Larvae - Exit Strategy, Ad Noiseam ADN160

I really wonder why I have missed presenting this album so far... Especially, when it was almost certainly No.1 album of 2012 (it missed this title by another late entry, to which I will dedicate the next post).

"Exit Strategy" is the latest album of I.D.M./experimental duo Larvae. And is completely different from their previous work, since it is actually a downtempo album with lots of pure/ambient, I.D.M. and trip hop elements, with an old-school ethereal feeling. I guess you got the point about what you're going to listen... The album is rather melancholic and sweet, with a very clever blending of all the previously mentioned musical influences without getting boring and never repeating.

Another thing that impresses in this work is how all these elements are mixed in the same track, shifting seamlessly from low to high tempo parts, or creating a dynamic change in the feeling of the song without changing the tempo but only the samples used. Characteristic example is the following track


If you ever listened to their previous works and liked them

1) This is MUCH better and mature than anything before

2) You will be happily surprised that such clever musicians exist nowadays

3) You will listen to this album for months/years

The only bad thing with such releases, especially when they occur at the first years of a band's existence, is that they create high expectations for the following ones; expectations which most of the time are very difficult to fulfill. We'll have to wait and see...


For the time being, enjoy one of the best albums of 2012, surpassed only by...

Front Line Assembly - Echogenetic, Dependent Records, mind 209

The latest album of Front Line Assembly,  Echogenetic, signifies another twist in their musical experimentation. The dubstep elements in their music were obvious in their previous soundtrack, "AirMech", and now the whole project finally took its shape.

I will not judge such a genre mixing, this is up to personal preference, but the outcome. I wouldn't expect anything less than a perfect blending of electro-industrial samples and dubstep flows from a band that is so many years around. Echogenetic will appear strange to FLA fans, especially after the more "hadcore" Improvised Electronic Device, but indeed, spend some time on it; you will not regret it

There are no tracks which really stand out in the first listening, except the 3rd track, "Blood", which is jaw dropping from its first few seconds. Listening better the album is were all its beauty start to appear, especially if you like good dubstep (aka, Burial). The blending of the two genres is immaculate, maintaining a perfect imbalance, in favour of course of the industrial character. Tracks like Exhale, Leveled, Exo and Heartquake are destined to be admired by both electro-industrial and dubstep listeners. Lyrics? Well it's FLA, what do you expect?10/10. This absence of lyrics in AirMech, due to its purpose of its release, was the main factor that the album was not that successful.

Nevertheless, the album is not perfect. It is obvious that FLA are still experimenting. Otherwise you would be able to feel that they have settled in a characteristic industrial/dubstep mix style throughout the whole album. Here the songs are rather different from each other in the atmosphere that they create. If Leeb and his friends decide the dubstep is worth working on it, I would bet that the next album will define the FLA sound in this category as well.

We'll have to see. For the time being, open your ears and your minds and listen to Echogenetic. Previous experience in dubstep will help you appreciate this album, to which I give 9/10, since I reserve the 10/10 for their next one.




We walk in silnce, we fade away
We're holding hands, we slip away

Snog - Babes In Consumerland, Metropolis Records, MET 850

New album from one of the most outstanding electronic artists in Australia, David Thrussell. Many things have changed in Snog, which now are a full-female trio with David turning into Dee.

Musically? Fortunately Snog keep on experimenting and presenting new ideas, keeping 100% their character. As usual, the new album is full of black humour, irony and critisism against New World Order and Western civilisation's consumerism, but with a more E.B.M./poppy character. ""Babes In Consumerland" continues the change seen in their latest albums, shifting away from their industrial roots and returning decades back into a more "old-school hardware" electronic sound, dominated by synths.

An album that will reward all the fans of Snog, and appeal "extremely" accessible to a much wider electronic music audience; a trademark of Snog.

Another masterpiece for your collection. An album filled with sweet melancholy and nostalgia...




Snog - 21st Centrury Lullaby by AbyssMariner

T>A>P, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, March 2013

Electroacoustic event



T>A>P, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 30/2... by AbyssMariner

 
T>A>P, Whitworth Art Gallery, 20/3/2013... by AbyssMariner

 
T>A>P, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 30/2... by AbyssMariner

And a song dedicated to people who live...

...in prisons.

Physical prisons or prisons of their own making

Coil - Horse Rotorvator, Force and Form/K.422, 1986

Horse Rotorvator is the 2nd full length album of Coil and the release that showed that Scatology was not a coincidental album. Coil were indeed reforming the "standard" image of industrial, and the very essence of the word music into a more spiritual and esoteric manifestation, along with the other two "pillars" of UK occult movement of this age: David Tibet and Steven Stapleton (and Genesis P-Orridge). Music in their hands has already started to transform in a way equally pioneering to the great fathers of contemporary electronic music such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Iannis Xenakis, and the rest. The tools back then, were the non-pythagorean mathematical interpretation of music and the post-WWII collapse of ideas and revisionism about man. The tools now were the newborn industrial movement established by Throbbing Gristle (the "Wreckers of Civilisation" as characterised by the politician Nicholas Fairburn in the House of Commons in 1976) and the strong belief that modern man, with all his ideologies and social systems has failed dramatically, suggesting that the solution is the change of man himself through the dissolution of the current moral systems, esoteric studies and hallucinogens.

Horse Rotorvator is the result of one of Johnn Banace's dreams in the period and its concept can be found on the album cover, the text of which I cite here

'On the Eve of the Apocalypse - (The Air choked with Horsehair) - The Four Horsemen betray their steeds - slitting open the animal throats - and in doing so release the Second Great Deluge - Horsegore - Infinite divisibles split - an Infinity of open Sewers -

The Four then fashion an immense earthmoving device from the collective jawbones - the Horse Rotorvator - with which to plough up the waiting World - (ROTA turns through 180 to TARO) - Wheels replace Horses - Dark Horses run - Dark Horses run Deep - and Hell is paved with Horseflesh... (We plough the Fields and scatter our dead steeds on the Land)'

This is Horse Rotorvator. Much more elaborate, complex and not so 'straight through' as Scatology, filled with parallelisms which became Coil's trademark.

The very characteristic vocals of Jhonn Balance start to unfold, creating a haunting atmosphere that drags you in his dreams. Abstract patterns, screaming children, abrupt industrial samples, create the means to Apocalypse as envisioned in the psychedelic dream of Horse Rotorvator.


Characteristic tracks are:

Blood from the Air


The First Five Minutes After Death, in its two completely different manifestations


and of course Ostia, written for the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini

COIL, 1979-2004

Coil started their career characterised as one of the best prospects in music experimentation back in the 80's, with the emergence of electronic music, moving the work of other pioneers in the 60s and 70s into a completely new path.

Coil finished their career, giving a completely new definition to what experimental music is - an artistic creation, which in the end, only 50% has to do with music (experimentation and improvisation). The rest 50% is philosophy, theology, poetry, literature, social/human sciences, painting, alchemy, psychedelic drugs and going deeper and deeper down the spiral of introspection.

Along with other people like Genesis P.Orridge, David Tibet and Steven Stapleton, they consisted the very core of the occult experimental music that started in the 70s in the UK.

Coil consisted of Johnn Balance, 1962-2004

 

and Peter 'Sleazy' Cristopherson, 1955-2010

 



The pure essence of Coil manifests in a statement of Johnn Balance in an interview:
 "I'm obsessed with the idea of turning base matter into gold, transmuting base materials, i.e. raw sound, into something else."

Nothing sounded like Coil, nothing will sound like Coil. With this post, I launch a series of album reviews on COIL, the band that contributed most in the change of electronic and especially industrial music in the 80s, into something completely new. A complete discography of COIL can be found in

http://www.brainwashed.com/coil/music/

Around 90 pages. The reason for it is basically that, especially during the later years, each song's performance was different than the previous one, not only in terms of music but of lyrics as well, with John Balance improvising on every gig and creating a fascinating realm of similarly sounding words into a psychedelic dreamscape. Bearing similarities to The Temple of The Psychic Youth, formulated By Genesis P.Orridge, Christopherson's collaborator in Psychic TV and the fathers of the industrial musical movement, Throbbing Gristle; "every message is valid only at the precise time that it occurs, nothing can be the same withing the Flow"

 Album reviews will be random in order. Why should they be otherwise for a band like this? COIL 1979-2004

I close this inaugural post with the COIL manifesto from the Trasparent album, when they were known as ZOS KIA, a rare AMAZING interview of Coil in a Dutch music show where John Balance describes the essence behind the band and the first performance of ZOS KIA in London. Enjoy!

The Price Of Existence Is Eternal Warfare

COIL is a hidden universal. A code. A key for which the WHOLE does not exist. Is NONEXISTENT, in silence and secrecy. A spell. A spiral. A serpents SHt round a female cycle. A whirlwind. A double helix. DNA. Electricity and elementals. Atonal noise, and brutal poetry. COIL is amorphous. Luminous and constant change. Inbuilt obSOLescence. Inbuilt Disobedience. A vehicle for obsessions. Dreamcycles in perpetual motion. We are cutthroats. Infantile. Immaculately Conceived. Dis-eased. The Virus is Khaos. The cure is Delirium.
COIL are Archangels of KHAOS. The price we pay for existence is eternal Warfare. There is a hidden coil of strength, dormant beneath the sediment of convention. Dreams lead us under the surface, over the edge, to the Delerium state. UNCHAINED. Past impositions and false universals. Reassembling into OUR order.
COIL. Who has the nerve to dream, create and kill, while the whole moves every part stands still. Our rationale is the irrationAL. Hallucination is the truth our graves are dug with. COIL is compulsion. URGE and construction. Dead letters fall from our shedding skins. Kabbala and KHAOS. Thanatos and Thelema. Archangels and Antichrists. Open and Close. Truth and Deliberation. Traps and Disorientation.
Coil exist between Here and Here. We are Janus Headed. Plural. Out of time. Out of place. Out of Spite. An antidote for when people become poisons.
COIL know how to destroy Angels. How to paralyse. Imagine the world in a bottle. We take the bottle, smash it, and open your throat with it. I warn you we are Murderous. We massacre the logical revolts. We know everything! We know one thing only. Absolute existence, absolute motion, absolute direction, absolute Truth. NOW, HERE, US.

Coil, 1983


Jhonn Balance interview, 1988 by AbyssMariner

 

Dead Can Dance, Athens, Lycabettus Theatre, 23-09-12

And the whole live

Hocico - El Último Minuto Antes De Que Tu Mundo Caiga, Out Of Line OUT 584

New album for the ultimate aggrotech band, Hocico, est. Distrito Federal 1994.

Need any more info? Hocico have already left their signature in electro-industrial/aggrotech with ALL bands of Mexico (or better say the Americas) trying to sound like them and posing the main stylistic opposition to the equivalent European style (:Wumpscut:, Suicide Commando, etc.). More trance-like and more aggressive than the more rigid and minimal European sound (which has more to share with industrial)

Hocico for 15+ years have been producing one masterpiece after another and their last album is WAY BETTER than their previous one, returning more to their roots

It is a Universal Musical Law that excellent bands keep 100% their initial character producing however more and more elaborate and perplexed soundscapes.

Hocico are bound by this law since 1994... Waiting to see them live (again...and again...and again...)

Cannibal Corpse - Torture, Metal Blade Records 3984-15080-2

Cannibal Corpse need no special introduction cause they're probably the most famous anti-commercial band worlwide, with their releases being banned or regulated in many countries. Plus they're one of the oldest players around in the game; death metal/grindcore.

This review is gonna be short. After the release of Bloodthirst I've stopped keeping track of them cause they sounded repetitive (I am a big fan of their first releases, up to "The Gallery of Suicide"; after that they played good death metal, but no songs that will stand above the mean and remember them for ever...and nothing new in terms of syntheses...)

After ten years, I decided to have a listen to their latest release.

CD in the player, press play, and I listen to this



The first thing that hits me is a completely "dirty" bass riff in the vain of the legends Macabre (one of my favourite bands). Continuing listening to the track, is what I would expect of a band that has a 25+ experience and they evolve remaining 100% original; completely different feeling from the "flat" Bloodthirst, Gore Obsessed era...

I go to their website, check the band listing, the same...good news...And there, I listen to this



There 're no more words to be said. A 100% pure US Death Metal release by one of the most important bands that this genre has spawned...

Old-School Deathsters around the world, rejoice and enjoy


ps. I think I'll have a look at their previous releases as well, you never know...

Front Line Assembly - AirMech, Metropolis Records MET 831

Briefly, the story of AirMech is this (based on the cd booklet) AirMech is a free-online game by Carbon Games. The way these guys chose to support themselves is to offer the players the opportunity to purchase things inside the game; things which do not directly affect the gameplay (good for them).

The game director, James Green, is a fan of FLA (good for him and us) and during the creation of the game he came in contact with Bill Leeb asking if he would be interested in writing a soundtrack for the game.

Leeb accepted, and here is AirMech.

Of course, this album cannot be judged as a proper FLA release but as a soundtrack by FLA. From this point of view, the album gets what is expected; 10/10

In a few words, this is a much more ambient-like release, maintaining 100% the character of FLA. I repeat, 100% FLA character. I've seen some discussions criticizing them for having some dub-step parts in a couple of their songs. Is that so annoying? I don't like dubstep, but its the way you use these elements (check Burial for example...). And of course, in that case, the mixture is amazing. Get over it and "see" music globally.

AirMech is exactly what I would expect from a professional who is asked to make a soundtrack; it must not be overwhelming and attract the attention of the gamer more than the actual game! The balance kept is amazing.



Of course we will miss two things. The extreme industrial parts which were so prominent in the FLA history and especially in their previous release, Improvised Electronic Device, and of course, the amazing lyrics and vocals of Leeb. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait a bit more for a proper FLA release.

Indeed, would someone expect a different result from one of the bands that defined electro-industrial?

FLA have only one major negative. They do not tour Europe as often. And having the pleasure to see them live during the IED tour, I have a thing to see them every year...

Really, who can be bothered of losing if he listens to such a track?

Happy 2013!!!!

Better late than never...

Happy new year to everyone!!!!! 

And a song dedicated to those not here anymore, but always next to us