Partial Fushitsusha Discography

 "Listeners coming from a rock orientation who are curious about Japanese monster guitarist Keiji Haino and his power trio Fushitsusha would be well-advised to begin their investigations with this disc. Whereas the group is normally (and, arguably, at its best) a sprawling, just barely in control affair, the performances on this release have a concision and brute strength that would be the envy of many a psychedelic thrash band. Several very short tracks have something in common with the brutal mini-massacres of Zorn's Naked City, while the longer pieces are about as close as Haino has come to the work of musicians like Casper Brötzmann or Justin Broadrick. The bass and drums, unlike on some other Fushitsusha albums, are mixed at an equal level with the guitar, and tend to lock into robust grooves, providing a more stable than usual platform for Haino's stratospheric (though resolutely non-pyrotechnic) explorations. But this band still tears most of its competition to shreds in terms of both inspiration and sheer abandon, making The Caution Appears both a fine, if severe, introduction as well as a welcome addition to the Fushitsusha catalog that longtime fans will savor. Track titles, all instrumental, are not listed."

Caution Appears

I Saw It!

Origin's Hesitation

Live 1

All flac btw.

Midori - Sayonara Goto-San + bonus DVD

Live DVD recording of Midori's grand final show at at Tokyo LIQUIDROOM on December 30, 2010.

;.;

Bonus (PV COLLECTION)

High Rise - Psychedelic Speed Freaks Live 1986 DVD

1

2

3

toe - RGBDVD

t

Hijokaidan - Legendary Live Collection Of Hijokaidan Vol. 5 DVD

Japanese noise band formed in Kyoto in 1979 by Jojo Hiroshige and Naoki Zushi. They released their first LP「蔵六の奇病」(Zouroku No Kibyou) on Unbalance in 1982, and this DVD is the live release party for that first LP.

Blood everywhere

Damsel - Distressed

 "For the past few years, avant-jazz legend Nels Cline (Wilco, Thurston Moore, The Geraldine Fibbers) and omnipresent beat freak Zach Hill (Hella, The Ladies, Team Sleep) have been waiting for an opportunity to spend a few hours making noise. When Cline joined Wilco full-time and Hill started The Ladies with Pinback's Rob Crow, the dream seemed increasingly unlikely. And by the time Hill's full-time gig as half of Hella saw him touring arenas with modern rock staples like System of a Down, the dream seemed dead. But through a bit of careful planning and a whole lot of serendipity, Wilco had a day off in Chicago the same day that Hill was in town. Recorded and mixed in one day at Semaphore Studios in Chicago, IL, the four pieces on "Distressed" are entirely improvised, with a little post-production editing courtesy of Cline's former Geraldine Fibbers partner, Carla Bozulich. Sitting somewhere between the most abstract freak-outs of Wilco's more recent material and the looser, more minimalist moments of Hella, Damsel exhibits a surprising amount of control over its chaos."

DD

Kevin Drumm & Tom Smith

 "Using Kevin's recent Obstacles double set as its thematic starting point, Mud posits the recent, still-unfolding Hungarian ecological catastrophe as a slowly gurgling metaphor for all the irrevocably fucked-up shit going on around us. (Yes, it's political.) Re-edited and remixed from KD's original Obstacles masters by Tom, who also added multiple layers of splintered vocals to re-frame the narrative."

"Kevin Drumm is an experimental musician based in Chicago, USA. Emerging from the city's improvised music scene, in the 1990s he became one the world's pre-eminent prepared guitar players.
Drumm's work expanded to include electroacoustic compositions and live electronic music made with laptop computers and analog modular synthesizers. He has collaborated with many artists working in similar fields, including Japanese guitarist Taku Sugimoto, multi-instrumentalist and producer Jim O'Rourke, and many European improvisers such as Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and German trumpeter Axel Dörner. He has also worked with the artist group Simparch, composing a piece for their installation Spec, shown at Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany and at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. Drumm has also worked with saxophonist Ken Vandermark's Territory Band, which brings together American and Eurpoean players who work in both jazz and free improvisation.
Drumm's work draws upon musique concrete, electronic sound, improvisation, heavy metal, and noise music, and has proved difficult to categorize. His solo and collaborative work ranges from challenging improvisations, ambient textures, and blistering walls of sound. Musical influences include Iron Maiden, Ralf Wehowsky, and The New Blockaders."

Reconquer Sleep

Mud Keeps

Mellow Grave - Smoke Filled the Room, We Slept

MG

Witch House that doesn't suck.
Also flac is gonna be sparse for a while since I have little space left. V0 for most atm.

Up-Tight Partial Discography

 "Black-clad and with an ominous aura created by their distorted guitar epics,burnt-out ballads and raucous mantric jam,up-tight are seriously not to be messed with.Heading up the second generation of Japanese pscyedelic rock acts (following on from Fushitusha,Kosokuya and Shizuka)they’re one of the best live groups in Japan.
As you might expect from their name,there’s a chiselled intensity to their playing which displays some startling post Velvets stances.With the movwa to lay down spontaneusly loose, acid-fried and drugged garage psche jam of hypntoic guitar squall, and a line in impassioned and fathomless vocals that are capable of kicking you right in the gut, up-tight have a mesmeric feel to them, unmatched by any peers.
—-From Program Of INSTAL’05 Festival(Glasgow)—-

Blending brutalised tripping improv freak-outs with cosmic induced melodic soft psyche Up-Tight arguably provide a structurally sound proposition that’s rooted heavily in Western reference points so that the influence of heroes Velvet Underground are keenly apparent bleeding as they do into elements of early Floyd, Sabbath and Spacemen 3.
—-From Review On Losing Today(UK)—-

The dark shadows cast by this underground Tokyo psych trio have been getting longer of late. We’ve had two cds from them, both of ‘em well-received by the AQ community (the excellent US release Five Psychedelic Pieces on Static Records, and then the maybe even better Lucrezia on Japan’s Alchemy label), and some of us here were also just lucky enough to get to witness the power and intensity of Up-Tight’s live show when they played in San Francisco quite recently, bringing their melanchoic vox, mantric drum beating, rigid bass pulsations, and guitar-heavy sadness and squall to the tight confines of the Hemlock. As displayed there, Up-Tight’s sunglasses-at-night music is aligned with the likes of current Tokyo scene brethren LSD-March in worship of ’70s Japanese distorto-psych legends Les Rallizes Denudes, and that’s nothin’ but a good thing. So another new Up-Tight document is cause for excitement.
—-From Review On Aquarius Records(USA) —-

Hamamatu-besed three piece psych group with history dating back to 1992. The current line-up is original memberAoki(vo,g) Ogata(b) and Shirahata(ds) The Ghost Of The Velvet Underground, Rallizes ,and Amon Duul loom large over there their Personal feedback song-distruction universe
—-From Japanese Independent music(Sonore:France)—-

Up-Tight are a noxious young trio from Tokyo, all acolytes of the legendary Japanese psych group Les Rallizes Denudes, who augment their sound with crushing, Sabbath-styled dynamics, earsplitting acid leads and beautiful Velvets-inspired ballads. If song structures are mostly kept loose, allowingfor lots of noisy improvisation, generarlly the disc is anchored by heavy riffs. Just when you thought you’d got to grips with Tokyo’s paradigm destroying psych scene,this one hits like a sucker punch.
—-From Review On Wire(UK) —-"

Sweet Sister

Five Pieces

Early Years

Lucrezia

Joe Hisaishi - 25 Years of Studio Ghibli Concert (Live at the Budokan)

 "Here is a release of the 25 Year Concert in Budokan, dedicated to collaborative work of Joe Hisaishi and Studio Ghibli, conducted by the maestro himself. With New Japan Philharmonic World Dream Orchestra, Ritsuyukai Choir, The Little Singers of TOKYO and many more. On August 4th and 5th, the event what was originally planned to be two performances turned into three to meet the raving demands of those couldn’t get get tickets in time. The event featured performances by Hisaishi, a 200 piece orchestra, and a 400 piece choir."

Yo Yeah

Wheels Within Wheels & Panopticon - Wheels Within Wheels/Panopticon II

Dat Cascadian BM

FLACCCC

Nightmares (Deathpile + Bloodyminded + Luasa Raelon) - Nightmares Limited Tour 2009 CD

 [pic unrelated]

"Nightmares is a new synth trio formed by Jonathan Canady, David Reed, and Mark Solotroff. Canady is known for his dark analog synth fueled solo project, Angel of Decay, while power-electronics fans know him for his truly brutal band, Deathpile...Reed and Solotroff previously toured the Midwest together in October 2007. Most recently, the three members of Nightmares all found themselves on the landmark "Wierd Compilation Volume II : Analogue Electronic Music 2008" – a four LP set that was released by BLOODYMINDED member Pieter Schoolwerth, on his New York-based Wierd Records imprint. Canady appeared as Angel of Decay, Reed as Envenomist, and Solotroff – with BLOODYMINDED and The Fortieth Day member, Isidro Reyes – as A Vague Disquiet. With their long history of dark analog synth music, the three members of Nightmares have united to develop their own type of aural sleep disruption, characterized by frightening psychological content and aiming to provoke a strong feeling of imminent physical danger and a sensation of being trapped or suffocated."

NF

Enochian Crescent - Telocvovim

"It seems to me that Enochian Crescent is nowhere near as well-known as I’ve thought them to be. Could be a simple case of faulty perspective, yes, but at the very least I believe they should be familiar to far more people than they are at the moment. A band that can write consistently good music is hard to find, a black metal band doing the same even harder and, apparently, there’s a level of seriousness in what they’re doing; even this is not too common at all. I wouldn’t say their debut ‘Telocvovim’ is necessarily an album you need, but it is one you need to hear at least once.

When it comes to the music alone, black metal probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind – once you get past the opening track ‘Kun Ihmisliha Itki’, that is. Honestly, when I first listened to this I thought I had the wrong album. In terms of both production and music, that track is as close to raw black metal as this band has ever been or (hopefully) ever will be. After that however, I could easily label the music death metal for the most part if it wasn’t for the band’s lyrics and image. Some ten years ago Old Man’s Child used to be a frequent comparison for precisely this reason. The guitars lead the way with relatively simple riffs that offer the entire scope of both styles and tempos imaginable in this context. We have melodic technicality, down-tempo heaviness, fast palm muted double picking and rhythmically catchy near-rock grooves, but almost none of “standard” black metal (if we’re thinking second wave Norwegian). In any case, all of it does manage to sound like black metal. This obviously has much to do with Wrath’s vocal delivery: varied as it is, the voice he mainly uses is a raw but rather typical high shriek.

As for which bands should be named in this review for the purpose of musical reference, well – just pick any. If we insist on black metal, the largely melodic overall style could lead to Immortal or Dissection, though both are a bit far-fetched otherwise. On the other hand, guitarist and songwriter Victor has often stated that he is heavily influenced by traditional heavy metal; this is very easy to believe, if you take note of the simplicity of rhythms. The guitars sound very natural in this sense and are easy to absorb instantly. Besides that, all I can think of is that ‘Telocvovim’ certainly doesn’t scream “1997!!!”; if anything, the album sounds very contemporary, ahead of its time, even. I hear riffs similar to these on Emperor’s ‘IX Equilibrium’, for example, as well as on many modern blackened death metal albums. Another interesting thing to notice is a slight “gothic” element – the surprisingly subtle use of keyboards, clean guitars and (even!) clean vocals on tracks like ‘Amma I Piad Sa Madriiax’ and ‘A Dream of...’ is just about exactly what Moonspell and others could do and have done. This can, of course, be nothing more than the “1997” of this album, so to speak.

What I enjoy very much is that, even though the music is quite simple, there are some nice little tricks in songwriting to keep things interesting. Also, not all simple music is this memorable. The band knows how to put two riffs together and turn them into an enjoyable passage. At times a tempo change can sound awkward and literally all tracks end more or less abruptly, but we are talking about a debut album, after all. I don’t think anyone would expect perfection. What I don’t like, however, are the guitar solos. Yes, solos. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with solos in black metal as long as they’re done well – here, the playing is unbelievably sloppy and I doubt the actual notes were thought about at all. Sounds like bad improvisation to these ears. Back on the plus side, the drumming is absolutely flawless. Kai Hahto of Rotten Sound and Wintersun fame played on the album, and couldn’t have done a better job. Some nice little tricks from him, too, and a genuinely solid performance. Almost too good, actually: there are times when other band members have problems keeping up with him.

Overall, ‘Telocvovim’ is as solid an album as you’ll ever find. There are no notable mistakes or low points as far as individual songs go, and the music is versatile enough not to require “hits” either. ‘Crescentian’ and ‘A Wolf Among Sheep’ are ones I enjoy for their melodies and “groove”, respectively, but there’s no reason to dislike any of the others. I will say, however, that placing the aforementioned gothic influences in the mid-section and ending the album with simple and effective riff monsters is a very good idea indeed. Giving the listener a good LAST impression, textbook example.

Ever since the release of this album, Enochian Crescent have been dubbed “experimental” and “innovative”, even “progressive” – I honestly don’t see a reason for using words like these. In the context of second wave black metal (not to mention the “mainstream” black metal it evolved to) it is understandable to an extent, but one doesn’t have to know much about other genres to notice where their music comes from. What does set them apart from most other bands is that they have developed a style of their own simply by merging enough different elements together. ‘Telocvovim’ was and is the first showcase of this and as such, very impressive indeed. From the start, the band knew exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. The album is worth a listen to just about any metal fan – whether you’ll like it is a matter of personal taste, but everyone should be able to at least appreciate the effort. A modern classic, if I know of any."

ETC

Frank Bretschneider - Rhythm

"Frank Bretschneider takes his, never simple, but all the more heartfelt relationship to rhythm and it’s complexity, to an intense inventory and, this time, works less out of suspenseful abstract sounds, than out of grooves. the terseness and precision of previous works remains, as well as a preference for high-voltage sounds halfway between noise and tone. new is the assemblage of the material. a combination of programming, composition and construction, which draws a clear distinction to his preferred loop-based work on foregone albums, is connected with bretschneider's very idiosyncratic aesthetic of digital sound: controlled and objective. the whole follows simple mechanical states: on/off, forward/backward, up/down, slow/fast, loud/quiet, dull/brilliant, soft/hard and is characterized by the absence of any romanticism. still this return to the elementary, the fundamental, does not diminish the music to dance-floor functionality, instead bretschneider always stays emphatically musical and manages to generate sophisticated and complex rhythm-structures, which respectively induce minimal deviations in frequency and timing relationships to generate a surplus of funk.

In all, rhythm is probably bretschneider’s most direct, clear and concentrated work yet."

FB

Kashiwa Daisuke - 88

"He has thrown out his usual delicate programming and audio editing, and challenged himself to express music via the piano's 88 keys.
The resulting album has an abundance of tranquil harmony and dynamic melody."

Flac

Weltecho Box

 "The artistic emancipation of noise in the sense of organised sound effects was achieved as early as 1913. At least since the technological development of sampling one can not think of popular music without the notion of organised noise. At four exhibitions held at the Chemnitz gallery A»VoxxxA« between April and September 2002 musicians experimented with electronically generated tones in the context of an artistic space. So unsynchronised film projectors (Weltecho was also the name of a former cinema in Chemnitz) for example created rhythmic structures for sound oscillations."

Box

Wolfgang Voigt - 20 Minuten Gas Im November / 20' To 2000.November

 "Of all the releases in raster-noton's "20' to 2000"-series this is the most magic and touching one. a twenty-minute long track of shifting scapes, calm, warm and friendly, dub beyond dub, ambient beyond ambient. whatever wolfgang voigt touches, in his hands it reaches the sky. in sound and quality this "20 minuten gas im november" are beside basic channel."

WG

Komet - Manhatten / 20' To 2000. January

"Significant for the close interaction between experimental forms of music, art and science label noton produced a new series of 12 "20 minutes" cds. the artists`concept behind is the creation of a piece for the last 20 minutes of the year 1999 as a cutting edge of the past century.

20`to2000 is a monthly magazine-like cd released for the last year of the millenium. in the 12 issues 12 artist were invited to transform their ideas - possibly a manifest of the millenium - designed for the series using new technologies and characteristic translucent materials of noton."

Comet

Abandoner & Angel of Decay (Deathpile) - Ghostspeak

[pic unrelated]

Good stuff. Get.

AAD

RST - Other Machines

 "Andrew Moon aka RST was one of the most mysterious and enigmatic of New Zealand's hypnotic avant/drone artists working in the 90s when he cut a memorable album for Ecstatic Peace alongside a bunch of impossible to locate lathes and a monster of formless gobble for Corpus Hermeticum. Then he pretty much dropped off the map. Other Machines marks his triumphant return with three discs - named simply "Worlds", "Ages" and "Earth" - that combine luminous, black hole-scale Kosmiche-Industrial drones with plenty of cranky avant detail, singing pick-up roars and the kind of arcing tone work that sound like slow motion sunspots leaping from the white-hot flesh of your brain. Moon really gets *inside* the drone, exposing all the complex crosswires, short-circuiting chatter and ferocious microtonal violence that combine in smears of atom-smashing tension in order to create these endless vistas of light. Great to have him back - highly recommended."

Moonspeak

Enochian Crescent - Omega Telocvovim

 "I've never heard much about Enochian Crescent when talking with other metal fans, other than their infamous stage show which made Emperor fear to go on. Before this album I'd expected just another one of those "kvlt az fvck" bands from the Northern Wastes with horrible production and little skill. Totally wrong. Enochian Crescent has got to be one of the most accomplished black metal bands I've ever heard. You could almost even call their stylings technical, if not for the more experimental parts of Omega Telocvovim. They are certainly a very unique band, but if someone were to ask me to compare their sound to that of another group I might say they sound a bit like Borknagar. Take away the synths, add some really evil shrieks by a fucking madman, clean vocals as insane as Arcturus, and more straight ahead black metal riffs with a touch of death metal. I realize this description is weak, but Enochian Crescent is by no means a typical black metal band."

O

Rehberg & Schmickler - USA

 "This latest is from Mego overlord Peter Rehberg and his old mucker Marcus Schmickler; it's an LP capturing audio from two incendiary live performances they gave as R/S at New York's No Fun Fest and Chicago's Lampo in 2009. Extreme electronic music is the order of the day, manna from heaven for fans of classic Pita, Whitehouse at their most innovative and the outer limits of the Keith Fullerton Whitman canon, but with bass weight to balance its needling treble assault. As ever with the work of these peerless pros, the intense digital barrage masks a huge wealth of sonic detail and nuance both incidental and deliberate; occasionally the fire subsides and you can glimpse an endoskeleton of carefully moulded drone and near-techno pulsation. Mastered and cut at Berlin's Dubplates+Mastering, limited to 500 copies and housed in fancy-pants screenprinted and PVC-sleeved artwork, this is vital, vital stuff."

R/S

Pretend - Bones in the Soil, Rust in the Oil

"It’s no overstatement to say that ‘Bones In The Soil, Rust In The Oil’, the debut album of LA four piece Pretend, is one of our favourite albums in quite a while (or one of this reviewers’, at least). Delicate, sprawling, musically exquisite, this is a record that’s near impossible to categorise, a haunting, jarring mix of alt-rock instrumentation, post-rock dynamics, and the unbound creativity of jazz that simply has to be heard. Weighing in at over seventy minutes, Pretend have made no commercial concessions here, their songs, such as the otherworldly ‘Guided Spirits – Guided Souls’ uplifting ‘Legs To Walk Us, To Drop Us,’ and stripped back ‘Alive In The Tone’, proving utterly spellbinding on first listen, and second, and third, and...

Pretend’s dreamy, mesmeric sound, complete with whispered, minimalistic vocals, will likely prove an acquired taste, but those who’ve enjoyed recent releases from Shelsmusic should definitely make picking this up a priority. Originally released last year, ‘Bones...’ worldwide re-release is something to celebrate; we can only hope that more adventurous listeners will fall under its beguiling charms... This is like the soundtrack to the best art movie never made, or a doomed romance set under languorous gray clouds. Beautifully imperfect, this is a great debut by anyone’s estimation, and hails a fascinating new voice in the worldwide avant-garde."

SBP

Kerretta - Vilayer

 "There is a fine line to be ridden in more “traditional” instrumental rock (traditional referring to the word rock, and not instrumental), between heavy riffage for the sake of heavy riffage, and lite-rocks-without-the-vox. I use the word traditional hesitantly, because there is no true dejá vu to be found in Kerretta’s debut full length. Hailing from New Zealand, land of former Midium label-mates Jakob, Kerretta’s Vilayer delivers a freight train of spacious, progressive, heavily fleshed-out sonic landscapes – perhaps inspired by the effulgence of New Zealand’s natural architecture and topography. Opener “Sleepers” induces the development of anything but, what with its stadium-proportioned projections onto the eardrum, but Kerretta begin to wax ambient during interior passages on “The Secret Is Momentum”  and “White Lie.” We haven’t seen such prowess and power emerge from this area of the world since Australia’s Meniscus brought us Absence of I in 2007, and Kerretta have even surpassed last year’s release Aura from Poland’s Tides From Nebula on the boot-quaking heaviness spectrum. Closer “Bone Amber Reigns” is a perfect 9+ minute summary to the album, encapsulating the very readily-evident maturity and restraint Kerretta have skillfully employed."

K

Wild Dogs In Winter - Homba

"Wild Dogs In Winter make slow-burning, intense, saddening music. Their sparse guitars, minimal percussion and organs combine with aching vocals and caustic lyrics. With a self-released debut E.P in late 2008, the band have moved on from the basement studio project it began as, into a live band. With various comparisons to A Silver Mount Zion and Sigur Ros, 2009 was spent touring and writing dark, haunting songs for their debut album in 2010.

Wild Dogs In Winter recorded their debut album Homba in home studios during the winter of 2009-10. It’s a work of remarkable beauty and maturity, and will doubtless engender comparisons to such outsider UK indie heroes as Hood, Crescent and Arab Strap. As with the work of these bands, it derives tension and melancholy from the juxtaposition of the rural and the urban: beautiful pastoral guitar lines are imbued with undercurrents of quiet menace through use of scrabbling electronic scree and grainy, heavily-processed synth textures."

WDW

Cyclo. - id

 "A decade since its inception, Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai are relaunching their collaborative project, cyclo., a project that focuses on the visualisation of sound and seeks to create a new hybrid of visual art and music.

Both leading electronic composers/artists from Japan and Germany respectively, Ikeda and Nicolai release their second album, that will later be followed by a publication with an extensive presentation of their visuals.

Since the beginning of the cyclo. project, the artists have developed a database of sounds composed to produce visual responses when analysed in real time with the help of stereo image monitoring equipment. Phase and amplitude of stereo signals can be illustrated graphically: the audio elements are constructed through the minute editing of frequencies (often beyond the physical range of human hearing) and selected by the artists for their visual characteristics when analysed. Through processes of composition, editing and experiment, cyclo. is amassing an ‘infinity index’ of sound fragments.

In building this archive, Ikeda and Nicolai transcend the usual dynamic whereby image acts merely as a functional accompaniment to sound. Instead, the audio element in the process is subservient to the desire and appetite of the image.

This record purposefully remains unmastered, in order to retain the waveforms as originally visualized through an XY phase scope. For listening, please do not convert the tracks into a compressed format such as mp3."

CY

The program to see it.

Maher Shalal Hash Baz - Blues Du Jour

"'Blues Du Jour' is the gorgeous new album by Japanese elemental visionaries Maher Shalal Hash Baz featuring some of their warmest and most accessible music to date. Tori Kudo's songs and sketches often recall the quirkiness of the Incredible String Band or the English nursery rhyme pastoralism of Syd Barrett. From the avant-pop masterpiece 'Open Field' to the bossa nova of 'Post Ofiice', this is a playful album that bursts with creativity. This 41 track album is Maher Shalal Hash Baz's first new collection since their legendary opus, 'Return Visit To Rock Mass' - one of the most collectable Japanese albums of all time."

MSHB

Incapacitants & Pain Jerk - Live at the No Fun Fest 2007

 "Live document recording the appearances of these two Japanoise monsters in New York City for No Fun Fest 2007. Pain Jerk puts on an exceedingly harsh, high-end set while Incapacitants put on an especially energetic, over-the-top performance with an extra helping of frenzied vocals. Pain Jerk tends to drag at times, but the Incapacitants piece is one of the finest they've recorded."

MFW

Jasper TX - The Black Sun Transmissions

"It has been two years since we were last treated to a full-length release from Jasper TX and Sweden’s Dag Rosenqvist’s return is marked by a sound evolved and matured into something yet more complex and challenging than before…

‘The Black Sun Transmissions’ opens with Signals Through Wood & Dust and the piece features a collection of sounds which are sculpted into feedback-laden ambience. The result is menacing and imbued with a sense of foreboding, serving to set the scene before ultimately closing with morse code and radio static, conjuring images of a post-apocalyptic survivor searching for hope in a world ruined. This apocalyptic aesthetic carries on into following track Weight of Days, which sees Rosenqvist ratchet the songwriting up a notch to deliver a stunning composed number defined by beautifully measured strings and refrains.

All I Could Never Be begins slowly and Rosenqvist chooses to highlight a melancholic aspect to his art. A fascinating counterpoint to his searing noise, it shows the artists’ varied tonal palette. The album’s finest moment however comes with the closing number White Birds. After the powerful melancholia and despair experienced on The Black Sun Transmissions thus far, the beauty of the piece seems accentuated and the listener drinks in the plaintive frailty as a thirsty traveller falls upon an oasis, a fine ending to this accomplished work and leaving the listener wanting more.

Rosenqvist has previously expressed frustration with the state of the current music business and the length of time taken for this album to come out, but perhaps he will garner some small comfort with offering a work as strong as ‘The Black Sun Transmissions’ into the world. Though in no way meant to belittle Rosenqvist’s already impressive and varied back catalogue, this release seems to suggest that the artist has grown even more accomplished and inspired as of late and, rather than finding a niche to fit into, has created his own."

TX

Johnnytwentythree - JXXIII

" Cincinnati quintet Johnnytwentythree, claimed to be taken from the works of William S. Burroughs but to me will always be the serial rapist portrayed by Danny Trejo in Con Air, are, pardon the cliché, a breath of fresh air for the ever-so-cloned so-called ‘epic post-rock’ genre. Glittering guitar work with every necessary pedal on queue, visceral crashes from giant cymbals, and the all-important staple of strings do not fall short of the likes of another quintet, Yndi Halda. JXIII is thoughtfully composed throughout, processing a series of constantly evolving rhythms which always remain faithful to its adopted style while retaining an element of aesthetic desirability. Notwithstanding the tattered nature of this territory, Johnnytwentythree dexterously tread it, unafraid to brandish its starkly familiar influences. What results is a solid hour of bliss where even the unnecessary roman numeric of what is otherwise effectively a self-title is not devoid of charm."

XXX