DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers - One Of Us / A New Dawn

Two new tracks from German witch house ambient duo Vortex Rikers prior to a full album due around Autumn time. Until then One Of Us and A New Dawn exist as ephemeral tracks floating out on their own, two doomy tracts of dark drone rich with a sense of uneasy dangerous fragility about them, a character borne from eerie modulation and half light figures that swish through the mist, the tolling bell melodies and the haunting slash and slap of beats and hi hats. Vortex Rikers are one of the most consistent and prolific acts around with a sizeable collection of releases available from their Bandcamp and Soundcloud.  These two new pieces meld into their catalogue like appartitions drifting through fog, cutting new shapes in the gloomy fabric of the bands aesthetic. Two more excellent additions to their canon.

DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers - Nullpunkt

Vortex Rikers
Nullpunkt ep
DOWNLOAD


Germany's dankest witch house producers Vortex Rikers release another free ep of blood-blackening ambient crawl. Throbbing with trance inducing cosmic energies, this new release floats more beats into the mix than previously, snatches of melodies drifting between the echoing thuds and flickers that punctuate the coalescent hum. The title translates as Zero Point, and though this isn't quite a ground zero re-approach to their sound, it's definitely an incremental shift towards ever more salient ground.  The conviction of the sounds and atmospheres, the patience with which they are played out is an ambience recalling Boards of Canada's most shadowy dreamscapes - an influence that should play a larger part in the more ambient oriented witch house artists with their own interpretations of occult and controversial themes subtly enshrounded within their oblique music.

Nearly all Vortex Rikers albums are available as free downloads from their Bandcamp, and they're very good at posting stuff on their Soundcloud, so get yr claws into them there too.

DOWNLOAD: Hunter Gatherer - Fingerprint Series

Hunter-Gatherer
Fingerprint Series
DOWNLOAD



A series of 10 tracks originally recorded and released between May and December 2010 from this intriguing electronic artist.  Futuristic with that warm analgue retroism that travels through Drexciya and Autechre to land it in the same curious cosmic space as fellow Irishmen, (and all fellow Dubliners too I think) Moths, Vision Air and Solar Bears - they say two is a coincidence and three is a movement, so dare we call out this New Wave of Irish Electronica as one of 2011's major happenings? NWIE anyone? This year's Skwee? Could be.


The album download includes individual photographic artworks for each track that go some way to illustrating the music in each track, from midnight helicopter chases to moody landscapes to church burnings.


Here's the opening jawdropper Serbia to convince you to get this. The rhythm keeps snaking over itself with a never ending supply of chrome hooks and silvery sounds, a loosely pulsing beat.

STREAM: I†† - Violent Beasts

Some more graven occult brainscrape from I††, uploaded to Soundcloud yesterday. A slow, treacly crawl through a very dark, airless space, this is about as suffocating as twine bound grim atmospherics gets. Lovely stuff.

DOWNLOAD: Beko / Clandestine Records Compilation

Beko DSL/Clandestine Records
DOWNLOAD

Another awesome team-up with BekoDSL, the French free netlabel, after their split with La Station Radar at the end of last year, here comes another, even more intimidating set of tracks. This is Beko / Clan Destine Records collaboration of dark and sinister tracks from both label's eeriest artists. If you're not already familiar with most of these artists then there's every chance there's something in here for you; these labels overlap in the shadowy recesses of dark ambient, drone and witch house; Beko providing the whiter light to Clandestine's pulsing black strobe tracks.

When the clap beats really connect and twist with the trance you get GuMMy†Be▲R!; when the vocals come in all mournful and windswept against a craggy grey backdrop you get GHXST; then the camera pulls out and you get the widescreen panoramic treatments of Among the Bones and Malibu Wands; dark ugliness erupts from the bowels of the earth under the influence of Mater Suspiria Vision and all hell blows out through the amps of Sealings, garbled up into the last-signal-on-Earth radio transmissions of Fostercare and Modern Witch. Pop music as you knew it, once – in a memory or a dream, buried, rotten, exhumed, reanimated.

Lots of ground covered in a parallel to the Mishka Grave Wave Comp, lots of new uncovered little nooks and crannies of this nebulous and loosely knit genre uncovered here.

In their own words, this compilation is:

“†HE SOUNDTRACK †O ¥R ORGASMIC DEMISE, NO†HING IS †RUE, EVER¥†HING IS PERMI††ED.”
Links to all the artists sites are included in the download

Tracklist

a1-Petra Schelm - Channel The Body
a2-oFF/Gr†LL Gr†LL - Crackedemo
a3-Among The Bone - Tunguska
a4-Gray Things - Fortune Teller
a5-Ela Orleans - Light At Dawn
a6-Skylines - @ Dawn
a7-oFF - Makeupworz
a8-Drugs For Drunks - DZLIGHT (intstrumental)
a9-GHXST - IXNYC
a10-Sealings - Two Cups
a11-King Dude - Never Let You Go

b1-Central Asian Nervous Systems - Almost Dead
b2-GuMMy†Be∆R! - False Prophets
b3-F8STERCARE - Snowdragon
b4-Mater Suspiria Vision - The Trip Graden Of El Diablo
b5-Gr†LL Gr†LL - Organ Sunday
b6-Meddicine - Some Thing You Knew Before
b7-Modern Witch - Running
b8-I†† - Chambre Ardente Affair†
b9-Party Trash - Alone
b10-Nattymari - K1LL K1LL
b11-Malibu Wands - Sleep With Demons

DOWNLOAD: Vortex Rikers – Wake Up And Smell The Ashes

Vortex Rikers

Wake Up And Smell The AshesAMDISCS
DOWNLOAD

One of the most interesting groups to have emerged from the movement of desolate electronics, Vortex Rikers drop their third release and it's a great one.  AMDISCS have offered up another arresting take on a haunting yet mechanically visceral sound, similar to Dream Boat in the bands abilities to really convey a sense of tense atmosphere and cinematic narrative over short spaces of time.  Named after the spaceship that crashes in a first-person shooter they owe it to themselves to produce an atmosphere quickly, and the opening bars of A False Prophet conjure images of industrial gothic vistas, ghostly metropolises overseen by spectral caretakers; on earthm, in Space; the origin of their sounds is kept ambiguous; there's a cosmic drift to the tracks nudged into existance by sparse yet motorik beats, the upward motion of the tracks inducing a euphoria that gently coalesces amongst the grey, earthy sense that you can roll around in the thick dirt of the drone. The final We Live As We Dream pushes down on the drums that much harder and draws the record to climax, but neither stellar nor tera firma potential is pushed too hard leaving the ultimate experience an entirely subjective one that makes these six tracks all the more compelling.

Tracklist

01 A False Prophet

02 Wake Up And Smell The Ashes

03 Vanishing Point

04 Hope Rhymes With Despair

05 Void

06 We Live As We Dream 

UKBMW VIII: Luggaldimerankia

In 2006 Zithuan Labyrinth began as the one-man band of Nostalggia, releasing seven demos worth of primitive necrosadistic noise explorations before adding members and expanding to Luggaldimerankia. Between 2006 and 2008 several ultra raw demos were released in a handful of copies each, then in late 2008 the line up was joined by Plague on vocals and Zithuan Labyrinth became Luggaldimerankia – a black metal inflected noise band of psychological and anti-cosmic themes. Early 2010 saw the first full Luggaldimerankia recorded demo, Within The Very Depths Of Depravity, and again, kept it release to almost single figures. Over the following months several further demos were recorded with suitably necro-deviant oriented musicians as well as a split cassette release with the awesomely named ambient/drone project Black Goatskin Robe on Black Blister Worship Productions.  

The MySpace has been reasonably active; after posting a 10-download limited track titled Sacrament from their demo Decaying Chamber Session (which they snuck into a military training ground to record in an abandoned bunker) they posted another song on MySpace from their impending debut album Swallowing Shapeless Echoes Of Eternal Despair entitled Primitive Baptismal Torture Rite Amidst Swollen Bark Of Dead Yew.  I recently wrote about their latest release on the blog, the short bursts of experimental harsh ambient titled Black Vomiting Mass, which is available to download for free.

Luggaldimerankia are the kind of band for whom you use the word 'song' very loosely - they are the UK equivalent to WOLD in texture and primitive energy (a Wold even being an English term for a series of inland limestone hills, geography A-level fans!).  Both bands share in their sound, a similar coruscating torrent of feral dissonance, though in Luggaldimerankia this is less utterly inhospitable than WOLD's Canadian wilderness; the milder climates of England tending more toward an upward stargazing ritual and downward crepuscular filth, rather than the pure and thorough cleansing the sub-zero temperatures induce.


I've posted the track Inducing The Deepest Core of Morbidity from Within The Very Depths of Depravity: the bestial cover art is certainly more Noise than Black Metal, illustrating the crossover this band embody, and censored for the sensitive souls (....or anyone really!) over at YouTube.

REVIEW: I†† - The Lesser Keys

I††
The Lesser Keys

Tundra Dubs

The Lesser Keys is a six track ep of undulating dark ambient soundscape explorations from an artist I keep offering up to you, and one which you should be biting in to, released on rapidly up and coming Berkely, California based label Tundra Dubs. Each is a relatively brief excursion into a field of tone experimentation which greater track lengths could have benefited to flesh out each one's nuances. But that's because I'm a patient person. Other people might find the sub-3 minute lengths just enough to get the message clearly from each. I would quite like to have heard these thematically similar pieces melded together to create a more seamless 16 minutes – there's a progression across all of them, a definite sense of moving deeper into the middle of something, then back out again. 

The album title is reference to a 17th Century text on magickal spells and conjurations, written by King Solomon himself, but I find dispensing with the more arcane bacground and workign with this in a realtime, urban environment work even better at instilling a sense of suspense and atmposhere than overlaying it with doomy sorcery.  The album opens with a metallic sucking hum, a rapid pressure drop, to reveal a swirling cable of gently fuzzing static that gives way to D▲RKST▲R; an airier, less dense version of the first that allows an obfuscated glimpse of a beats, dark shapes moving amongst even darker undergrowth. They ripple and expand in such a way that their effect is less a music percussive propulsion and more a visual trick – bodies ghosting about in the peripheries of your vision, indistinct forms scuttling around. Creepy stuff. The third track is the longest, titled Ph▲sing it does just that, slowly unveiling a modulated phaser tone that unfurls into several strands of sound, some high pitched keening tones that fly into the upper reaches of the sonisphere, while others pitch down and rough themselves under a bed of distortion, burying deep into the bass elements of the track, their presence felt thereafter as waves of throbbing push to the surface. This bass throb continues into the next track that piles more distortion on to them, bending them at a harsher angle into a more triangular waveform with peaks and troughs, producing an eerie polyrhythmic ebb and flow. Then comes a snatch of reality, a clear beat, a fracture in the trance and a frightening moment of clarity. A proper song title: Above a Convenience Store. Not just reality here, but mundanity, the true essence of reality. It's the most kinetically active track of the ep, some kind of voice can be heard, there's a semblance of melody forming amongst the shifting rhythms, the beat, bass and shadow clap deflecting back off the curves of the lower registers. The final track, all high pitched at first. Discordant shrieking, burbling, computer chatter. The most absent of humanity in it's hollow coldness, after the comparative heightened passions of the track preceding it, it snatches any sense of hope away in the cruellest of denouements.

There is so much going on in such a short space of time across this album, it's a tiny vignetted frame of a complicated bigger picture that I'm almost tempted to retract my requests for a longer form of it because it works so well. I'm hoping to hear great things in the future from this artist, transcending several genres, carving out a very clearly defined musical environment for themselves and really elaborating on all the themes they touch on here.

Buy it now from Tundra Dub's Bandcamp page for an absurdly cheap $1.99

ORDER 

DOWNLOAD: Gone In 60 Seconds (A Collection of Short Songs From Friends & Devotees of I Heart Noise)

Gone In 60 Seconds 

(A Collection of Short Songs From Friends & Devotees of I Heart Noise)

DOWNLOAD

Gone In 60 Seconds is a huge free-download compilation of over 40 micro-tracks released by one of the best Noise blogs out there - I Heart Noise. This album contains a wealth of styles of music, not just blasts of grinding death distortion - though of course there is plenty of that – there’s an almost cartographically thorough inclusion of everything across the noise landscape with contributions including neo-folk, hardcore, dark ambient, industrial and spoken word.  Most of the tracks were specially recorded for this compilation through invitation and open submission; no idea how many submissions they received but the quality of the tracks on this is consistently great, the only unpositive thing I could take away from this is some artificially abrupt sounding editing that I suspect is due to keeping tracks within the 60 second limit. There is a lot of punky hardcore which I’m not a massive fan of but these only last for 60 seconds or less and that I can take because they make for good punctuation. I am much more familiar with the Noise vernacular and there’s a depth and immediate submersion in atmosphere in the tracks of Rectum, Guanoman, and Drone Forest; other standout moments include the minimal ambient glitch from Collapse Under The Empire; absurd gospel pop metal from Down I Go and their operatic cousin FEASTofFETUS.

It will take you longer to read this that to listen to them yourself, so you may as well get on it.