samples here ...
http://www.soundohm.com/wolf-vostell/d-coll-age-musik/tochnit-aleph/(the jean dubuffet reissue that tochnit aleph/rumpsti pumpsti just put out is also incredible by the way)
diocletian - doom cult cdferocious. so many amazing antipodean metal bands ... aus/nz is to metal what finland is to power electronics?
witchrist - beheaded ouroboros cdintense, monolithic, suffocating. still need to pick up the grand tormentor and war of all against all but looking forward to hearing em at some stage
archgoat - whore of bethlehem cdgreat gutteral vocals, catchy riffs, solid from start to finish, always end up putting this on repeat when i dig it out
