New releases finally available, with updates across the site:
(sic 120) Mo*Te & Worth C-30
New split cassette from two harsh noise artists who should need no introduction. Mo*Te has been spawning unsettled harsh noise from Saitama, Japan, since the mid-1990s, a unique voice even among the abundance of artists of the time. Since resurrecting Mo*Te in 2012 Fumiyuki Nagura has continued in that same turgid style with intermittent cassette releases and also had his early work compiled by Industrial Recollections and Audio Dissection for a 2019 boxset. His two tracks here are especially mean, a malignancy coursing through the material for a focus and frustration unlike any previous work.
Worth adds another collection of splayed and restless noise to Will VanGorder’s impressive discography, after recent releases on Total Black and Nefarious Activities. There’s an immediate connection to Fumiyuki’s own motivations and tendencies, the tracks never shaking their debt to the mid-1990s noise underground, lingering melancholia, and the tension between creator and equipment.
Edition of 75 copies, packaged in mesh, wire and printed parts as my tribute to the Mo*Te/Cracksteel ‘Brain Storm’ cassette released by Fumiyuki Nagura’s Uncut label in 1996, one of many amazing packaging works the label crafted.
Edition of 75 copies in a semi-transparent sleeve of cut-and-paste artwork, ziplock-bagged.
(sic 118) Uboa The Origin Of My Depression & The Sky May Be C-42 + C-30
‘The Sky May Be’ and ‘The Origin Of My Depression’ are the most recent full-length recordings by Melbourne’s Uboa, finally available on this double cassette set released by Cipher Productions.
‘The Sky May Be’ is “a work about poverty, sex, anxiety and love", an overpowering record that slips between dreamy ambience and nightmarish caverns of harsh noise. The record rattles with a sense of instability from start to finish – song structures are freeform and unbound by chorus or verse, harsh elements attack at random yet land perfectly, and it’s rare that any single track can be summed up as solely ambient or noise. The sum of the music is a feeling that pushes sound and mind to its limits, reaping new forms of terror and weakness as the seconds pass by.
‘The Origin Of My Depression’ moves beyond Uboa’s expert ambient and harsh noise craftings to explore elements of shoegaze and found sound, but without ever losing its identity as a craft and highly evocative harsh noise record. theneedledrop describes the release as “a ‘cerebral dive’ into Xandra's most negative and intense feelings of being a transgender woman... via ‘intense feelings of abandonment... expressed through intense soundscapes... and walls of distortion’, culminating in a wide expanse of styles and soundscapes.
Both releases feature extended artwork. The first 25 copies are packaged in a surgical dish with a an individually numbered printed cloth cover, while the remaining 50 copies are packaged in a double-sided cloth and photograph cover, in a ziplock bag.
(sic 116) Un Regard Froid Accélération CD
Inhumanist Singularity Electronics.
Accélération is the second full-length by Quebec-based project Un Regard Froid. Pure accelerated devotion to cyberschizophrenic deterritorialization. Celebrating machinic impulses and void lust. Injecting propergol and the ashes of economists.
Edition of 100 copies in a printed box, with a 16 page booklet of expositive artwork.
(sic 106) Culver The Razor And Deceit 12" + 3xC-40 boxset
Eight sides of ashen drone from British mainstay Lee Stokoe, covering a lathe-cut LP and three cassettes. Singular tones, melodic memories, extended techniques and raw electronics are all subsumed into the drone vortex, smothered by Culver’s billowing drones and electronics dustcloud. After a heft of releases on his own Matching Head label, At War With False Noise and Turgid Animal, and an extended reach into the experimental underground, I’m very pleased to present this release as an extended study of Culver’s central capabilities.
Limited edition of only 20 copies, special packaging. Currently only 8 copies are for sale, the remainder will be listed at a future date.
