Boquetot / Paris / Port Jerome
(Groundfault - GF021) CD $12.00
Music produced by Eric Cordier (processing, contact microphone recordings), Jean-Luc Guionnet (long string recording devices, mixing), and Eric La Casa (condenser & contact microphone recordings, filtering, processing, mixing) at specific sites: a windy day on a highway exit ramp near a hemispherical tunnel made of sheets of corrugated iron, with amplified steel strings stretched between it and the recording van; a train station; and an emergency training day at a huge petroleum factory, near valves regulating steam pressure).
Descent to Mimas
(Groundfault - GF018) CD $12.00
John Wiese has been instrumental in pushing the evolution of Eric Wood’s Man Is The Bastard side project toward the predatory galactic monster it is by combining its original caveman electronic roots with new atmospheric sounds. Using oscillators, mixer-feedback and other electronic grit, this is a fairly killer concept album about traveling to one of Saturn’s moons, drilling through the surface of the cold, cold rock, fatally stumbling upon a catacomb of alien millipedes, and drifting lifelessly inside space coffins.
Terminal Hz
(Groundfault) CD $12.00
32-minute five-movement slap-and-tickle by Japanese bombastic guitarist KK Null (Zeni Geva) and Australian guitarist David Brown (Dumb And The Ugly, Bucketrider). Terminal Hz leans on electronic-based improv, nosebleed textures, musique concrète, high-pitched tones, and sparse electric guitar. Not really soothing, not really noise either. Sort of like a cross between Derek Bailey and two spaceships having a near miss.
Buried on Bunker Hill
(Groundfault) CD $12.00
Guitarist Nels Cline and bassist Devin Sarno have been playing together for almost 10 years, and this is their first multitrack recording (their past collaborations have been live). With a focus on improvisation and texture, Buried on Bunker Hill rumbles thick, low and foggy, as Cline’s detuned and bent guitar mechanics gravitate, distort, meander and hover. For fans of Labradford, Flying Saucer Attack, and the like. Easily the best recording by a duo with chemistry to burn.
Face of Vehemence
(Groundfault) CD $12.00
Another blobalicious sound gulp from Portland, Oregon’s über-rattler Daniel Menche. Inspired by Yukio Mishima’s attitude toward art, flesh, death, and spirit, Menche constructs big-man bass pulses and harmonic drones that’ll make the hair in your ears turn green, and ignites more of the corrosion fireworks for which he is famous. Electro-crickets, grinding metal rain, hypnotic and sultry static -- Menche unleashes them all. He shall overcome.
DANIEL MENCHE / KIYOSHI MIZUTANI
Garden
(Groundfault) CD $14.00
Natural garden sounds electronically processed by Mizutani (high sounds), and West Coast chancellor of scrape Menche (low sounds). Subtle and disorienting.
Shipmaker's Diary
(Groundfault) CD $12.00
For those who have grown immune to regular dunkings in steaming cauldrons of hot tar and hydrochloric acid (as pleasant a homeopathic remedy for ailments of the skin as they may be), Dominick Fernow sloshes 33 minutes of unbelievably thorny, hard-scouring noise, adding a new chapter to the Total Pain, Instant Death playbook. Here, the high-concentration electronic defects of Wolf Eyes meet the stroboscopic rainbows of distorto-screech that the Load Records crowd takes their shirts off for.
Fall of Nature
(Groundfault) CD $11.15
New material recorded in 2007. One track, nearly an hour in length, depicting a nihilistic nightmare on personal and social levels. This epic track evolves gradually, starting with the voice of creation, building to a fury, and ending with man's desperate screams of realization and madness. The relentless music in between is "nothing short of monumental."
This Is The Truth
(Groundfault) CD $13.50
The first studio album in eight years by Sutcliffe Jugend, who began in 1982 as a Whitehouse side project that gained notoriety as one of the harshest exponents of the original power electronics scene. After the monumental 10xCS boxset We Spit On Their Graves (Come Organisation, 1982), Sutcliffe Jugend released a handful of albums until 1999. A single 7-inch was released in 2001 and they weren’t heard from again until 2006, when they played their first-ever live show, followed by more that same year. This Is The Truth is an original and perfectly balanced noise composition, referencing classic as well as unique and fresh elements one does not hear in noise. Foreboding tension and anxiety, lively, disturbing, and textual elements of noise all come together with detail and balance.
California
(Groundfault - TRO225) 10xLP $75.00
The controversial, ear-baking box set featuring 20 artists from California, each receiving an album side to do their thing. You get it and good from: Amps For Christ, The Cherry Point, Joe Colley, Control, Die Yellow Swans, Gerritt, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Moth Drakula, Oscillating Innards, Open City, Sixes, Skaters, Solid Eye, Spastic Colon, Tralphaz, Damion Romero, Rubber O Cement, John Wiese, Xome and RHY Yau. Limited edition available with metal California pin.