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DECAYCAST Reviews: BIG DRUM IN THE SKY RELIGION “Hope In Hell” (Self Released, 2018)

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DECAYCAST Reviews: BIG DRUM IN THE SKY RELIGION “Hope In Hell” (Self released, 2018)

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Dozens and dozens and dozens of short audio collage snippets sampling cult preachers, hip hop intros, classical music, dust to digital style folk, guitar strummed outros, zealots, bigots, activists, tv personalities, “sickness in my community”  “suffering is the given” “{why do we suffer” bleeds into the funk arpeggiated bass line. Destroy god, destroy humanity, destroy politics and see what pops out the other end with a sonic audio accident slamming everything together with muscle, yet nuanced ease so to speak.

 

Pulling from John Oswald’s “Plunderphonics” and Negativland’s “Christianity Is Stupid”, “Hope In  Hell” blasts short, dense, collage critique splatter offerings of  religious and capitalistic confusion, alienation, and so much more and less., In  terms of sound art/collage, these  short works are dense, impactful, complex sonic vignettes into a  twisted world of  confusion and alienation, and well,  philosophical blindness. Some of  the  stronger works on this shuffle friendly journey through cut and paste absurdity are “God’s People” > “Transformation Energy” > “Make Me Present”.  This work oscillates between comedy, critique, and absurdist / dada tendencies to create a dense, dark, cut and glued critique of world’s interpretations of the unknown. Dense, fun, well done and sonically interesting collage work.  “The Big Drum In The Sky Religion is a shape-shifting confederacy of dream wanderers, spirit warriors, entheogen casualties and miscreants assembled for the purpose of altering the collective unconsciousness and bringing about the total Ecstatic Awakening of All Sentient Beings and Union of the All and the One through the use of polyrhythms, fuzzboxes and senseless banjo abuse. Dilute! Dilute! OM“

 

DECAYCAST Reviews: DAHB “VISIONS FROM AN ASTRAL CORE” (2018)

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DECAYCAST Reviews: DAHB “VISIONS FROM AN ASTRAL CORE”

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Dahb hails from Philadelphia and plays mid-tempo, angular, rhythmically complex,  thrashing metal/metal core. At times operating more in the black metal style before quickly and swiftly switching the riffs and focus for a more angular, choppy melodic  style. The vocals are typical of the genre, somewhere between yelling and anguished screams, they sit atop the drums and shredding guitar perfectly. A standout aspect of “Visions from an Astral Core” is the complex rhythmic relationships between the drums and guitars, both firing in oppositional machine gun like rhythms, with dissonant, archaic strums atop the chopping riffs and blasting, rapid fire drums.  The track slowly turns into an abstract, atmospheric improvisation but Dahb never loses its poise or complex style. The improvised tail provides a nice crescendo to the track showcasing both their technical prowess as well as their ear to listen. Dahb’s strength lies within this compositionally and rhythmically complicated dynamic, giving them a heavy, unique sound all their own for fans of both technically proficient and chaotically charged heavy metal .

– Maniere Zappone

DECAYCAST Reviews: AMANDA R HOWLAND “Spider, Milk, Batshit, Silence” (No Rent, 2018)

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DECAYCAST Reviews: AMANDA R HOWLAND “Spider, Milk, Batshit, Silence” (No Rent, 2018)

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Cleveland, OH recording artist Amanda R.  Howland comes with refreshing array of sonic possibilities and strategies with, “Spider, Milk, Batshit, Silence” her first tape for the NO RENT imprint, with two sides of mixed-bag, dense, electronics spanning from harsh noise, to musique concrete,  to sections accentuating voice, to more abstracted rhythm sections which blend in and out of a gentle, yet very present, bowed, hum.  Static, voice, melody, clattering broken rhythms, radio chatter of  ancient transmissions and a harsh sense of absence are all present in this short but important release.  Tension is another constant theme to the ear as  one section may contain a harsh, alienating scraping; a  sound nasty pissed and angrily broken, inching across the floor toward its prey as the  amplitude and aggression increase and climax into an alarm style buzzing; alerting the listener that, yes, now is your time. Another sound, if even for a moment, m0014255476_10ay offer a brief, ambient respite to the harsh reality that has encapsulated us all, “Spider, Milk, Batshit, Silence” is, indeed the sound of that. A chaotic, dangerous and aurally thick and swift climax appears and then vanishes leaving only a distant hum of  abstracted silence, a slow, subtle, thumping as if the decaying heart has pushed red for its final beat.  The silence at the end of side one almost doesn’t seem real as the listener is left with wanting more of this uncertain future the ears and brain have yet to test, yet to experience.  If any sonic territories are left unexplored under the “experimental”  or “out-sound” tags on side one, we soon learn they will be shredded and eviscerated on side two with as much skill, tension, and carefully articulated abstraction as they were on side one.

The second side, “Batshit, Silence” picks up  right where the  A side dropped us off, with a high-pitched, distorted and warped melody.  Intense shrieks, angry swells, and ancient hymns of bouncing, pulsing sine-wave frequencies gel together like a microbiological  fungus slowly transforming into something much greater and dangerous, the thick scraping, shooting radio0 transmissions into the brain grow together, seamlessly providing a ridged and ugly backbone for abstracted  layers of thunderous pounding, the a tonal scraping of a ferociously thick winds ripping across the gruesome and confusing scene, pulling tiny, flesh-ridden shards of the listeners inner ear with it,  to cascade upon, as Howlands’ dark, grinning, noisy, churning  machine glides through the wires and slowly leaks out of the pores offering a new dark reality, endlessly searching for a cave to whip around in, an enormous sound. This scene is eventually evacuated to barren, alien radio transmissions have crept their way in and angst-like shake and sputter long lost messages over the dense, thick walls of  bleeding electronics, this like life eventually fades away and we are  left with an alienating, deafening silence.  Highly dynamic and enjoyable tape for a wide variety of experimental delvers. Pick u the digital HERE and the cassette HERE

DECAYCAST Reviews : Witowmaker “Feather” Cassette (Sleep On Dreams, 2018)

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DECAYCAST Reviews : Witowmaker “Feather” Cassette (Sleep On Dreams, 2018)

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Witowmaker is the project of Bay Area electronic producer and internet cult personality Christopher Danko, also of Stable imprint/collective, and Religious Girls fame. On “Feather”, Danko crafts ten lush, dynamic,  emotionally present, fun and heavy electronic “dance” tracks which float the listener to an oscillating plane of lush tone poem arpeggiations, thick walls of decaying synthesizers, heavy, dynamic drum programming, atmospheric flutterings, and concisely layered, and intricately mapped vocal samples. The overall sound of Witowmaker is, at times,  surprisingly warm and ‘positive’, with a tinge of sarcasm, and at other times, darker, more dissonant, and even emotionally confusing in an interesting and uncontrived manner. Tension is sonically available throughout the wide range of aural moods on “Feather”, one track is accentuating the bent light sunshine across crashing waves, while the next track descends into another layer of cosmic hell, unsure of the outcome. Refreshing; this is a fun and important release in the arch of bay area electronic musings.

“Feather” offers complex, lush, delicate sonic textures while still retaining a pounding, thick, four to the floor heaviness which pulls from Acid, Dub, IDM and a dense warped version of straight-up dance music. Remnants of influence from Aphex Twin, FKA Twigs,  DJ Spooky, Art Of Noise, and later Carl Cox can be heard in the glistening, bright, affront production, yet Witowmaker offers a unique style of dance based electronic music all their own! The B side begins with a fast tempo, funky bass arp track titled “Trick Me Twice” which rings back to 90’s NRG/bass music with an experimental flare all it’s own. A classically trained arp machine spits out climbing cascading  rhythms while lush pads provide a warm backbone for chopped and glued vocal slices, offering a dense, warm, funky dance floor banger. Plug my ears with a drill to extract the earplugs that have been stuck for centuries at the club, ‘cause this is the high tempo, low bullshit dance music I’ve been waiting for.

This little tone machine gets funkier and more dynamic with each spin!  Other tracks like the B side’s “Contamination” offer a darker, more evil-grin means of electronic stylings, which perhaps might be the  darkest and most warped track on the album, pleasing the listener as the acid kicks in and everything changes. Witowmaker is refreshingly honest, dark and delicately crafted dance music for the jokester in all of us laughing to the trap door of life  until the doors spin open and we’re left wandering through a world of confusion not knowing what we’ve seen nor heard. Look for more from this project, we will be. Side note: this is one of the best sounding and best LOOKING tapes we have received in some time, and it’s refreshing when the visual look and sound unite to create a beautiful package of lush electronic presentation.  Order this tape, now!

 

Here’s also some free bandcamp download codes for the album:  redeem at http://www.bandcamp.com/yum

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DECAYCAST Reviews: Andorkappen “Temples Of The Unvirtuous” (Oxen, 2018)

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Andorkappen, LA  based noise/ drone maestro and also honcho at Underground Tape Review is back with “Temples Of The Unvirtuous”, on one of our  favorite labels, OXEN, also an LA based imprint. “Temples Of The Unvirtuous” begins with a slow, low, hollow  drone which barely is able to escape the speakers, however this distant  drone steadily becomes a thick, warm, comforting,  whirring sawtooth buzz accented by a steadily rising sine  wave pitch poem, steadily climbing the ladder or  alienation and confusion. This is the style of  synthesizer drone music i have been waiting for,  stripped, raw, warm, an a-tonal  form to atone to.  The bass  forward drone, and the high pitched ring, engrosses the hearing until the  sound is like a shaking, microscopic robotic insect drone which has  entered the brain via the ear canal.  You now have become rather UNcertain of what the future may hold.

The  drone remains omnipresent, now navigating the innards of your  nervous  system with its sweating,  pulsing, reverberations of mechanical hell, yet somehow this hell is soothing and relaxing, like the  warm hum of distant machines that will eventually come to end our life, but for now have  taken respite across the desert, gently vibrating and breathing, not  quite ready to attack yet. The high pitched buzz has gently, yet in a fixed, determined manner become the musical  crescendo and de-crescendo  of the A side, and of course the bass for the B side, but rest assured, no matter how your body takes it’s  new  implanted oscillations, things will be different. Even though this evil sound appears distant it  will slowly, steadily and eventually forcefully remap the sonics of your nervous system until you  are violently, shaking uncontrollably in a pile of confusion and as you collapse onto the floor, the buzzes  cease to exist, and all that’s left is a tiny mechanical bee buzzing  against a dark, barren, abandoned landscape, ominously and microscopicly floating in limbo, waiting for it’s next unknown victim.

You can order the cassette from OXEN Label HERE! 

DECAYCAST Premieres : Mathieu St-Pierre ” These Elephants”

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DECAYCAST Premieres : Mathieu St-Pierre ” These Elephants”

Slow, bubbling, long-form settle yet creatively present aural shifts of ambient swells from Canadian visual and  audio artist Mathieu St-Pierre.Lush, warm  tones  slowly pulsate to give the listener an soft  and gentle tone poem, displacing place, space, and  sonic orientation. St-Pierre paints lush  portraits of barren Canadian landscapes losing the listener over and over and over into a foggy, shimmeringly vibrant yet thick sonic haze. Chirping arpeggios give breath to layers of buried, shimmering, textured  sound  explorations. Phase out and take a deep listen. Also don’s sleep on their  extensive array of expended glitch art here : http://www.mathieustpierre.com

“Mathieu St-Pierre is a Canadian experimental visual artist, specialized in the fields of video art and photography and more specifically in glitch art. His passion for experimentation within a multitude of video manipulations stemmed from a lifelong passion of cinema. Since, he has refined his passion for visual art to focus on the creative medium of digital glitches, generative art and net art”

‘This is the first album by visual artist Mathieu St-Pierre. In this musical venture he explores the relationship of ambient sounds with the medium of the internet. More specifically by incorporating Google Maps’ Street View to his musical vision and therefore creating a new interactive experience.’

DECAYCAST Track Reviews: Forests 森林 “Disarray” from ‘Idol Collapse’ LP (Left Hand Path, 2018)

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DECAYCAST Track Reviews: Forests 森林 “Disarray” from ‘Idol Collapse’ LP (Left Hand Path, 2018)

Forests 森林 crafts dark, heavy, funky, and  occasionally sludgy, a-tonal industrial music for generations spanning many wars and technological shifts, collapses included.  On the track “Disarray” of their new 12” LP “Idol Collapse” on the rapidly accelerating  San Francisco Left Hand Path imprint,  Forests 森林 begin with an ancient howling metal percussion style clamoring as a distressed alarm-style sine wave bleeds your ears into a dark, thudding, hammering bass  riff.  “Disarray”  angrily and violently pounds forward  with thudding, unsettling cavernous percussion. An angular,  fuzzed out, monotone bass eventually gives breath to distantly haunted chanting/moaning style vocals. Words, and these worlds are unintelligible to my damaged, ramsacked, and now funky bassed-out,  puss-filled ears, but the tone of the story tells of an old, abandoned structure who’s walls are being slowly expanded upon by the  cavernous reverb,  pulsing bass tracks and churning hum of far away synthesizers and mutilated electronics,  Forests 森林  will lock you in a room and expand upon its  structure through sound, until you lie motionless on the  floor of  a place that once  contained  the form, now you have nothing but an old mangled, half  erased Front242 tape playing at a  third of the speed with  twice the  intensity and four times the  dynamics, whoops that’s actually the Forests 森林 tape i just dubbed as  I was  laying  there gasping for my last breath, i reach for the record  to button to  replicate these hellish,  booming sounds just one more time as my  turntable wont fit in this tightly bound coffin. Order the record HERE

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– Maniere Zappone

DECAYCAST REVIEWS Petridisch – “A Fixed Point” CD/Cassette (I Heart Noise, 2017)

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DECAYCAST REVIEWS Petridisch – A Fixed Point” CD/Cassette (I Heart Noise, 2017)

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Petridisch”A Fixed Point” CD/Cassette are already sold out in physical form (both CD and  cassette) but you can get a free download over there at the  I Heart Noise Bandcamp Page , which is a label and multimedia platform hosting a rather active blog of the same name. Petridisch’s  vocal and  percussion forward offerings of multi-layered, slow  ambient sonic explosions and chants of densely layered synths, build a wide variety of complex timbral experiments and densely articulated specimens. On “A Fixed Point”, Petridisch begins with slow shimmering waves of  ambient, buzzing waves, decaying, cavernous claps  and slowly and  steadily builds  layers of washed over plumes of texture and memory while structures of rhythm and  percussion begin to take form. Synthesizers slowly and  craftily edge  their way in with soft, present  swells,  mid  tempo arpeggiated sines, and layers of  ambient noise sustaining bright,  shimmering, articulate sonic  events.

The voice is an important part of this record and it adds a beautiful cloak around the various  track elements and really does gel all of the different  elements together as a compositional superglue.  Four short, ambient explorations pull equally from The Cocteau Twins, Boards Of  Canada, early Eno and  so much more, and so much less in the best way  possible, as Petridisch truly has cast their own unique sound into the  ethos of the word of endless sonic discovery and invention.  For fans of ambient, drone, early Tangerine Dream,  Terry Riley, and early synthesizer music, Petridisch packs a huge arsenal of sonic weapons in a  release that  is barely twelve minutes long, Highly recommended.

 

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DECAYCAST Reviews: UNSUSTAINABLE SOCIAL CONDITION “Pleasure Seeking Pacifists” (Phage Tapes, 2018)

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DECAYCAST Reviews: UNSUSTAINABLE SOCIAL CONDITION “Pleasure Seeking Pacifists” (Phage Tapes, 2018)

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Oxen label  head-honcho Matt Purse is back at it again with another no holds  barred  harsh noise ripper,  released by another veteran in the harsh/death/industrial hellscape,  MN based imprint Phage Tapes.  

“Pleasure Seeking Pacifists” comes right out of the gate with alienating brutality,  not even wasting a  second on some unnecessary intro and belts right out of the speakers with crunchy, ear splitting harsh noise with very little variation.  To the  casual or unsuspecting listener, sections of this cassette could potentially even fall under HNW category, though i think not to the discerning listener as their is some pretty interesting variations happening if  you can make them out once the  blood crusts over dried crispy inside the listeners ear and an entire dead sea of chaotic violent manipulations of the sounds become more articulated and present .

Thick scraping nails pull against a dead  chalk board which shimmers into the  listeners ear with a whistle meaning its time to eat the static and then death is the  logical next step. This cassette is unrelenting, it;s the style of undulating static, mid-high frequency  harsh noise that I would blast on the subway to alienate the morning commute into isolation, Did I say relentless yet? Because it is. Brutal, pummeling and alienating . This is top notch psychedelic noise. Purse holds nothing back with this sonic assault and with each release, further solidifying himself as one of the masters of new North American Harsh noise.  Short  review for a short but HIGHLY IMPACTFUL release. Highly recommended.

ORDER THE TAPE HERE ,

DECAYCAST Reviews : Cadaver In Drag – “People Meant To Die” (HUSK, 2018)

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DECAYCAST Reviews : Cadaver In Drag – “People Meant To Die” (HUSK, 2018)

 

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“People Meant To Die”  by underground stalwarts Cadaver In Drag is  nothing short of a classic  reissue from Josh Lay’s longstanding Lexington, KY based imprint, HUSK RECORDS. Underground legendary grind/noise outfit C I D belt through  viscous, heart stopping grind core songs  which often sound more like machines shutting down than actual music.  Menacing, pummeling riffs bleed top spastic,  pummeling drums  and thick layers of homemade synths  and electronics.  The  vocals oscillate between early Black metal and  growling slabs of  guttural noise; the perfect  glue to seal your  ride all the way to hell. Cadaver In Drag belt forth classically atonal offerings  of  bleeding esoteric heaviness which  cannot really be  categorized as “grind” , “metal” or even “noise”. It does  contain all of these elements however it is a sonic beast all on it’s own and angrily and aggressively defies classification. FAST, ANGRY, CHOPPED, BLEEDING, PULSING, CHURNING, BREAKING, DYING, ACCELERATING. All these things seem to be happening at the same time; this record is the  acceleration of anger, chaos, and  heaviness into the ear.

Originally recorded in 2003 by Trevor Tremaine of  Hair Police fame ,re-released in 2018 yet is seems just as  fresh and relevant as ever. Additional electronic  slabs of  chaotic, sputtering noise are  laid  down by local KY maniac, and  psychedelic visual artist Robert Beatty, also of Hair Police fame, add to the  general chaos and uneasiness that this recording is  known for. Endless layers of  quick moving, buzzing, breaking, battling homemade synths  clash with pummeling, arrhythmic  walls of lightning speed percussion and flying, buzzing,  choking guitars assault the  listener  with a seemingly endless barrage of  thick dark, esoteric slabs of  heavy  grind and noise. All of the instruments blur together in the most desired, intentional way possible to  create a truly menacing, abrasive  style of heavy music/noise all of their own, which is often replicated but rarely done with this amount of precision, intention, and menace..

Big sounds, violent  outburst after  violent  outburst of bleeding, confusing negative vibes in the best way  bring the listener further and  further into a pit of chaos- a  sonic stew of your last chosen meal. The world needs more bands like Cadaver In Drag, an this reissue is an absolute must own for  any and all fans of heavy music.  Totally unique and essential listen. HIGHLY  RECOMMENDED you go order it HERE.  Paypal/E-Mail = huskrecords@yahoo.com.