Building upon the doom and dread of their solid debut, industrial revivalists 3Teeth return with their sophomore set, shutdown.exe, a thrilling assault that finds them staking their claim as formidable new voices of the genre. Exiting the dark dungeon club where they resided on their self-titled first effort, shutdown.exe expands the band’s sonic canvas to full cinematic scope, creating a brutal and unforgiving post-apocalyptic landscape that once again borrows the best of early-era Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, and White Zombie (and, by lineage, forebears like Die Krupps, Front Line Assembly, and Laibach). This release is a gift to fans of classics like Broken, The Downward Spiral, Antichrist Superstar, and SEHNSUCHT.
Whereas 3Teeth exploited nostalgia with…
Category: industrial
Orphx formed as a trio in late 1993 in the Canadian suburbs of Dundas, Ontario, taking influence from early industrial music as well as alternative sounds emerging from Japan and across Europe, and it’s these early years in their life as a group that are forming the focus of a new archival release.
This all manifested itself in their music, created in those early days from second-hand equipment in their basement studio known as The Pit, with much of the material seeing release across two cassettes in late 1993 and early 1994. Their work reached wider attention in the years to come, without one of their number, Aron West, through monthly concerts and tape-trading networks, while the Sonic Groove label has been bringing their music to the attention of techno fans across the world since…
Through a decade of performing and recording as Pharmakon, Margaret Chardiet has made music that heaves, throbs, and decays. Harnessing the drilling power of electronics and the elasticity of her screams, she’s concocted visceral noise in New York since she was a teenager — first on small-run tapes and CD-Rs, then on more widely-available albums for her hometown label Sacred Bones. As her profile has grown, her sound has remained physical, the aural equivalent of organs pumping life into a body while nature takes a toll on its flesh.
The physicality of each Pharmakon album emerges in Chardiet’s choices of cover art. Her 2013 LP Abandon showed maggots swarming on her lap, suggesting a theme of bodily decomposition. For 2014’s Bestial Burden — influenced by an illness…
“Deforming in an original way the vibration of the metal itself […] (sounds that) with their abstract simplicity of anonymous gears give the geometric and mechanic splendor”. These sentences, published by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on the 18th of march 1914, and later on considered an influence for Esplendor Geométrico music, can describe Yura Yura‘s rhythmic noise formula as well. In particular, they describe Rumu Namba, his third album (if we count his self-released first album), following Be Sexual, released approximately two years ago, that had a quite different mood.
Yura Yura is the creature of French composer Grégory Mousselle, a project with a typical old school Hands Productions sound, strongly…
Following their 2015 debut full-length, Perfect World, New York-based industrial/noise rock duo Uniform signed to Sacred Bones for the release of 2016’s Ghosthouse EP, which set the stage for their second album, Wake in Fright. Released in January of 2017 as Donald Trump was being sworn into office as President of the United States of America, the album reflects the paranoia, confusion, and sheer horror rampant throughout the nation.
Uniform take their already caustic sound to its extreme, sampling actual explosions and gunshots for the album’s drum tracks. The songs all vary in tempo, but many of the tracks are absolutely relentless, recalling a more overdriven version of Ministry’s most thrash-influenced material. “The Light at the End (Cause)” is particularly brutal at…
US noise artist James Donadio aka Prostitutes release a new LP on Oscar Powell and Jaime Williams’ Diagonal imprint titled Dance Tracksz. Donadio has appeared on Diagonal twice previously, and has brought his blend of abrasive noise and techno to labels such as Opal Tapes, Digitalis, Spectrum Spools and Night School since his 2011 debut.
Dance Tracksz is described by the label as a “no-pretense, raggy-as-fuck rave set built minimal and raw for the hard-worked ‘floors.”
The press release also says Dance Tracksz is “like one of those weekends when an old mate turns up and Friday turns into Monday, face-down in empty bottles of sauce, it’s a blinding session that leaves you rotten to the core and unable to tell what the fuck that taste is in your mouth.”
Almost a quarter-century into their career, you might expect the southern Ontario-based industrial techno duo Orphx to be sounding a bit tired. Not so. Pitch Black Mirror, their first album since 2011’s Radiotherapy, is an enthralling listen that proves they’re more than worthy of the appearances at Berghain they’ve been tapped for.
Sonically, this record isn’t too far removed from more mainstream techno, but it boasts a rhythmic and conceptual variety that is often lacking in the genre, something that helps Pitch Black Mirror cohere into an album proper, rather than what feels like a collection of singles.
The use of vocals also helps make this an engaging listen; snippets of spoken word and chant are woven into the dark, sometimes even dystopic…
Michael Berdan has a brawler’s voice, spittle-flecked and dissolute. Those nagging vocals seized center stage on Perfect World, the blistering 2015 debut LP from Uniform, Berdan’s duo with multi-instrumentalist Ben Greenberg. Theirs was a marriage made in industrial-punk Hades, draping righteous pique over a grind lashed together from guitar groan and staple-gun electronics.
Over the course of six songs — capped by churning, spoken-word downer “Learning to Forget” — the NYC-based pair forged a bracing, singular sound as strong as its Bad Religion-esque logo, strong enough to sustain a cult career.
With Ghosthouse, Berdan & Greenberg demonstrate a healthy willingness to interrogate and even upend that sound. The duo’s core certainly remains…
The definitive version of “The Downward Spiral”, meticulously prepared by Trent Reznor and NIN art director John Crawford.
The Downward Spiral positioned Trent Reznor as industrial’s own Phil Spector, painting detailed, layered soundscapes from a wide tonal palette. Not only did he fully integrated the crashing metal guitars of Broken, but several newfound elements — expanded song structures, odd time signatures, shifting arrangements filled with novel sounds, tremendous textural variety — can be traced to the influence of progressive rock. So can the painstaking attention devoted to pacing and contrast — The Downward Spiral is full of striking sonic juxtapositions and sudden about-faces in tone, which make for a fascinating listen.
The definitive version of “Broken”, meticulously prepared by Trent Reznor and NIN art director John Crawford; containing “Suck” b/w “Physical”
During the time that Pretty Hate Machine was becoming an underground sensation, Trent Reznor became embroiled in legal difficulties with his label that prevented the release of any new Nine Inch Nails material. But the 3-year wait actually helped – most of NIN’s fans were relatively recent converts, and they eagerly snapped up 1992’s Broken, which afforded the already angst-ridden Reznor the opportunity to vent his ample frustration over the imbroglio. Where Pretty Hate Machine had a few moments of reflection and sardonic humor, Broken is a concentrated blast of caustic, naked rage. Given how draining it is, a full-length album in…
…The Fragile: Deviations 1 contains 37 instrumental, alternate and unreleased songs, many of which reportedly have never been released elsewhere. The band’s website says it is a “unique version of Nine Inch Nails’ record … created by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross”; Ross was not associated with the original release.
“The Fragile occupies a very interesting and intimate place in my heart,” Reznor said in a statement. “I was going through a turbulent time in my life when making it and revisiting it has become a form of therapy for me. As an experiment, I removed all the vocals from the record and found it became a truly changed experience that worked on a different yet compelling level. The Fragile: Deviations 1 represents Atticus and I…
Trent Reznor has been teasing fans with the prospect of new Nine Inch Nails material for the last few months. A new five-song EP is called Not the Actual Events and will arrive on December 23 through the band themselves.
“It’s an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make,” Reznor said in a statement. “It’s an EP because that ended up being the proper length to tell that story.”
The Nine Inch Nails website claims that the release will sound “unrecognizable” from Reznor’s recent film work with his frequent collaborator, Atticus Ross. The website also included Ross as an official Nine Inch Nails member.
“The intention of this record is for it to exist in the physical world, just like you. Choosing this…
Forming in London in 1988 Terminal Cheesecake made waves releasing an uncompromising blend of psych, dub and industrial grooves across two EPs, six albums and a now infamous session for John Peel. Last year the band celebrated their reincarnation with the release of live album Cheese Brain Fondue: Live in Marseille released on US based label Artificial Head.
…in Dandelion Sauce of the Ancients we have their first studio recording since 1994’s King of All Spaceheads. The band haven’t made it back entirely intact however, with GNOD vocalist Neil Francis having taken over from Gary Boniface. It’s a match that makes perfect sense: the Cheesecake have a good argument for being the missing link between the British psych bands of the ’70s and today’s…
The Sound of Being Alive, a remastered collection spanning 1998-2007, contains 12 transgressive classics, including alternate universe sound-of-the-summer party hit ‘Wriggle Like a Fucking Eel’.
Whitehouse are thee arch, original power noise unit formed around William Bennett (vocals, electronics, percussion) and Philip Best (vocals, electronics) who met in London around 1982, and the pair would go on to establish one of the most notorious, probing, and necessary catalogues in the late 20th/early 21st century canon. Other members joined them over that time, most infamously Peter Sotos, who appears here contributing lyrics to a pair of the collection’s most cutting numbers, Cruise (Force the Truth), and the 12 minute noise baptism Daddo, whilst the rest runs thru some crucial cuts such as…
End Position is a harsh noise industrial hammer punk album about numbing your feelings, chastising the nostalgic, smoking crack, hurting your loved ones, and eventually killing yourself. Debut album.
Lots of piercing hi-energy noise, distorted sampling, screaming, head-stapling drums, and melodies powered by pure anger abound. Behind a vicious wall of noise waits equally abrasive lyrics, dark-hearted polemicals against bad faith and self-preservation. A life of lived experience rains down on everyone else with all its bodily fluids, ensuring an inexorable lesson about life choices. For added emphasis, throw in a broken glass-and-gunshot scatter Dada collage.
This is a difficult album to enjoy. Upon first listen, you may just be put off by its astringent clipping and unabashed intensity, but absorbing that…
Coil’s discography has fallen into neglect somewhat over the years as more and more releases have gone out of print. That was intended to change with the Threshold Archives (named after Coil’s label Threshold House), a project Peter Christopherson started in 2006 and which remained unfinished on his death in 2010.
The Archive has now been completed by former Coil members, close friends, and family members following Christopherson’s blueprints. The collection brings back over 30 releases from Coil’s history beginning with early sketches and soundtracks (including the soundtrack to Derek Jarman’s The Angelic Conversation) up to a reissue of the duo’s final album, The New Backwards, featuring unreleased outtakes and new music.
Smersh were a New Jersey-based duo whose myriad self-issued cassettes throughout the ’80s and early ’90s anticipated much of the industrial dance music that would follow, but the group existed solely as a home studio-based project and remained in obscurity long after founding member Chris Shepard’s death put an end to the project in 1994.
Josh Cheon’s astounding Dark Entries label released Cassette Pets, an utterly essential, sprawling double-LP compendium of the duo’s work, in 2012.
Super Heavy Solid Waste is a more concise single- disc collection derived from the group’s self- released tapes, as well as from a few compilations and releases on European labels KK Records and Börft Records. The LP is a wonderful summation of the group’s more rhythmic side, with stiff,…
Liquid G. (Liquid Garbage) is the one-man project of EBM stalwart Peter van Bogaert from Melsele, Belgium. In 1987, he began to record music and self-release limited cassettes on his own label Liquid Produkts. Between 1987 and 1990, Peter composed over nine albums, in addition to a split release with Vomito Negro. Liquid G. made their first vinyl appearance on the Expo 87 7” compilation, courtesy of Dirk Ivens’ Body Records.
Liquidation is the first ever vinyl compilation of Liquid G.’s cassette recordings, taking you on a journey through the underground of the Belgian Electro Industrial scene. Each song was written, produced, recorded and performed by solely by Peter between 1987-1989. Liquid G. captures the DIY synth-punk ethos of Cabaret Voltaire,…
Here in the Black is a 20 song collection of work, recorded and filmed over two shows Gary Numan played at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles in 2013 as part of the Splinter World Tour.
Opener I Am Dust shows what the 58-year-old musician is still capable of. The combination of older songs with new tracks of Splinter is perfect. Metal has been upgraded, only the magnificent howling synths remind us of the colder original version.
Also remarkable on this live release, is the lower amount of used “overdubs”: it makes it all more pure and raw, but it never restricts the musical perfectionism of this fantastic artist. Cars is pushed back into the background and has evolved into a rock song over the years. The ‘older’ tracks on this live album are darker and more mature,…
They were one of the most groundbreaking bands to emerge out of Philadelphia in the early ‘80s, laying the sonic foundation for future acts such as Ministry, Skinny Puppy, and Nine Inch Nails.
Yet the post-punk, proto-industrial sounds of Albert Ganss, Matt Marello, and John Young never earned the significant recognition it deserved.
Last year, Dark Entries re-released the eponymous debut EP from Executive Slacks, originally released in 1983 on Red Records, the release was an appetizer that contained just four songs.
Now Cleopatra Records has served up a multi-course meal in a new two-disc set Complete Recordings 1982-1986; it spans only four years, but includes 36 tracks (22 songs appearing for the first time ever on CD).
