Flesh Coffin – Folie à Deux CDR
Dumpsterscore Home Recordings
Andreas Brandal is the man behind the quickly rising Flesh Coffin moniker and he is taking the noise world by storm. Offering strange and unusual sounds, Flesh Coffin is easily carving out his own niche in style and sound while sticking to a classic dark and gritty aesthetic. This is what I truly love about noise.
Folie à Deux consists of two long tracks to form almost 40 minutes worth of seething distorted atmospheres, harsh noise bursts, odd textures, and sometimes almost academic …

KVIK – Feeds CDR
Brise-Cul
KVIK is an experimental/drone project hailing from Montreal. With Feeds he presents three long tracks of minimalist experimental tracks with some drone influence. The CDR is spraypainted and features some tasteful and iconic artwork to accompany the music.
Return Signals is the first track and it gradually lulls in with low bubbly synthesizer drones. These are accompanied by other noisy synth elements that become quite screechy and wanky along the way. The Hand That Feeds follows up with a repetitive feedback jolt that continues through the bulk of …

The Kali Ensemble – The Kali Ensemble CD
Phage Tapes/Turgid Animal
The Kali Ensemble is a collaboration between Michael Page (of Sky Burial, Irukandji, and the late Fire in the Head) and Pentti Dassum who I am unfamiliar with. The art on this disc immediately brings to mind a tribal feel with it’s Indian influenced artwork. Both songs clock in at over 30 minutes, and are respectively titled The Seven Tongues MK I & II.
Strangely enough the sounds that the Kali Ensemble present are much more industrial than tribal. The first track …

Gnaw Their Tongues – L’Arrivée De La Terne Mort Triomphante CD
Crucial Blast
Now my French may be a little rusty but I do believe that this album explores a few concepts centered around death. Death triumphant, songs of death, white death, and any other imaginable types of death that one could possibly want. The concept of death is classicly represented on L’Arrivée De La Terne Mort Triomphante through somber strings, bombastic chords, and valiant rhythms that fall together like a gorgeous Gothic symphony. This is neo-classical through and through.
Heavy, plodding percussion …

Nxfxtxex – Press Play And Shuffle 3″CDR
Shit Music For Shit People
Nxfxtxex, or Not For Trendy Ears, is a Danish noise project that, from what I can determine based on the material found on Press Play And Shuffle, stays more on the absurd side of the noise genre than anything. Consisting of 99 tracks within about a twenty minute time span, I’m reminded of Sissy Spacek’s self titled album in terms of format but, in terms of concept, Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s Altered States of America is what comes to mind more when …

Churner – Coffin Angel CDR
Violent Noise Atrocities
Here is my first exposure to the already prolific artist Churner. He seems to spew depraved power electronics noise from almost every orifice with this simple CDR release. The packaging is ultra minimal using simple text and stickers on a stock digipak.
The album kicks off with what is probably the most creative track here, a lonely organ tone eventually working itself into a frenzy of obliterating distortion. The rest of the album features sickened power electronics and harsh noise with screamed and distorted …

Josh Hydeman – Chiaroscuro CD
Entropic Tarot Records
Chiaroscuro is a release that is now a few years old and I believe is one that stands out among Josh Hydeman’s release catalog as he is more well known for his harsh noise and power electronics works. So it is that Chiaroscuro explores slowly evolving synthesizer compositions featuring metallic patches, organized drones, slowly moving pitched pads and even the sound of a guitar here and there.
The entire album has the atmosphere of an old creepy sci-fi film. As the album artwork is all …

Shalocins – Scrapped Mold CDR
Dumpsterscore Home Recordings
Here is my first exposure to the project Shalocins. With Scrapped Mold they present almost an hour’s worth of material in two long tracks, both recorded live. The artwork here is simple yet tasteful following the aesthetic of most Dumpsterscore releases.
The style of Shalocins is junky harsh noise with synth and pedal sounds. It’s quite generic and doesn’t really do much for me as it’s also a bit wanky with long passages of fuckery, squealing circuits, and dead radio noise. At first I thought …

Budrūs – Devyniems Rytams Auštant CD
Self Released
Here’s a heavy disc of black ambient from an unknown project to me. I have no idea where Budrūs hails from but I wouldn’t be surprised if they reside in deep dark woods, or some foggy isolated lofty mountaintop somewhere based on the earthly drones emanating from Devyniems Rytams Auštant. They merge harmonic synthesized beds with various black metal influenced vocal deliveries and some tribal percussion to form a unique sound.
Sometimes the vocals are screamed and sometimes they are whispered or spoken gruffly. The …

V/A – Dreadful Passage CD
Hipster Death Records
Here’s an ambient noise compilation that I believe consists of mostly Seattle-based artists. I know at least Joy Von Spain and Cathartech are from Seattle; I guess the rest of the artists are guilty by association. It’s a heavy release, clocking in at over 60 minutes with multiple tracks by some artists; this is a lot to take in.
Joy Von Spain & Patrick Urn collaborate for the first two tracks entitled Walking All Alone Pt. 1 & 2 which feature a weird combination of …