From Rock-a-Rolla:
A huge blast of space-colonizer synth burbles, real piano and beetle rush sounds beamed directly brain-wards from a 2007 radio session, Head Boggle does exactly what it says on the tin. Each of the eleven tracks holds it own personality, some a little darker and some more of a splurge, but the overall effect is that of a broad spectrum of noise/electronics explored and laid-out with attention to detail – in other words no drone coffee breaks
From Rock-a-Rolla:
This self-titled disc is an example of early 70s private press psych sides, except created in 2008 through the fuggiest fug ever smoked. Hawkwindian oscillator squelches riddle gluey sections of the two tracks, an enormous mangle of loose melody and loop dripping sound like warm wax.
The “Join with Us” movement of the opener is unsettling big sunglasses / bad haircut cult soundtracking. The mysterious UFO Antler Band have tapped into a lost reservoir of darkly
out-there waters.
From Rudio Horrible (thanks to Google translators):
"Oddities of the Lothians is a hellish labyrinth where electromagnetic fragments of conversations and found sounds are made on each other as convulsed nauseaum. The pattern "musical" or pseudo compositive is dictated purely by the flow of voices, sometimes faster, sometimes more inconsistent. Laughter, cracks, incomplete sentences, murmurs, grunts, everything is operated from the human voice, distorted or made to rotate around the crowds gathered in the room without being able to escape from his dismal prison. Totally experimental, radical and frightening."
From Foxy Digitalis:
I've had the opportunity of witnessing the overwhelming sensory explosion of Muscletusk live in their native Edinburgh once before, and am happy to report that this unassuming CDR captures the wailing sprawl of gurgling feedback, drunken percussion and ten-tonne murk with a direct honesty that befits the immediacy and energy of their approach. What's more, nuances of feedback, vocal squeals and and percussive shrapnel are more clearly active in the recorded picture, flecks of shrieking tone that would otherwise be buried in the heaving mass of dense guitar-driven noise at the volume that a live show of their ilk demands. Itchy, restless clatter and scrape blossoms into plumes of beguiling caterwauling guitars, cymbals and sheer abominable noise, perforated wildly by the drumkit's addled and coruscating accompaniment. Chaos is happily managed in the exponential orgiastic improvisation, huge waves of despairing, deep feedback pulse with a damaged intent, whilst tonal buckshot and scrap-metal fly out of the storm adding a razor-sharp edge to the dark cloud brewing beneath. But despite the mass being created Muscletusk aren't prone to wailing on the noise for noise's sake, and know when and how to pull back the reins on the creature and dwell in the damage they've set in motion, at times brooding and heaving at the seams like Black Flag and alluding by the end of the piece to a Swans-style pounding march that completes the gig as succinctly and directly as it began. 7/10 -- Joe Luna (28 January, 2009)
From Idwal Fisher:
Muscletusk meanwhile are beating the shit out of various instruments, weaving a cord through rampant drum attacks, inchoate electrical storm damage and clung iron in a live track as laid down at the Captains Rest. After a brief tempest the dust settles to reveal churning machinery, slave barge rhythms beaten out on dustbin lids and feedback. It has certain soothing qualities although whether this was the original intent I’m not sure. Short and sweet though.
Muscletusk "S/T" (Poot Records)
From Rock-a-Rolla:
There’s an intimation of thuggery in this act’s chunky free-noise, jam-hard playing – there’s the brutish name and several tracks of heavy freefall noise here. Repeat plays reveal more to the picture, the disc’s great swollen belly of feedback and drum riding accelerated peaks and troughs. On headphones it’s thicker still, the atmosphere of being welded into a tractor engine, bashed from side to side on the splutter on red diesel.
From Foxy Digitalis:
Uton and Anti team-up for some bumble-fingered thick Finnish psych under the AKA of Hunton Qunitet. Summoning up a friendly cabin fever, “Bert's Parts” is seen/heard through hearth smoke and the use of random materials/sounds to hand – ones not normally associated with the psych movement. The delightful turntable warp and plastic percussion are a good jumping off point for the darker landscapes of sound, these five parts thump and clack-together in runs of accidental complexities. Not your everyday psych-folk by any stretch of the imagination. 9/10 -- Scott McKeating (12 November, 2008)
From Idwal Fisher:
Who’d a thought that hiding beneath the mundane moniker that is the Hunton Quintet would lie a group of freaky accordion wheezing, fiddle scraping, leaf rustling, wood rubbing, drum bashing, guitar frotting Finns? Freaky doesn’t even begin to describe it. These guys are so far up in the Arctic circle that there’s nothing left to do except soak up all those Popol Vüh, meets Lewis Caroll, meets Fluxus vibes and hope that it don’t get dark before tea time. But this is only a tenth of the story. I’ve just spent an afternoon viewing all their videos and I think that maybe, just maybe I’ve unearthed some kind of woolly underground cult that lives on papier maché, carrots and tree bark. Oh, and there’s only two of them of course; Zileg Concrete and Agent Stepanoff. Imagine Ivor Cutler like wheezes meets random pluck and drum thump with added bits of theremin and maybe we’re um ... now halfway there. A more wayward Vibracathedral Orchestra jerked up on Magners and bifters the size of parsnips doing battle with the scuzz found in the gaps on all the best Sun Ra solos. Well, maybe not but you get the idea.
Bert’s Parts is a five part experimental free form fest fest thats a match for Reynols and as hippy dippy as Vashit Bunyan with her throat ripped out and a needle in her arm humping a smacked up Mike Oldfield on a pile of broken instruments. This is more of a world than a record where sounds are picked up and toyed with taken for a walk and then abandoned in favour of others. There’s theremins, scratchy strings, spazzed out electric guitar, toy keyboards, bass ruminations, jack socket abuse ... some tracks build up a head of steam and just about enter drone land, others just wander along, a pluck here, a tambourine there, a finger cymbal there, all dissolving into the Finnish wastes.
Having been left cold by what may have been loosely known as the Finnish Freaky Folk Scene of five years or more ago, this comes as the breath of Arctic fresh air thats so desperately needed at the start of 2009. There’s even a short story about Bert and his parts that comes as an insert. Kerrrazy.
“This compilation from Edinburgh based imprint Unverified brings together key figures from the Scottish noise/improv underground, plus connected scenes in Brighton and elsewhere, all investigating the possibilities of non-verbal sound poetry, and highlighting the fact that, as sound generators go, they don’t come much more versatile than the human voice. In essence, this collection reflects a movement away from the electric/psychedelic fury of noise and into more established sound-art practices. But if this is a representative snapshot of that post-noise underground’s current artistic fascinations, you have to wonder about its emotional condition. Much of this sounds lost, lonely – and dangerously spooked.
The portentously monikered Institute of Sub-Dimensional Frequency Research provides a good starting point: murky, disembodied hoots and moans evoking soft, fleshy machinery engaged in distant manoeuvres on a wet night. From there, it’s a journey into varying shades of mental turmoil. CKDH’s claustrophobic huffing sounds like a submerged diver suddenly becoming aware of the terrifying stifled intimacy of her own breathing equipment. Brighton duo Hereharehere’s multi-tracked male and female voices start as unnerving chants emanating from dark shadows, rising into unhinged glossolalia and cresting in a threatening purr, like a wild cat driven insane with fear.
Of course, it could all mean nothing at all. Regardless of the fact that contributors such as Dylan Nyoukis have been pursuing this direction for years, for some this could simply be a temporary stance. Only time will tell. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the most effective statement here comes from the most experienced practitioner – “Breathing Out Three Times” by veteran vocal improvisor Phil Minton; three long exhalations clearly recorded with a close-miked physicality that reveals his astonishing polyphonic split tones. Wailing in at least three different voices simultaneously, he becomes a whole ghastly choir of lost souls staring into the blank horror of the void. And you can tell he means it, too.”
(Daniel Spicer, The Wire November 2008)
From Idwal Fisher:
Phil Minton’s influence on the UK experimental noise scene has been more than subtle but with the likes of Dylan Nyoukis paying homage and getting vocal involvement via his curated Colour Out Of Space fest it would seem that his profile is more evident now than it has been for some time. I once saw Minton perform with the drummer Roger Turner in a tiny club in Manchester and sat there spellbound as Minton gurgled, moaned, whined and roared his vocal chords into shapes I didn’t know existed. It’s quite something to be in the presence of someone making such extraordinary sounds using just their vocal chords.
Minton sits atop a dozen or more vocal inspired tracks on The Speech Organs with a self explanatory track entitled ‘Breathing Out Three Times’. In between each lung emptying breath comes a silence and then another breath. Its simplicity is well, erm, breathtaking.
From Foxy Digitalis:
DLP brings the stranegness with a lo-fi approach...There's a lot of cut up samples, tape looping and flexidisc-flexing and it's a mixture that works well...“Go to Church”, starting off with a wash of static that gets punctured by a variety of junkyard sounds and a sampled voice that seems to have been recorded on a 1960’s tv set inside a metal workers shed. The whole thing, the collision of junkyard anti-harmonies, the voice and what sounds like treated samples of church bells is layered in such a way that it proves to be “Examinations” stand out track. “Bells (for aw cunt)” obviously consists of a number of bells doing what they do but it’s due to the way Dead Labour Process knows how to structure such ordinary sounds that makes it work. “Jail Time” feels like a drone piece played on a slowed down tape recorder while the entire 4 minutes of “Spanew” features voice samples, supported by a backdrop of soft, mushy noise. “Examinations” does feel like a complete album, they didn’t just throw anything on this cd-r and it shows. Here’s a project I’d like to hear more from in the future.
From Idwal Fisher:
Dead Labour Process’s release contains true experimentation. ‘Bells [for aw cunt]’ is a delightful piece of tinkling goat bells under which an urgent chatter of marching ants file past. ‘Jail Time’ is a sousaphone playing a lament to rattling tea cups on a tin tray whilst someone moans the Eraserhead theme.
From Rockarolla magazine:
With this mix of gutter styles heaved up over a two year period, Dead Labour Process offer a relatively smoothly produced junk-aesthetic. The garbage pail collage avoids lo-fi gunk and wallow by giving melody and virtual structure an integral role in these seven tracks. Uncomplicated repetitive spookhouse melodies, heavy bells, the gentle burble of highlight "Wings" and even a nod to the slow brass of the hauntology genre
From Foxy Digitalis:
Usurper, paired with the former members of Decaer Pinga/Prick Decay, let loose on two head-scratching free noise jams that are infused with the same spirit of sonic shenanigans as various cohorts of the Los Angeles Free Music Society. While recorded live and on separate dates with Doll and Nyoukis individually, both tracks explore the sonic potential of non-musical objects and that of the human voice.
The first track, with Doll, opens with what sounds like some sort of marble rolling and plunking about inside of a game (Hungry Hungry Hippo?) and then fills out with some added cranking noises (Jack-in-the-Box?). From here, there is a mingling of these sounds with added scrapes and squeaks, and the vocal wheezing and hacking that emerges around the five-minute mark sounds as though someone is trying to unleash some pesky lung cookie. It all crests eleven minutes in then builds back up the momentum for the duration, with vocal hiccupping and various whistle-blowers becoming more pronounced. At the onset of the track with Nyoukis, there is some similar crank and clatter, but this jam is centered more around some seriously strange vocalizations and breathing patterns, along with some oddly blown noises, that become completely blown-out and manic in sections.
I’ll stop at that, as really no amount of words will get you any closer to wrapping your head around this. I can’t say this is something I’ll return to often, but damn if it wasn’t a treat to the ears those first few spins.