Musique Machine Reviews

From Musique Machine:

Baktruppen – 1986-2008(boxset)
Baktruppen are a puzzling, sometimes challenging, but always rewarding performance art theatre group & experimental music collective from Norway. The project has been active since 1986 with quite a few shifts & changes in their line-up over the years; but they’ve always stayed truly weird, challenging, but ultimately very worthwhile in their sonic & visual outlook.

Rack – Water
Rack is the HNW project of New Yorker Jon Paris & Water is his first release which offers up two lengthy, rewarding & searing slices of thick nautical roared wall making.

Gnaw Their Tongues – All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity
It’s like, how much more black could this latest release from Netherlands’ Maurice De Jong (or Mories) be? and the answer is none. None more black. For Gnaw Their Tongues, Mories has set himself the task of taking what is commonly understood to represent the most romantically sublime, terrifying and apocalyptic in music and sound – doom metal’s grinding drum and bass sludge, the panicked screaming of vulnerable souls in flight, cinematic serialist strings of Bernard Hermann or Leonard Rosenman, and choral requiems of the 19th century – and blending it all in a cacophonous mass that goes one louder, or rather one darker, than anything that has gone before.

Frank Rothkamm – Ghost of New York
As a kid, my most-read book was a peculiar little volume called, roughly translated, the Horror Handbook. In a dozen or so chapters, it set out the basics of horror: what kind of creatures you might encounter in horror stories, essential horror movies, essential reading, and so on. The chapters were accompanied by black-and-white, charcoal illustrations of the creatures and situations described: a head sprouting legs, a creepy shaman, the emaciated undead, etcetera. Most intriguing was the chapter on ghosts. Not only did it describe (and depict, most creepily) your typical pale dead persons walking through walls and stirring things up a bit, it also delved into ghosts of an inanimate nature: ghost carriages, ghost cars, and many other ghost possessed items.

Roto Visage – Where the Mandrakes Grow
I’ve always felt that dark ambient had something to offer me. There’s an undeniable attraction in the dark and gloomy sound scapes, the raw, gritty and dirt stretch of unpleasant sound. And then there’s the darkness in the imagery – to anyone even remotely interested in experimental music of the dirtier kind, there’s definite appeal there. It’s all about what lies in the shadows, what harrowing visions appear at the edge of my vision as I’m drenched in eternal blackness – this obscurity, this understated-ness is ever intriguing, and, though we are drenched in darkness, we are eager to find our way through it, or to get lost in it, and then to disappear completely.

White Plague/Wallkeeper – Split
This double disc CDR release offers up two Walls of near unchanging Harsh noise matter that fall between just short of an hour & just over an hour a piece. The first disc is taken up by Minneapolis based White Plague who is Sam Stoxen(which runs Phage tapes & is also in Baculum, …Massacre & junk noise collective Grain Belt) & Angie Ridgeway. And the second disc features Nordrhein-Westfalen Germany based HNW act Wallkeeper.