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