In Slaughter Natives – Psicofonias – Las Voces Desconocidas (reissue) Label: Gradual Hate Records GH 131R CD Format: CD, Album, Limited Edition , Digipack Country: Spain Released: 2018 Style: Martial, Dark Ambient, Industrial
In the year 2008 the documentary called “Psicofonías: Las Voces Desconocidas” was shot by the film director Jose Moral. This was about the voices of dead people where echoes of spirits leave us some footprint after death. Humankind has believed during a long time that it is possible to communicate with dead people.
Over the years , seances, mediums and psychics have been possible instruments to make contact with the afterlife. So, EVP is an espiritual footprint and a communication link to the soundtrack in this documentary.
This one relies on some of the most important projects of the Dark Ambient Industrial music: In Slaughter Natives, which is a pioneer in the symphonic industrial field and part of the legendary label Cold Meat Industry. This music project is formed by Jouni Havukainen who carries out an outstanding and deep work full of aspects where in some parts we can listen the voices of dead people.
CURRENT 93 – If a City is set upon a Hill Label: House Of Mythology – HOMALEPH 05 Format: CD Album Country: Germany Released: 2022 Style: Experimental, Neofolkcording tool, we discover the pleasure of the regular things in a world each day more processed.
Current 93 are an English experimental music group, working since the early 1980s in folk-based musical forms. The band was founded in 1982 by David Tibet, who has been Current 93’s only constant member, although Steven Stapleton (of Nurse with Wound) has appeared on nearly every Current 93 release. Michael Cashmore has also been a constant contributor since Thunder Perfect Mind. Douglas P. of Death in June has played on well over a dozen Current 93 releases, and Steve Ignorant of Crass (using the name Stephen Intelligent), Boyd Rice, runologist Freya Aswynn, Nick Cave, Björk, Andrew W.K., Anohni, Baby Dee, Will Oldham, Ben Chasny, Rose McDowall, have also lent their talents over the years. Current 93 have released over twenty albums and many singles as well.
Much of Current 93’s early work was similar to late 1970s and early 1980s industrial music: abrasive tape loops, droning synthesizer noises and Tibet’s distorted, excoriating vocals. The earlier recordings reflect his preoccupation with death, Christ, mysticism, Aleister Crowley (Tibet borrow-ed the term «93 Current» from Crowley – the 93 Current being the current of Thelema or Agape), Tibetan Buddhism, Gnosticism, runes, swastikas, Noddy, The Wicker Man, and a variety of other ridiculous occult notions. The later to present-day period of Current 93’s recordings increasingly reflect Tibet’s interest in Christian mysticism and apocalypse.
Three years in its creation, birthing and borning, The new album it being released on 3, highly over-priced formats.
David Tibet says the following about “If a City is set upon a Hill”… actually: What he has to say is THAT MUCH ridiculous, that I omitted to include on here in its completeness. An excerpt?
Diamanda Galas – The Divine Punishment Label: Intravenal Sound Operations – ISO-006CD-RE Format: CD, Album, Reissue, Remastered Country: US Released: Jun 10, 2022 Style: Industrial, Experimental, Vocal
On June 30, 1986, the same day that Diamanda Galás’s The Divine Punishment was released, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Georgia’s so-called sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick, criminalizing consensual sex between men. At the time, about 15,000 people were known to have died of AIDS in the U.S. alone, with little government acknowledgement besides suggestions to quarantine homosexuals on island colonies. By the end of 2021, the number of AIDS deaths globally would exceed 36 million.
The first album in her Masque of the Red Death trilogy, The Divine Punishment is one of the most jarring works of art produced in response to the AIDS epidemic, and a milestone in Diamanda Galás’s artistry and activism. Galás uses her famous voice both as an orational instrument and as well as a physical representation of AIDS and those it afflicts.
The album features the panphonic* dirge work of Galás, accompanied by analogue synthesizers and piano played by Diamanda Galás with additional synthesizer work by Dave Hunt. The texts are primarily taken from the Old Testament, contrasting the hectoring lawmakers of Leviticus with the desperate appeals of the Lamentations and Book of Psalms (Psalm 22, 59, and 88). In doing so, she indicts those who use religion to instigate the witch hunts that inevitably accompany real and perceived plagues.
«[On The Divine Punishment] Galás offers her voice as an expression of anger, succor, and simple fellow feeling. Giving public expression to a rage and loss that might otherwise be confined in loneliness, she provides a cathartic focus or condensation of emotions.» – Artforum
«Diamanda Galás has a vision of the world that makes the horror-stricken likes of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft seem like pink-cheeked Pollyannas.» – Rolling Stone
«Compelling but brutal. An ugly, brooding masterpiece.» – AllMusic
1986 was a year marked by global political turmoil and disasters both natural and man-made: Chernobyl, the space shuttle Challenger, Reagan’s race-driven wars on drugs and welfare while opposing sanctions against apartheid South Africa. The Washington Post wrote, in a year-end editorial: «It was a year in which a new spirit of patriotism and national well-being, proud heralds of the ’80s, was tarnished by evidence of a new wave of greed, a lowering of ethical standards of conduct, a celebration of self over country, a crisis of government spawned by duplicity and hypocrisy in high places, a breakdown of technological prowess…Not since the turbulent ’60s, a time of national tragedy and breakdown, had so many things gone so stunningly awry.»
Meanwhile, the music industry was enjoying its most profitable year in history, as compact discs began their lucrative rise. Many artists—Janet Jackson, Run DMC, Peter Gabriel, Beastie Boys, Robert Cray—had commercial breakthroughs, while major labels were mining the semi-underground for bands like Hüsker Dü and the Smiths. The top-selling single in the U.S. was «That’s What Friends Are For,» which raised a laudable $3 million for AmFAR (American Foundation for AIDS Research) while keeping the disease at such arm’s length that most connections between the song and AIDS are long forgotten. Perhaps the only artists confronting reality in as visceral way as Galás in 1986 were, depending on your perspective, Slayer, Swans, or Schoolly D.
Today, The Divine Punishment sounds no less audacious than when it was released, but one hears it with a sense of shared trauma and a renewed call to action. Galás imbues all her work with the crushing weight of history–the hypnotic cadences of her vocal work are precisely aligned to the liturgical texts employed. Remastered with exceptional clarity by mastering engineer Heba Kadry working from the original mixes by London-based producer/composer Dave Hunt, it’s a work of great empathy, solidarity, and physical power. Coming amid another pandemic marked by ignorance and division, its anger and fervor feels remarkably urgent.
ABOUT DIAMANDA GALÁS A composer, vocalist and activist, Diamanda Galás is one of the most uncompromising and influential avant-garde performers of the last thirty years, with an extensive catalog of work that is often oppressive but always thrilling.
Galás has collaborated with Vinko Globokar in the opera Un Jour Comme Une Autre (1978),which was inspired by Amnesty International’s account of the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for treason. She also performed Xenakis’ N’shima under his tutelage in 1980 with L’Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Brooklyn Philharmonia. In 1982 Galás released her debut album, The Litanies of Satan, which set the stage for extended forays into vocal experimentation, improvisation, and manipulation; and which included the 15-minute solo piece titled “Wild Women With Steak Knives.” Her eponymous album included «Song from the Blood of Those Murdered,” which was dedicated to the victims of the Greek Junta that ruled Greece from 1967-1974.
Diamanda Galás continues to deal with mortality, isolation, and the abuse of power. Her new and forthcoming work, Broken Gargoyles, concerns the facially-mutilated and stigmatized soldiers from WWI and their diseased comrades, who were isolated in industrial buildings until their death. Broken Gargoyles will be released this fall.
ABOUT INTRAVENAL SOUND OPERATIONS In 1977 Diamanda Galás began her own vocal research into what she describes as the ‘shredding of complex vocal sound into slivers moving back and forth to the host sound.» Her work in the area would be published in 1982 by Perspectives of New Music. This manifesto was entitled “Intravenal Song.” Galás was very excited about the parallels between her work and the subtractive synthesis of complex sound by Iannis Xenakis. Since that time she has championed his work.
These eleven tracks, all recorded in Luanda, Angola, orchestrate the military vengeance march of an entire bloodied continent that stands proudly and which, day after day, keeps arming itself in the shadows.
Decolonization wars, civil wars, cold war, ethnic wars, barbaric wars, let no one dare believe the African people’s struggle is over. The oppression of the Western civilization has devastated our infrastructures, severely weakened our governmental agencies, violated our religious institutions, and battered our economic fabric.
For our cultures to never again be humiliated, for your oppression to never again be a degrading threat, for our recurring famines and your ceasefires to never again be fertile grounds for the shameless exploitation of our natural resources, African Imperial Wizard fights back and will fight back over and over again.
To finance the arming of our revenge-hungry factions, African Imperial Wizard presents Behanzin, our brand-new CD which gathers the 11 tracks of our first two opuses, the Cetshwayo kaMpande EP and the Isandhlwana LP. This record is intended to be the echo of a violent revolt that will spell the end of the tyrannical exploitation of our proud nation!
To all the rebels, commandos, dissidents, guerrillas, and squadrons plotting their fierce revenge, African Imperial Wizard offers you the soundtrack to your bloodthirsty retaliation! We will never bow down again to your ruthless battalions! Never again will we turn a blind eye to your inhuman crimes. From now on, we will mercilessly retaliate blow for blow. uSuthu!
Von Thronstahl / The Days Of The Trumpet Call – Pessoa / Cioran Label: Infinite Fog Productions – IF-06 Format: CD, Album, Reissue Country: Russia Released: 2010 Style: Modern Classical, Ambient, Neofolk
Since 1998 year Von Thronstahl, led by the founder and leader Josef M. Klumb, remains to one of most appreciable and interesting groups on martial industrial/neofolk scene. The Days Of The Trumpet Call, it’s neoclassic project by Raymond P., the musician of the Von Thronstahl. This split, is devoted the Portuguese poet Fernando Antonio Pessoa (1888-1935) and Romanian philosopher Emil Michel Cioran (1911-1995), their writings are used as lyric for this album. The melancholic neoclassics from The Days Of The Trumpet Call and probably strangest of all records Von Thronstahl where they balance on border between neoclassics and ambient, with a light touch martial and all the same, beautiful and charismatic, Josef’s Ê. voice…CD is released in 6-pannel Digipak, with design by Federico Salvador(All my faith lost…)
Amber Asylum – Songs Of Sex And Death Label: Prophecy – PRO 131 Format: 2 CD, Album, Digisleeve Country: Germany Released: 26 Dec 2015 Style: Ethereal, Ambient
Label: Prophecy Productions– PRO 138 Format: CD, Album Country: Germany Released: 04 Dec 2015 Style: Neo-Classical, Post Rock, Ethereal
Amber Asylum are unique
Amber Asylum… a filmic fusion of modern classical and post-rock… where arias and Art Songs meet in a pale field of electronic disturbance. Equally at home in the opera house or the smoky, raucous din of an underground nightclub, Amber Asylum plumbs the crevasse between noise and beauty. Lyrical, confessional, dark yet aspirant, their strings, vocals, and spare percussion billow like furious mists across your consciousness. Dark as it is beautiful, spare as it is complex, its supernaturally decadent powers will overtake you in the remote reaches of your imagination.
On “Sin Eater”, Amber Asylum’s first studio effort in six years, the four ladies from San Francisco combine the ominous energy of their drum- and bass-heavy albums “Garden Of Love” (2005) and “Still Point” (2007) with the lushest string arrangements in the band’s history. The subject matter of then album is the cleansing ritual of “sin eating”. Kris Force explains: “It still exists as a death ritual where the Sin Eater consumes a meal or ‘corpse cake’ that is passed over the body of the deceased or laid on the chest. The meal represents the sins of the deceased and once consumed by the Sin Eater the sins are released thereby allowing the soul to rest in peace. The album speaks of this process of taking on the pain of others to set them free.”
“Sin Eater” does not only mark Amber Asylum’s debut for Prophecy Productions, but also the band’s 20th anniversary. In two decades, Kris Force and her fellow musicians released seven albums, several singles and EPs, not to forget their countless sampler contributions and collaborations with acts such as Neurosis, Swans or Sol Invictus. In order to celebrate the group’s 20th anniversary, a limited box set entitled “Anthology” is released at the same time as “Sin Eater”.
Arcana – Le Serpent Rouge Label: Projekt – PROJEKT171 Format: CD, Album, Repress Country: US Released: 2011 Style: Neo-Classical, Dark Ambient
On their sixth full-length release, Sweden’s Arcana leaves behind ancient Western ruins and cathedrals for Arabian deserts filled with magic and mysticism. The sound of the Middle East flows through this amazing album; Armenian duduk, dulcimer, Egyptian finger cymbals, timpani and cabasa are just part of the musical arsenal on Le Serpent Rouge, taking Arcana to a higher dimension, exploring new melodies and realms. This is Arcana as you have never heard them before!
With their lush blend of spirituality and earthly emotions, Arcana has always been compared to Dead Can Dance. At Arcana’s heart is Peter Bjärgö who started over 10 years ago making music that captivated the ambient / neoclassical scene. The traditional sound with strings, bells and timpani, the angelic female tunes, Peter’s dark voice and the emotions behind the music have made Arcana one of the leading bands within this genre.
Now Peter boldly ventures into the hot Arabian desert, breathing life from the baking sun and the serpent’s dance. Le Serpent Rouge envelops the listener in a powerful rhythmic sensuality; one feels the sands of the desert slowly begin to swirl, twilight falls across the dunes and in the distance perhaps a lonely nomad’s fire burns . . . just beyond its reach, one can make out the subtle movements of a great red serpent . . . edging ever closer . . .
Et Nihil – Nor Am I Label: Lichterklang – LK035 Format: CD, Album Country: Germany Released: 05 Dec 2016 Style: Neofolk
If there is one band in the current Neofolk scene, that stands out among all other bands it’s ET NIHIL for sure. Rising from the ashes from legendary LUFTWAFFE, b9 InViD, RB and Jonathan S consequently follow their artistic vision and present a highly dynamic and powerful variety of the genre. “Nor Am I” is their first official studio release after the limited and sought-after “Onus” CDR, two live-albums and numerous singles and the first one to be released on LICHTERKLANG. “Nor Am I” contains 13 tracks of pure Neofolk mayhem, spanning from the morbidty of the Neofolk genre to intense drumming Martial Industrial is known for up to harsh and distorted vocals characterized by the Industrial scene, defining a new and modernized version of Neofolk.
Tracklist:
1. Nor Am I 2. +Ulfberht+ 3. Cross Weight 4. Right Hand Son (v2) 5. Runes Writ In Rust 6. On The Brae 7. The Externalisation Of The Hierarchy 8. Malign 9. And Then 10. If Lies Are Not Defied 11. Blood Carries Far 12. Thieves Lose Hands 13. Grave Desecration (live)
Venta Protesix + Jugendwerkhof – Sterilitätszelotismus Label: New Approach Records – NAR31 Format: CD, Album, Limited Edition Country: Portugal Released: 15 Jul 2022 Style: Noise
Just before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe, Italian Noise project Venta Protesix and German Harsh Noise duo Jugendwerkhof joined forces and recorded «Sterilitätszelotismus» a collaboration focused the obsessive cleaning behavior.
