Sewer Election – Wreck cd
Having done his bit to restore harshhead integrity to Sweden, Mr Johansson may be forgiven the heretical turn Sewer Election has taken over the better part of a decade. Not to neglect the bags of ultra primitive brutalities more recently scored in the name of Heinz Hopf! Say your seven-point-five Heil Mikawas and go get wrecked, my son, an eternity of elkbrews and MSNP tapes awaits. Heinz Hopf is the first point of reference, the second SE's uber primitive Ljungarum Blues, c. 2004. Ljungarum Blues (& An Ode To Reality) aka heavy duty killer fricken Sewer ERECTION! Pretending that ten intervening years of studied esophageal abuse never happened, Wreck hoists the moldered Ljungarum carcass aloft, lugging a couple hefty bags o' Hopf-grade overbilged elk brew-talism- for added concentrations of raw filth- the whole unseemly spectacle thrashing unevenly about squalid pools of mid-low-end churn. Just in case I'm not getting repetitive enough, key descriptors include "rough", "raw", "brutal", "pure", "filth", "filth" and "filth". If some sweaty swede is choking and belching on mic jammed halfway to bunghole you'd be hard pressed to notice under all the bilge-encrusted layers (of heaving filth). Filth seems to be the descriptor of choice, but the divergence is in the details. First in the degrees of separation, the widened stereophonic scope. Phat slabs o' raunch-ass filth slam into one earhole whilst Mr Hopf's mighty meatstick rips straight through the other. Burly balls o' ripped ragged fury fizzle into non-fidelity, the right 'hole forced to take up the slack, the left hacked open and left to drizzle in fields of deadened hiss. Distorted dregs of scrap-junk overload bury themselves in throaty, full bodied, shitheaps, full-up rugged rrrrreams o' ragged ripped-to-shit raunch ass-filth – no hole neglected! Deliberate movement of dulled and deadened rust-scraping, long scrapulent runs percussed with chunks o' falling debris. Solid sheets of coarse-grained greyout sheer into thunderous full boar roar to approach hint of cavernous depth. The inevitable ambient interlude... Plenty of meat, plenty of bone, plenty of time to chew it over. Spastic, this is not. But neither is it inclined to settle into anything like routine, nor is there any sense of progress, or hope. This might almost be a series of live takes, decisively cut when each movement of the moment is adjudged to have run its course. Once again I scandalize myself in suggesting comparison to the mighty Merz - once again late 80s early 90s Merz. Quint-essential Merzbowlian Merz: manifest compositional skill and ear for texture- raw texture, ever on the move. But, qua Merz, never once to overplay the hand, never once to second guess the quint-essential filth, never once to defer to anything short of the Noisehead, nor in such deferral to break down and make the mistake of trying to compose the literal Shit out of the textural Raw. The Man knows his Shit. In short: sounds like Merzbow. Merzbow with an old broken ax to the face tied naked to upsidedown crosses and blood everywhere. Just the way I like 'im.
Maaaa – Abhorrence And Dismay cd
I've been struggling for a good while to martial words adequate to the task of re-presenting what this piece of work apparently does to the noiseholes... the noisebrain... the noisewhatever. I hereby give up. I give up, at least, trying to sum this sucker up. Or wait, here we go: the history of industrial-experimental-noise condensed into thirty eight minutes and fifty-two seconds. (How'd I do?) There's a lot breadth to this story, a good amount of depth. There's a lot of noise, as represented by a lot of not-noise. A whole lot of sounds, alright, piles of them, scrunched up tight. Sod says "carefully arrayed kaleidoscopic compaction of variegated perv-vision," but he always says shit like that. It's a bit of this, a bunch of that. It's harsh, it ain't. It is, unapologetically, epic in scope. Wait, I've got another one for ya: laborious recompiled accumulation of collapsible concrete counterpoint. I... well, I still give up. Run the transcript. Fingernail drags across piano string. Rhythmic bass thump, slow, steady, linked in chains of wobba wobba. Reversed cymbal slide to peak drama. Just when the kick-drum is due to hit, rumpled ribbons of scrap-junk shlump center stage, cantanker about the rusted channel pan, shuck 'n jive stage right stage left, delivering tape-manipulated assemblage ever-so-carefully mixed to form a very physical backdrop to increasingly voluminous strains of high-end pierce, to culminate, finally, in climax number one. Break now for eros as realized via looped sequence of moody melodic synth plinking. Before long eros is dancing with our lusty tape manipulated junk assemblage, scrapped clatter hitting with a renewed percussive fervor that might almost suggest violence were it not so un-dominant in the mix. And this is it, the defining feature, so to speak: a constant strained dialog, pushing and pulling, between elements terse and tender, hard and soft, harsh and plush, cock and cunt, slip and slop and SLAP. Concrete music or just plain music? Resignation, a blush, a sigh, a stretch... of junk-textured whine, machine-hum ambiance, a whiny machine-hum ambiance to whinge into deepened throaty consistency, ten minutes deep now, and- abrupt. orgasmic. cluster FUCK YEAH of full on harsh purity! Stacks of metals bashing together in thick cauldrons of heavy analog throat-pummeling. Whitened sheets of abrasive scathe-howl blast away at ballsy meatstacks of low-end thunder-bulge, acoustic sources all but consumed in the interminable density. Five minutes later... and all harsh inclination is duly burnt out of the system. So to return, in steady, echoed footfalls, upward, through glowing doorway, into the lightened haze of brittle-sweet bleeding flatline. So concludes "Abhorrence", time for "Dismay". Dismay perhaps at the untimely dropping of the track index, as we are treated to four solid minutes of carry over from track 1, bleeding flatlined Abhorrence played against throatier throbs of cyclic drone, machine-hum, increasingly pushy scraps of junk-texture to suddenly click against the seeming start of Dismay proper. So, Dismay proper: crash of sullen piano chord, wavering through unsteady tape ribbon, dragged into a heavier junked car crash percussive. And the chord hits again, and again and again, playing against very rough series of scraps, scrapes, junks, the odd alarm call, reversed drama peaks, more of that defining feature above described: the counterpoint of legitimate musicality and very rough n tumble tape-mangling of well-spaced heaps of disheveled scrap. Exit piano, enter: pure gutter atmos. Sludge-encrusted raw dragging of mic against the back of tonsils, pushing at yr sympathetic gag reflex, machine whine returning to escort stumbling descent of burly trashcan slam. Quite the striking development, starting to lose my train of thought... All aboard! Roll of freight car over warped and warbling tape tracks through to fully fleshed locomotion, heavy industrial-strength rail atmospheres chugging steadily toward that climactic fifteenth minute and... well, c'mon now, y'all know what's coming. KA-BLOWY! Heavy-handed harsh purity. Concentrated convergence of extremes hitting at all-out overload, the whole shiteloaded mass bereft of any sign of acoustic source. But wait a sec, there it is- the acoustic source! Buried in the next instant by rippled rip and roar. Windswept torrent of rapturous twist n slam. These momentary twists feel natural, though, flowing, even. Nobody getting jerked around here, spastics thusly advised to jerk it elsewhere. As the 'holes adjust to their new home invader, the good and many splendored layers reveal their myriad creaks and cracks. Slow dismantling of the final dregs of variegated perv-vision, done.
Breaking The Will – Choosing Death cd
Here's something to confuse the harsheads. Harshasalmightyfuck razorripped scorchspastics meet high-minded concept. At least, I'll assume the concept is high-minded. It's some concept stuck into fuckloads of harshnoise fer fucksake, in relative terms it's pretty much high-minded by default. To the inevitable first question, "What the fuck was up his ass?" we'll have to leave that to your filthy mind. Mine is pretty much baffled by the concept – document of weekend toolshed construction guided by self-help manual written on the fly by L Ron Hubbard? But in one key capacity it works: the harshasalmightyfuck razorripped scorchspastics are well spaced out, in between abbreviated concrete documentations of the process of Preparation (Parts 1 – 5). First a trip to the dock. A quiet, out of the way dock, timber bumping quietly against swaying hull. Then to "Disappear" into the slow gathering of quiet static layers, flattened buzz, ambient hum, carefully upping intensity as choice cuts of multi-channeled scorch titter, totter, and finally blast through the field, louder and louder, faster and faster, hinting at the mighty spasticities to come. Without the 'holes ever quite noticing, noise proper has practically reached full peak, a dense and complex cacophony of harshasalmightyfuck razorripped out-and-out earhole-saturating glory. Just when the harshhead is beginning to bang out its agreements, things are rudely interrupted by sudden cut to "Preparation 2 (Stove)", which sounds, well, like someone preparing a fucking stove. Or perhaps checking stove for resonances accorded series of well-aimed "ding". Thus, quite logically, we proceed to "Learning To Care" (about the fucking stove, I presume). Sounds of literal smoldering back echo-y fluttered static, playing against stretched out winks of chirpy morning ambiance. That's four tracks covered and the only harsh proper was that rudely interrupted hint of possibility a couple tracks back. I'm on the verge of "Learning Not To Care" (about the fucking stove) when the main course is set. Well, fuck. Here we are. All the harsh you can eat, open wide and ready thy 'holes for... a veritable smorgasbord of harshasalmightyfuckturd. Jagged angular incisive multi-pronged sphinct-rip of the first order, right up there with the Bigguns! High enough caliber to render any decent perv-veyor of the (more spastic species of) harsh purity jealous. Eat your shitey heart out, harshheads. Layers of harsh and heavy electronics, sure, but a good amount of air savagely ripped from the dense, epileptic, convergences, spasmic breaks in the ferocious pummeling to force huge gapes in the harsh pucker, the attention, ever off-kilter, obliged to drill right down to the essential metal-sourced grit, the junked-clank gristle. Never the pedal-driven purity to overwhelm and render useless the concrete materials at work. Do I hear a fucking stove or is that the feedback whining in sympathy? Stutter. Jab. Judder. WWWoooorsshshshssss. Ka-splunge. Poofterpoofter. SPLACK-zzziiiing! Yes, trying to jot this stuff down does tend to render the recorder a spastic mess. Perhaps time to shut the door on the world, enter "Preparation 3 (Shed)". Chainsaw, digging around for nails, hammering, securing of concrete materials of essence. Thus to prefigure the three part Assembly, possibly the centerpiece of the album. We do indeed seem still to be trapped inside the damn shed, but that just means everything needed for total audio destruction is within easy reach, exploited to the max. Here, in the shed, each individual blast of razorripped scorchspastic is kind of prepped or prefigured by miniature strands of carefully laid acoustic foundation. Harsh out-of-control spastics that never once feel out of control, nowhere near about to fly off the handle. Spastic, then, in texture or tone. Improvised performances seemingly non-reliant on the editing deck. Yet- a very deliberate sort of surgically plotted ferocity, designed to provoke in the listener an understanding of just how good the perv-veyor is at what he is about. Something to prove? Fuck, proven already. "Preparation 4 (Generator)" is just that, nothing to add. Did someone say "Werewolf Jerusalem"? They're here too, featured on the somewhat grim, gritted, "Committed" strains to follow, coughing, choking, flattening of ground up flecks of delectable filth, to suddenly blast out of coma at 5:14 for a good several seconds before petering out in deference to "Preparation 5 (Chainsaw)". No comment. In fact I'm done commenting. "Choosing Death" seems the only righteous option at this point: massed orgy of tightly focused perv-vergence, open flits of acoustic crack whipping and slapping, down, hard, into properly dense hunkerings of collapse upon collapse, a final sizzling lighting of the fuse to explode to the utmost scorchification, pure fire, all hail all hail, ozone, smoke, frantic, lurching this way and that, no way out, caught in "Aftermath" of shed ("Burning") slowly down to the ground, snap crackle pop of life smoldering unto blank.
