Cerca:violence

Satisfaction comes in many forms. When the magical word Motown is uttered, most people are hard-wired to The Four Tops, the Temptations and The Supremes. But to reduce Motown to the effervescent sixties is only part of the label’s remarkable legacy.
By the 1970s, a different sound was gathering. America was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The Vietnam War had been a disaster, urban street crime was epidemic and the nation’s college campuses were alive with political resistance. The joyful hope that had inspired “Baby Love” now felt anachronistic and out of time.

The music industry was changing too. The vinyl pop single on 45rpm which had been the staple of Motown’s success was being challenged by concept albums.   This was the era of Edwin Starr’s anti-war album War and Peace (1970), The Temptations mind-bending Psychedelic Shack (1970) and Marvin Gaye’s state-of-the-nation classic What’s Going On (1971).
By the early 1970s Motown had a stable of male vocalists that was arguably the best in the world, among them former lead singers from The Temptations - David Ruffin, Dennis Edwards and Eddie Kendricks. Alongside them singer-producers like Leon Ware and Frank Wilson were asserting their presence.

David Ruffin’s “Crime in the Street” captured the epidemic of violence in Detroit allowing his exquisite voice to quietly rage against gun crime. Recorded a few years before his underground classic “Rode by the Place”, both sound more modern today than when they were recorded.
If there is a common thread here, it’s the mid-tempo shifting soul soon to be christened as “quiet storm” including groups on the margins of Motown such as The Originals and The Fantastic Four led by the impassioned “Sweet” James Epps.
Just to keep you satisfied, immerse yourself in the overlooked creativity of Detroit’s male voices in the early 1970s.

Released by Hegoa Records and Night School Records.
Greatest Heads is the fourth album by the radical Basque- Berlinesque group Al Karpenter. A deconstruction of structured “rock” music, here Al Karpenter re-imagine “the band” to explore the intersection between Free music, afro-beat, the avant garde and gonzo rock.
If Theodore Adorno wrote “To Write Poetry after Auschwitz is Barbaric” in 1949, Al Karpenter attempts to answer the difficult question today; what kind of music can be done in the face of a genocide? Álvaro Matilla, Marta Sainz, Enrique Zaccagnini & Mattin’s response to the planet’s slipping into a vortex of hate is to create a music ecstatic, a music of protest bursting with multiple musical languages and glossaries, full of overlapping histories and thrilling tensions.
Greatest Heads posits a plurality of musics both in opposition and intertwined: Al Karpenter play rock instruments pulled apart in the studio in post-production. Distorted rhythm chunks bit-crushed and dissipated, segments of freedom oppressed by waves of sound invading from every direction. The interplay between the chief instrumentalists and renowned, storied sound artist Mattin creates something akin to ESP freedom-seekers Cro Magnon playing in Miles Davis’ early 70s groups, The Los Angeles Free Music Society tightening up into a clenched fist of plunderphonics and runaway percussion.
We Are All Karpenters opens Greatest Heads with the most straight-forward song refrain of the record accompanied by a band that soon crash into eruption, imagining Sun City Girls in full free rock mode.
The modulating synth sound soon sucks the band into its wake to create a spine-chilling climax of distorted sound, made fully orgasmic with mastering engineer Rashad Becker’s attention to detail. On Izugarrizko Buruak (Greatest Heads), Matilla intones in Basque over a mangled distorto-beat. A Brand New Astraphobia creates a black space for a heavily processed guitar to blow up before falling to earth at night, a gentle figure serenading the coming end.
On Side B, the band begins by being masticated by a brutal phaser, squelching and stretching the music into new territories. The overt message of Stop The Genocide! is besieged by violence before Worm City aggressively samples the ghosts of soul music, mixing in noise bursts, prepared piano and swiping, abstracted sound. Epic closer Perfect Love feels like a beat poetry performance on a burnt world, still grasping for community, for home, for some sort of human love. A Mad love, then; an angry love fuelled by solidarity and collaboration.
The band’s cascading layers of references and polyglottal musics attempt to create the perfect lover, alive with rage and disorientating ecstasy: Al Karpenter.

Nu-hardcore quintet, Bodyweb, are the sound of someone’s nervous system on the verge of breakdown—hyperactive, tormented and unflinchingly vulnerable. Born out of the Leeds hardcore scene, they’re a shape-shifting alloy of jagged emotion and precision chaos. What began as late-night jams between Louis Hardy (Higher Power, Big Cheese, Fate) and Ben Jones (Pest Control) eventually mutated into train_wreck_simulation, a debut EP filled with frantic breakdowns and nu-metal swag that felt like the soundtrack to a digital exorcism. The final piece of the puzzle came from Hardy’s estranged childhood friend, pq. His twisted samples and synthetic textures are haunted and disturbed, injecting cyberpunk soul into hardcore flesh. Contorting through several iterations in the following years, the band absorbed Luke Thompson (Stiff Meds) on drums, filmmaker Tom Hobson on guitar and Naomi Macleod (Empire State Bastard) on bass, and laid down their first collective offering. deadwired is due out on Flatspot Records later this year. Bodyweb's second EP is a violent thesis on connection and pain that sends Hardy’s unfiltered vocals through heaven and hell. Four overstimulating tracks run a gamut of styles and influences from Slipknot to Björk, constantly lane-switching between dizzying heaviness, ambient soundscapes and brain-burrowing hooks. Entirely self-produced, deadwired upgrades the sonic formula laid down on the last record and raises the question: what else could exist in Bodyweb’s twisted roadmap? Nothing seems impossible. What seems important, however, is retaining the rawness in a style that can often turn sterile. “We still wanted it to sound very human. It had to be well produced but not cold and lifeless.” shares Hardy. “We didn’t use a click track. All guitars were real amps with microphones. We tried to make everything as real and raw as possible, we recorded using all the same gear we use when playing live too to really capture the energy of how it feels when we jam together." ‘Deadwired’ is a snapshot of violent implosion. Four ADHD-fuelled transmissions from the edge of spiritual collapse. It drags metallic hardcore through glitched-out ambience to confront ego death, generational trauma, and the violence of being alive. On stage, Bodyweb don’t just perform, they purge. Raucous live electronics meld with digitally contorted guitars. Breakbeats meet breakdowns—no backing track in sight. Bodyweb enable a collective catharsis. Mosh, dance, dive, scream, heal. A physical therapy session screamed into the void.

Pickle Darling has always existed just outside of the periphery. In a heightened time of fast music, algorithmic consumption and rapid virality, Lukas Mayo (they/them) has remained focused on the album. Their discography is a reflection of their creative evolution, and they deliberately look for ways to push sonic boundaries from release to release. Since debuting with Bigness in 2019 followed by Cosmonaut in 2021, Mayo has curated a catalog that is deeply personal and strangely tactile, where tiny, unexpected details_an off-kilter loop, a whispered aside, the warmth of an old Casio_become as crucial as melody itself. Their 2023 LP Laundromat was a precise and polished expansion of that world, a record that felt like it had been carefully placed behind glass. Their forthcoming fourth album, Battlebots, by contrast, is unruly and full of static: a collection of songs that feel like they could only ever exist on scratched CD-Rs passed between friends. Self-recorded in their home studio in Christchurch, New Zealand, it finds Mayo taking a scalpel to their own songwriting. Songs were stretched, chopped, reversed. Some ideas started as "unlistenable garbage" before morphing into something unexpectedly beautiful. If a song felt too straightforward, Mayo had to mess it up. That friction of old and new, organic and digital, melody and noise is what drives Battlebots. Drawing inspiration from a strange, scattered lineage: Four Tet's Rounds, The Books, Neneh Cherry's Broken Politics, The Wrens' Three types of reading ambiguity, but also the emotional directness of 2000s pop like Madonna's Ray of Light and Robyn's Body Talk, the result is an album that feels like a glitch in the system, pushing against past constraints while embracing the weird, beautiful mess of making something new.

Second part of second album! Originating from Normandy, France, psychedelic noise-pop quartet You Said Strange presents a unique blend of indie rock that incorporates elements of psych pop-rock, shoegaze, and proto-grunge. Thousand Shadows volume 2, a second chapter was needed to highlight the many shadows that still linger everywhere. The shadows that linger on the borders, hiding the violence of the fights for them. The shadows that time has on the relationships and their persistence, because the shadows move. Plato's cave, modern version, would be the one of toxic relationships, antidepressants and the acceptance of the regression of freedom and/or the vision of a dying world... Between shoegaze, noise pop and psychedelic rock, You Said Strange absorbs its time to incant a music in which melancholy, love and the search for plenitude meet. The band recorded their first album, Salvation Prayer, in 2018 in Portland (USA), with Peter G. Holmstrom from The Dandy Warhols, which saw release via Fuzz Club Recirds. In 2022, the band shared their LP Thousand Shadows Vol. 1. Mythomaniac kings, the Mediterranean, the colors of mourning _ these are the detailed subjects, described against a backdrop of psychedelic pop, proto grunge, and shoegaze. The first part of a powerful, reverberant, melodious second album, drawing its inspiration and production stem from encounters during their 2022 European and North American tours, between Normandy, New York, and Oregon. Most recently, You Said Strange shared the second part of their sophomore release, a follow-up to Vol. 1 entitled Thousand Shadows Vol. 2.

Mutant, in partnership with Howe Records, is proud to present Howard Shore's incredible score and 17th collaboration with legendary filmmaker David Cronenberg: THE SHROUDS. Over the course of four decades, Howard Shore and David Cronenberg have collaborated on countless masterpieces (Crash, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, History of Violence... the list goes on and on). The Shrouds continues in the mold of Crimes of the Future, with a delicate but deceptive score. In a film about burial, decay, and the search for meaning—marred by conspiracy theories and an overreliance on technology—the film and score find a space that balances the ethereal and the dreadful. The sacred and profane. It's a profoundly beautiful work of art from a maestro who has made some of the best film music of our lifetimes. "Howard Shore’s score, a mix of hymns and organs, beautifully layers the film’s imagery.”

Mutant, in partnership with Howe Records, is proud to present Howard Shore's incredible score and 17th collaboration with legendary filmmaker David Cronenberg: THE SHROUDS.

Over the course of four decades, Howard Shore and David Cronenberg have collaborated on countless masterpieces (Crash, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, History of Violence... the list goes on and on). The Shrouds continues in the mold of Crimes of the Future, with a delicate but deceptive score. In a film about burial, decay, and the search for meaning—marred by conspiracy theories and an overreliance on technology—the film and score find a space that balances the ethereal and the dreadful. The sacred and profane.

Playing with a Different Sex was the debut album by seminal post-punk band Au Pairs, released in 1981.

Described retrospectively by AllMusic as ‘one of the great post-punk records’, a review by Record Mirror on its release said the band’s ‘critique of all forms of possession and sexual stereotyping assumes a devastating power’. Themes include sexual politics and the torture of women imprisoned in Northern Ireland during The Troubles of the 1970s, as well as a stunning cover of David Bowie’s ‘Repetition’ about domestic violence. It peaked at No. 33 in the UK, and features the single ‘It's Obvious’, which reached No. 37 on the US Club Play Singles chart. Playing with a Different Sex is available as a numbered limited edition of 750 copies on turquoise coloured vinyl and contains an insert.

Mayssa Jallad is a Beirut-based bilingual singer-songwriter, architectural researcher and teacher. Her work deals with the highly personal as well as the political, as with her first solo album "Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels", which explores the histories of urban battles that occurred before she was born, during the Lebanese Civil War, through a collaborative musical and architectural lens. "(Marjaa) is, as one might expect, a sombre affair largely comprised of Jallad's delicate vocals backed by acoustic guitar and ethereal synthesizer. Elsewhere, co-composer and producer Fadi Tabbal adds the crackle of distant artillery and a ghostly wind between the high-rise blocks." - Daniel Spicer, Songlines, April 2023 "Historical trauma, strings, drones, metallophones and buzuks wrap around powerful stories and gossamer vocals on Lebanese singer's tender, intimate debut. With shades of Nico, Jarboe and Elizabeth Fraser, '80s' 4AD fans will rejoice." - Andy Cowan, MOJO `Marjaa_' (tr. `reference') combined Mayssa Jallad's two main vocations: music and urban research/architectural history. The album was co-written with Fadi Tabbal and based on Mayssa's Historic Preservation master's thesis (`Beirut's Civil War Hotel District: Preserving the World's First High-Rise Urban Battlefield'). The thesis examined a 5-month conflict that took place within Beirut's skyscraper-laden luxury hotel district of Minet El Husn near the start of the Lebanese Civil War. Addressing a post-war generation who have never been taught this difficult history, `Marjaa_' was an attempt to process trauma, and "a call to protest for the renewal, rather than the recycling of the political class that once destroyed the country and holds us, to this day, hostage of its violence". In 2013, Mayssa founded indie-pop band Safar with guitarist Elie Abdelnour, releasing debut album In Transit with Lebanese indie label Ruptured in 2017, and follow-up EP Studies of an Unknown Lover in 2019. Both albums were produced by Lebanese producer Fadi Tabbal at Tunefork Studios in Beirut. Mayssa's most recent multi-genre collaborations include "Madina min Baeed" (2022) with electronic musician/producer Khaled Allaf; "Bi Kheir" and "Fil Aatma" (2022) with indie supergroup Baada Ab (Dani Shukri, Ezra Tenenbaum and Omaya Malaeb), released by Thawra records and Found Sound Nation. Next is the Versions version of Marjaa, which sees Civilistjävel! (aka Swedish producer Tomas Bodén) apply a stripped, dub methodology to Mayssa's original rich stems, refracting the Arabic source through the hazy prism of Northern European electronica. 140gsm vinyl, jacket printed on 20pt board with aqueous gloss coating, with a 3.5mm spine and a black paper inner dust sleeve.

In 1995, when Cobweb-day was released, Fabrice Laureau was 24, Nicolas Laureau 21, Ludovic Morillon 22, and Quentin Rollet, who had just joined them on this new album, was 21. Prohibition, founded in 1989, had already released two albums: Turtle in 1993 and Nobodinside in 1994, on the Distorsion label. Cobweb-day, literally "Spider-web Day," is poetic, satirical, and libertarian. A title conceived by Nicolas to express all the feelings and themes explored on the album, this neologism also echoes the artwork on the cover. The lyrics describe, in vitriolic poetry and with a touch of self-deprecation, a world based on the powers of commodification and order, on submission to modern Molochs. Thirty years ago, it addressed themes such as the trade in minds and bodies, Kafkaesque justice, state violence, and Western blindness. Is this a coincidence that might raise a smile? Fabrice and Nicolas were both conscientious objectors at the time the album was written. The deceptively childish drawing that adorns the cover was created by Fabrice in 1989. It evokes African art and the skyscraper where the brothers grew up. Its title? "Glances on the Horizon." Yet, in these naive eyes, locked in a rhizomic matrix, there is the disturbing sensation of being observed, scrutinized, or perhaps imprisoned. This is Cobweb-day. During this period, the band spent its entire life touring with the British post-punk trio Headcleaner and the furious Lyon-based Condense. Their correspondence, followed by a meeting in 1994 with Guy Picciotto, singer-guitarist in Fugazi, led to a series of concerts with the Washington, DC quartet, around the time of the album's release in the spring of 1995. Quentin Rollet gradually joined the band, first on stage and then on the records. The concerts of this era often ended with long improvisations featuring saxophone, sitar, bass, and drums. Prohibition had emerged from the shadows, but chose to continue evolving underground, with the Laureau brothers creating their label Prohibited Records. Cobweb-day serves as the first reference. Thirty years ago, then. The album was recorded at Ark Studios near Paris in January 1995, along with eight other previously unreleased tracks. This new mix was created at Black Box Studios by Peter Deimel and Nicolas from 24-track analog tapes in August 1998, shortly before the release of 14 Ups & Downs, Prohibition's fifth and final album, and their US tour. All tracks were remastered by Fabrice and Nicolas Laureau in March/April 2025.

Der Perkele Album-Klassiker 'A Way Out' jetzt erhältlich als Ltd. Transparent Yellow Vinyl!

Mit 'A Way out' gelingt PERKELE, Göteborgs finest since 1993, erneut ein Street Rock'n'Roll-Blueprint, ein maßgeschneidertes Statement. 10 Old School Bootboy Anthems, eine mächtige PERKELE-Stampede aus Zorn und Leidenschaft. Rough, kickin', catchy! PERKELE sind wieder bissiger geworden, klingen wieder "schwedischer". Ihr Sound orientiert sich an eigenen Meisterwerken, vereint die schroffe Aggro-Kante von 'Voice of Anger' mit den goldenen Singalongs von 'Confront' und den grandiosen Melodien von 'Forever'. Dazu dirty UK'79 Basics, griffige R'n'R Traditionals und eine deutliche Working Class/Way of Life-Message. "Dagegen"-Klartext von der Straße, antisocial for life: Der A.C.A.B.-Smasher 'He loves violence' bringt es amtlich auf den Punkt, die Gier-Gesellschaft bekommt mit 'Dedicated to nothing' ihre Widmung ins Gesicht gespuckt und auch "Leave me alone" läßt keine Fragen offen. Und die Party kommt auch nicht zu kurz: 'The boots will dance tonight, to the sound of the street!'. Das ist ein Versprechen. 'A way out' liefert die neuen Hymnen.

"Wind, Again" is Sary Moussa’s fourth studio album and second album on Other People. Based between France and Lebanon, Moussa returns with a riveting electro-acoustic album informed by his ever-changing relationships to space, listening, and resonance as well as his growing interest in the study of harmonics in electronic and electro-acoustic music.

Years in the making, “Wind, Again” approaches distinct musical worlds and languages by bringing together improvisations by musicians performing on Western and West Asian instruments such as the Hammond organ, clarinet, saz, and buzuk with electronic arrangements and textures. Rather than force a rapprochement of these musical worlds through the instruments, and keenly aware of the weighty sonic histories they carry, Moussa proposes another way through which they can exist together in contemporary electronic composition.

Composed of six tracks, each of which demonstrate an array of recording and processing techniques, the album generates moments of tension produced by the synthesis of textural, tonal, and harmonic encounters that Moussa calls “shadows”, which outline an impressionistic musical language, existing at the edge of familiarity. Such moments permeate tracks like “Everywhere at once” and “Violence” that open with the Hammond organ and the saz respectively and slowly reveal an expansive field of sounds that showcases each of the musicians’ characteristic performances and Moussa’s densely layered textures. It is a latent yet unrelenting tension through which the composer invokes rather than represents a collective experiential state, especially familiar to those who know his environment. In “Wind, Again” these shadows are articulations of sounds steeped in traditions they are never quite tethered to. Such articulations are implied and alluded to, they play within a musical reference without the latter explicitly existing in the recording, always teetering, never completely here nor there.
Sonically and musically, the album is fueled by the cultural, social, and personal realities that Moussa was brought up and lives in.

Both personal and musical ties with the musicians who feature on the album is central to Moussa’s practice. In the title track “I will never write a song about you”, musician Julia Sabra opens with rolled piano chords, followed by Paed Conca on clarinet and Abed Kobeissy on buzuk, before Moussa’s electronic processing pieces together, lifts, and sustains the melodic direction of the track that emerged from the musicians’ separate improvisations. For Moussa: “The initial connection between the three performances was made on a track that no longer existed, the original recording was both an obstacle and necessary step for the track we hear on the record. It’s as if we were all telling different stories and I pulled on the thread that held them together”. The track, and more generally the record, is tinged with a melancholy of things lost, though it never fully succumbs to it.
“Everything inside a circle”, Moussa’s most personal track and for which he provides the only vocals on the record, harkens back to a childhood memory of listening to music with his mother in a car: “There was a sound I was looking for — a memory of a sound and how I first heard it. This track is a hybrid of that memory and what I wanted to make of it”. The track relies heavily on generativesystems and perhaps embodies most the ambiguous quality of the record’s music in its refusal to be pinned down by one musical tradition or another.
“Wind, Again” is both familiar and alien, cold and warm; it pays homage to the mechanics, materials, and tactility of the instruments and converges acoustic and synthetic spaces. What anchors the sound of the album are the elements of a whole that cannot find its own idiosyncrasy and that is precisely why Moussa’s album is a tour de force.

Civilistjävel! x Mayssa Jallad’s ‘Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels (Versions)’ is a radical response to Mayssa Jallad’s 2023 original LP, a lyrical account of epochal events in Beirut at the dawn of Lebanon's civil war. ‘…(Versions)’ sees Civilistjävel! (aka Swedish producer Tomas Bodén) apply a stripped, dub methodology to Mayssa's rich stems, refracting the Arabic source through the hazy prism of Northern European electronica. Retaining ‘Marjaa…’s deep spatial framing and vaporous, shifting nature, traces are lifted and set down in a new landscape: a ghost of a ghost. Informed by Tomas' singular strand of ambient, minimalist, dub techno, ‘… (Versions)’ recalls the reductive, shimmering pulse of pioneering Berlin-based practitioners Basic Channel/Chain Reaction, but with the parameters stretched into the ether. Where versions typically focus on a rhythm, here the anchor is the tone and texture of Mayssa’s voice, around which a new world has been constructed. Disembodied and liminal, it conjures an eerie panorama that feels like a postscript to the original, further emphasizing the geopolitical events that have had such devastating effect in Mayssa’s homeland of Lebanon since that record’s release. ‘Marjaa…’ (tr. ‘reference’) combined Mayssa Jallad’s two main vocations: music and urban research/architectural history. The album was co-written with Fadi Tabbal and based on Mayssa's Historic Preservation master's thesis (‘Beirut’s Civil War Hotel District: Preserving the World’s First High-Rise Urban Battlefield’). The thesis examined a 5-month conflict that took place within Beirut's skyscraper-laden luxury hotel district of Minet El Husn near the start of the Lebanese Civil War. Addressing a post-war generation who have never been taught this difficult history, ‘Marjaa…’ was an attempt to process trauma, and “a call to protest for the renewal, rather than the recycling of the political class that once destroyed the country and holds us, to this day, hostage of its violence.” Often perceived as a mysterious, shadowy presence, Civilistjävel! has come increasingly to the fore in recent years through a consistently dazzling stream of records, released both anonymously and via Fergus Jones’ FELT imprint, often appearing with scant information and tracks for the most part untitled. Having featured tracks from ‘Marjaa…’ on mixes, and included the album in his picks of 2023, in early 2024 Tomas asked Mayssa to provide vocals for a track on his album ‘Brödföda’. Mayssa remembers, “Tomas asked me to choose one of the tracks he was working on. I was in Boston at the time, so I took a walk and chose a track. I wrote the lyrics at the public park, wondering if I was the only one around that was losing sleep over the genocide in Palestine and the war in South Lebanon. I went back to the apartment and recorded the vocals on my phone, while listening to the track on headphones. Tomas reworked it with the voice and sent it back. I liked it immediately.” Despite the geographical distance from Beirut to Uppsala, Sweden, where Tomas resides, Mayssa’s contribution sounds very much at home in Civilistjävel!’s atmospheric, contemplative sound-world. Tomas’ request was reciprocated by Mayssa soon after, resulting in the spectral, glassy ambience of ‘Etel, Kharita (Version)’. This was followed by an invitation to work on more tracks, which Tomas immediately embraced, intensively jamming out versions live to two-track tape in downtime between travelling. If not entirely dissimilar to his regular working practice, the immediacy of it was unusual. Much was improvised live with just a keyboard (not tethered to a grid), and a restricted set-up that largely forbade later edits - only the rhythm tracks are programmed. A sharp conceptual thinker and composer, Tomas takes creative liberties with Mayssa’s songs in a way that is deeply felt and sympathetically aligned, whilst unashamedly outside of the original context of the record. The voice is leaned into as an instrument, without the clear, specific details of language, and this axis provides an uncertain, amorphous footing - structure is often suggested or hinted at, before disappearing or collapsing into fog, and folding back into the message within the song. A somewhat unprecedented source for an album of versions, even those familiar with ‘Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels’ may at points struggle to hear the songs these versions are rebuilt from, despite the vocal narratives remaining virtually intact. The light has shifted; eroded buildings are foregrounded; fragments of memories appear in chiaroscuro. Signs and signifiers have been replaced. Shorn of the original's warm guitar, ‘Baynana (Version)’ feels like an ominous visitation, the sun no longer visible. ‘Holiday Inn (March 21 to 29) (Version)’ is a molten, clattering invocation. The beat-less tracks nod towards the cold, otherworldly sound-scaping of late '90s isolationism. More propulsive and embodied, ‘Holiday Inn (January to March) (Version)’ and ‘Kharita (Dub)’ are strobing, iridescent techno - lithe, shifting and mutating with almost implausible finesse. A stunning addition to Civilistjävel!’s growing catalogue, ‘…(Versions)’ is a luminous counterpoint to ‘Marjaa…’, and a welcome reminder of how incredible that record remains.

Seit Mitte der 1980er Jahre prägt Caspar Brötzmann einen unverkennbaren Sound - infernal, radikal, kompromisslos. Unbeirrt verfolgt er seinen eigenen Weg, jenseits klarer Genregrenzen. Als Sohn des berühmten Saxofonisten Peter Brötzmann fand er früh seine künstlerische Identität und entwickelte eine einzigartige Klangsprache, die sich in brachialer Katharsis entlädt. Seine Musik ist keine Anpassung an Trends, sondern eine sensible, leidenschaftliche, fast autistisch anmutende Annäherung an Verzweiflung und Wut - und doch voller Hoffnung. Mit seiner virtuosen Eigenständigkeit am Instrument ist er eine Ausnahmeerscheinung. Ein atonaler Hendrix, made in Germany. Nach der Veröffentlichung seiner ersten Komposition "The Lovers And Destroyers" mit Caspar Brötzmann Bass Totem im Herbst 2024 veröffentlicht der international renommierte Gitarrist nun eine Platte mit seiner Band Massaker beim deutschen Label Exile On Mainstream. Es ist die erste Aufnahme der genreprägenden Band seit 26 Jahren nach dem letzten, 1999 erschienen Album "Mute Massaker". "It's a Love Song" besteht aus zwei unterschiedlichen Versionen seines Songs "All This Violence", die im Januar 2025 in Wien und Dresden mit Saskia von Klitzing (Drums) und Eduardo Delgado Lopez (Bass) aufgenommen wurden. Angesichts der aktuellen Weltlage entschied Brötzmann, mit "All This Violence" ein klares Zeichen zu setzen. Er selbst schreibt dazu: " Schon nach ein paar Augenblicken war klar: was ich hier hörte, hatte die Botschaft, die Kraft und spiegelt unser Zeitgeschehen wieder. Keine von meinen Studioaufnahmen hatte diese Power. Und das war nur die eine Seite, es bedeutete auch den Spalt zwischen Schwarz und Weiß zu finden, zwischen Hell und Dunkel und zwischen Leicht und Schwer, wohin mit all meinen anderen Songs? Lange, lange habe ich nach der Achse gesucht und völlig unerwartet stand sie plötzlich neben mir im Raum . . ."

Das Erfolgsalbum Junk Culture von Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark aus dem Jahr 1984 erfährt die gleiche Behandlung wie seine beiden Vorgänger „Architecture & Morality“ und „Dazzle Ships“: Es wurde von den Originalbändern neu gemastert und von Miles Showell in den Abbey Road Studios Half-Speed gemastert. Die 1LP ist ab dem 20.06.2025 überall erhältlich.

Third installment on Raw Elegance is here. MBM delivers a new chapter for the label including 4 track crafted to shake the dancefloors in different moments of the night.
A1 “Dancebreaker” gives the name to the record: deep and focused with some tribal touches and a mesmerizing vocal.
A2 “Smash and Prey” criticizes the behavior of those who do harm and then clear their conscience, as well as the contradiction in accepting violence if it is conveyed by religion.
B1. “Empty Minds” features a vocal guest, with a mental and repetitive yet focus approach that gets the listener lost in the concept of time.
B2. “Vocaltool” closes the release, providing an energetic and muscular vibe with minimalistic and tribal vision.

a A1 Bull In The Heather, Other [Selected By] – Catherine Keener
[b] A2 100%, Other [Selected By] – Mike D
[c] A3 Sugar Kane, Other [Selected By] – Beck
[d] A4 Kool Thing; Other [Selected By] – Radiohead
[e] B1 Disappearer; Other [Selected By] – Portia de Rossi
[f] B2 Superstar; Other [Selected By] – Diablo Cody
[g] B3 Stones; Other [Selected By] – Allison Anders
[h] B4 Tuff Gnarl; Other [Selected By] – Dave Eggers, Mike Watt
[i] C1 Teenage Riot; Other [Selected By] – Eddie Vedder
[j] C2 Shadow Of A Doubt; Other [Selected By] – Michelle Williams
[k] C3 Rain On Tin; Other [Selected By] – Flea
[l] C4 Tom Violence; Other [Selected By] – Gus Van Sant
[m] D1 Mary-Christ; Other [Selected By] – David Cross
[n] D2 World Looks Red; Other [Selected By] – Chloë Sevigny
[o] D3 Expressway To Yr Skull; Other [Selected By] – The Flaming Lips

[a] A1 Bull In The Heather, Other [Selected By] – Catherine Keener
[b] A2 100%, Other [Selected By] – Mike D
[c] A3 Sugar Kane, Other [Selected By] – Beck
[d] A4 Kool Thing; Other [Selected By] – Radiohead
[e] B1 Disappearer; Other [Selected By] – Portia de Rossi
[f] B2 Superstar; Other [Selected By] – Diablo Cody
[g] B3 Stones; Other [Selected By] – Allison Anders
[h] B4 Tuff Gnarl; Other [Selected By] – Dave Eggers, Mike Watt
[i] C1 Teenage Riot; Other [Selected By] – Eddie Vedder
[j] C2 Shadow Of A Doubt; Other [Selected By] – Michelle Williams
[k] C3 Rain On Tin; Other [Selected By] – Flea
[l] C4 Tom Violence; Other [Selected By] – Gus Van Sant
[m] D1 Mary-Christ; Other [Selected By] – David Cross
[n] D2 World Looks Red; Other [Selected By] – Chloë Sevigny
[o] D3 Expressway To Yr Skull; Other [Selected By] – The Flaming Lips

From "Spirit Of The Air"'s violence, "Cross Over"'s industrial poundings, the PCP-infused minimalism of "High On Angel Dust", to "Someone Was There" mixing techno and hardcore, Derniere Danse Part II outlines what Manu le Malin is as a producer : not afraid to visit experimental soundscapes nor ashamed to go straight to the dancefloor point... But always soaked in darkness. This is a black gateway to the world of MKNK's head, through five of his all-time favorite tracks, including one unreleased, all remastered by Scan X and Deathmachine.

But before pressing play, consider yourself warned : the first track "Spirit Of The Air", with its tortuous intro, piano break, screams samples and references to The Exorcist saga, is relentless, violent and unpredictable. And things don't go softer with "Cross Over", also an extract from his Fighting Spirit album (2002), a downright industrial attack that sounds particularly up-to-date.

Unreleased "High On Angel Dust" then shows Manu's admiration to the label PCP (hence the powdery title) and its founder Marc Acardipan. An oddity in his discography that almost never saw the light of the day : the synths and TR-909 based track was recorded in one night, and completely forgotten in a DAT for 28 years! "Someone Was There", from the soundtrack of Jalil Lespert's 24 Mesures, and the esteemed classic "One The Way Home", available as a bonus in the digital release, conclude this handpicked selection.

Diverse, personal, tormented and yet dancefloor compatible, Derniere Danse Part I and Part II feature some of Manu's best works. But they also are a stepping stone : MKNK will now open to new artists exploring every dark corner of what hardcore music can be.

"Evil is very real and having its way, and love is also real and hasn't lost yet." That's how Activity's Travis Johnson described their third album, A Thousand Years In Another Way. A friend had asked why these songs seemed to capture the strange, heavy feeling of being alive right now better than anything else_and that was his answer. The album doesn't try to explain this time we're living in; it simply feels like it. It's a mix of violence, alienation, and tenderness_reflecting the surreal, dreamlike (or nightmarish) rhythm of daily life. Across ten songs, Activity blends experimental rock, electronics, and found sounds with a sense of paranoia, flickers of hope, and a warped reality. Working with producer Jeff Berner (of Psychic TV), the band manipulated sounds and played with room acoustics to create a feeling that's disorienting_like the air is thick and the walls are listening. Coming out of a period of uncertainty, the Brooklyn-based quartet_Travis Johnson, Jess Rees, Bri DiGioia, and Steven Levine_pieced the album together from fragments: clipped samples, looping guitar lines, ghostly melodies. Rees, DiGioia, and Johnson share vocal and writing duties, shaping a record that feels both deeply personal and strangely alien. There's a constant sense that things could shift or fall apart at any second_nothing stays one thing for long. A Thousand Years In Another Way might not offer answers, but it captures the feeling of right now better than most. And maybe, it sounds a bit like your world too.

Violent Delights is an anthology of stories that meanders through themes of grief, rage, desire and identity. There are stories of the toxicity of addiction, and growing up around religion; stories of overwhelming obsession, isolating abandonment, and empowering anthems of identity, and stark laments about sexual violence. They are each lived experiences, laid bare, reclaimed with every syllable whether dripping in spite or swagger, anger or anxiety. "Loss is a central theme of the album," explains vocalist Kate Price. "For us, we have our own specific version of what that is in these songs, but for anyone listening, it could be the loss of something else - a loved one, a relationship. But we're never mourning loss. We're celebrating it. Loss is almost universally looked at as a negative, but we're finding the positives in those moments. We had to go through hell to get to heaven. Violent Delights is about looking back with gratitude, and even fondness, the closing of one chapter and beginning of another." Jools - comprised of Kate Price, Mitch Gordon, Chris Johnston and Callum Connachie, Joe Dodd, and Chelsea Wrones - has been a name on the lips of clued-up fans and tastemakers since its collective of musicians found each other in the earliest days of 2023. Quickly gaining a reputation for their cathartic, unpredictable and specular live performances, the band have been consistently championed by BBC Radio One, including two `Tune of the Week' placements on Daniel P Carter's esteemed Rock Show. Violent Delights was recorded across two week-long stints at Southampton's The Ranch studio in August and December of 2024, with Lewis Johns helming production and mixing duties. When pressed, Jools may identify as a punk band - in its truest sense that punk is a mentality, rather than a sound - but Violent Delights equally lends from the worlds of metal, rap, post-hardcore and hip-hop as much as it does the post-punk of its surface layer. Gordon and Price are as likely to point to Turnstile, Mannequin Pussy and Amyl & The Sniffers as influences on the record as they are to Little Simz and The Streets' Mike Skinner. "We don't necessarily look at music in sounds or structures," nods Gordon. "Instead we look for attitudes."

“Evil is very real and having its way, and love is also real and hasn’t lost yet.”
That’s how Activity’s Travis Johnson described their third album, A Thousand Years In Another Way. A friend had asked why these songs seemed to capture the strange, heavy feeling of being alive right now better than anything else—and that was his answer. The album doesn’t try to explain this time we’re living in; it simply feels like it. It’s a mix of violence, alienation, and tenderness—reflecting the surreal, dreamlike (or nightmarish) rhythm of daily life.
Across ten songs, Activity blends experimental rock, electronics, and found sounds with a sense of paranoia, flickers of hope, and a warped reality. Working with producer Jeff Berner (of Psychic TV), the band manipulated sounds and played with room acoustics to create a feeling that’s disorienting—like the air is thick and the walls are listening.
Coming out of a period of uncertainty, the Brooklyn-based quartet—Travis Johnson, Jess Rees, Bri DiGioia, and Steven Levine—pieced the album together from fragments: clipped samples, looping guitar lines, ghostly melodies. Rees, DiGioia, and Johnson share vocal and writing duties, shaping a record that feels both deeply personal and strangely alien. There’s a constant sense that things could shift or fall apart at any second—nothing stays one thing for long.
A Thousand Years In Another Way might not offer answers, but it captures the feeling of right now better than most. And maybe, it sounds a bit like your world too.

The record tells the story of the Jesus De La Cruz Conde, who embarks on an epic journey of self-discovery after witnessing his hometown get burned to the ground. The tracks that make up this record are the very repertoire of songs sung by De La Cruz to Mezcal-soaked patrons in haunted cantinas, as he drifts from pueblo to pueblo across a desolate landscape bristling with tumbleweed. Throughout La Muerte en Realidad no Existe, Clothing conjures De la Cruz through this vampire-cowboy alter-ego creating as much a Mexican Gothic as a Latin American Giallo - a phantasmagoric fever dream of love, loss and violence - painted in neon Technicolor.

"I loved Julia Sabra’s Natural History Museum—it was released at the end of the year and is quietly devastating. Her lyricism and sensitivity in timbre and harmony is akin for me to the great Linda Perhacs. The songs are intimate and infinite feeling at the same time—I love the raw and soft poetic settings of love and death." Julia Holter (Best album 2024- Fader)

“This album is a collection of songs written between 2020 and 2024 in Beirut. I wanted to capture them the way they were written by keeping the rawness and fragility intact, like the late-night voice memos I send to my bandmates as soon as I have a first draft of a song. Fadi and I decided to record them live on tape, with no overdubs, barely any effect - with all the imperfections. Most of the tracks were done in one take only. Some were recorded in the studio, and some in the church I grew up going to every summer in Dhour Shweir.

This is a collection of songs that slipped through the cracks, and some of the most personal ones I ever wrote. Songs about the port explosion, its aftermath, picking up the pieces and trying to move on, coming to terms with the past, regret and nostalgia for a childhood that lives only in memory, the uncertain future, learning to love, getting married, watching a genocide unfold on my phone screen, having it fill my every waking moment, imagining a better send off for all the dead, processing the violence and terror, and finding solace in community.
These songs would’ve probably stayed in my “songs in limbo” folder on my laptop had it not been for Pascal and Fadi, who pushed me to release them. And for this I’m eternally grateful.”









[h] 8.Dis, quand reviendras-tu? [Barbara cover]

Infinity Division is the alias of electronic producer Ash Luk. Best known for his innovative blend of euphoric melodies, scattered breakbeats and gabber infused rhythmic chaos drawn from his relentless live performances, Ash’s newest offering, debut album SATISFACTION (which also marks the launch of his label, SOFTCORE UNLTD.), explores his relationship with all things anthemic.

Featuring artwork from Spyros Rennt, the thirteen track album traverses a diverse array of sonic landscapes. Spanning doomy post-rave and trance-driven metal to breakbeat-infused industrial pop, the album is united by a genre-defying exploration of the elusive essence of anthemic sound.

Venturing beyond the safety of machines, Ash steps to the forefront with his vocals on Seven Demons and Like Heaven, while From Evil, Weather Prophets, and Satisfaction feature vocal contributions from Zastar of Violent Magic Orchestra, Coy Mistress, and Nova Bruise, enriching the album’s diverse soundscapes.

In addition to his work with Infinity Division, Ash is one half of the doom electronic live duo S.A.T.I.N. alongside Ireen Amnes and is possibly best known for his work in Minimal Violence, a project known for their raw, hardware, punk influenced live performances. Releasing on well known labels such as Tresor and Technicolour / Ninja Tune. Their work was characterized by a DIY ethos and an emphasis on analog equipment, allowing for a direct and visceral approach to production. Now, with Infinity Division, Ash continues to build on a body of work that explores the space between genres, combining an attention to detail through carefully constructed sound design with the spontaneity and raw energy of his live performances. SATISFACTION sets the stage for the next phase of Infinity Division, showcasing a collection of tracks that draw from the essence of the past while reaching out toward a mirage of the future.

The Oh Sees wasted no time in racing headlong into nightmarish battle with the mighty Orc, clawing even farther up the ghastly peak stormed so satisfyingly by their previous A Weird Exits. The band is in tour-greased, anvil-on-a-balance beam, gut-pleasingly heavy form, nimbly braining—with equal dashes of abandon and menace—on this fresh batch of bruisers and brooders, hypnotically stirred into to the cauldron of chaos you’ve come to expect. On Orc, fresh blood Paul Quattrone joins Dan Rincon to form a phalanx of interlocking double drums, alternately propelling and fleet-footing shifting ground to pinion John Dwyer’s cliff-face guitars to the boogie. Tim Hellman keeps it swinging like a battle-axe to the eyebrows. The tunes veer toward the violence of their live shows, with a few tasty swerves into other lanes: heavy to lush, groovy to stately. Throughout, it remains sinister in its swaggering skulk, manic in its fuzz-fried fugues. They hit all the sweet spots the heads foggily remember, and there’s plenty to sweat over if you just hopped into the sauna. More evil…more complex…more narcotic…more screech… more blare…more whisper…there’s even more Brigid. Less “Thee,” but more of everything else.

With an eccentric, poetic line in minimal rock, London bass & drums duo Most Things release their debut album Bigtime 23/05/25 on tastemaker label So Young Records. Marrying the compassionate observational wit of Richard Dawson with a sound somewhere between Minutemen and Television Personalities, the album’s ten songs explore family relationships, mental health and life in the city. The project of London-born bassist/vocalist Tom Phillips and New York-born drummer Malachy O’Neill, the pair met as students in London after being introduced by Phillips’ then housemate Sabrina Fuentes – singer in acclaimed punk band Pretty Sick. Bigtime is a London album. Chronicling Phillips’ experiences growing up in the city, as the only child to his single mother, it illustrates its shops, pubs and bustle with humour and warmth, but also considers its troubles: from violence to threadbare public services.

Depth.Request presents Lllneas' debut album, Buried Stories, a powerful 7-track odyssey through life's darkest shadows and most enlightening revelations.
This collection of works traces its origins back to 2018 when the concept of Lllneas was born. Long before the music was written, the idea and name carried the promise of an eventual catharsis, a release that would embody the untold stories and emotional complexities of its creator.
Each composition on Buried Stories weaves a vivid tapestry of experiences, shaped by contemporary events and echoes from the past. With remarkable intensity, Lllneas channels the raw emotions they evoke, transforming music into a catalyst for healing, reflection, and understanding. More than an album, Buried Stories is an unapologetic and honest expression of survival, self-acceptance, and transformation; a tribute to those who feel out of place, offering hope and validation to embrace their unique perspectives. This release marks a moment of liberation, a turning point that sheds light on an issue that deeply resonates with Lllneas: the devastating realities of domestic violence. The artist calls for courage, awareness, and immediate action, urging people to break free from cycles of abuse and fear.

Let Buried Stories inspire you to confront the untold and find freedom in your own truth.

Nothing is lost on Cash Langdon. It’s something you can hear in the observational lyrics of his last record, 2022’s Sinister Feeling; but on its follow-up, Dogs, you can also hear it in the camaraderie he cultivates playing live with his band Meadow Dust, a sonic energy that gives off the heat of his native Birmingham. The trio’s fuzzy take on heavy country rock has a worn-in no-fussiness that recalls Neil Young & Crazy
Horse – nothing overthought, nothing understated. And like Young, Langdon’s voice is simultaneously earnest and world-weary – but there’s a sense of humor, too, and a resignation to keeping on (“Dogs,” “Magic Again”). Recorded at Portside Studios (the former location of the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound) in just two days, engineer Brad Timko (Dan Sartain, St. Paul and The Broken Bones) captured Langdon and Meadow Dust at their fiercest yet. The title track “Dogs” and side B heater “Dead Dogs” both take inspiration from the wild dogs Langdon encountered in his neighborhood at the time of writing the record, where he wondered about the sick twist of fate that renders one dog a pet and another a threat. Across songs, he examines how oppressive cycles overlap, intersecting the personal and the societal at all times. The heavy yet melodic “Lilac Whiskey Noise” is the heartbeat of the record, written following an active shooter event that Langdon witnessed at work in 2016. It’s an indictment – not of the perpetrator – but of the systems of power that enable such an act. It’s a microcosm for all of the themes on the album, too: the ongoing violence of simply being awake to the world around you, and the resolve to stay awake anyway.
On the crunchy album-closer “Nothing’s Good Anymore,” Langdon sings about overhearing someone say just that – and you can tell he’s tempted to agree. He’s going to find what kernel of beauty he can. Dogs is a sonic map for finding that beauty in just about anything.

Legendary New Zealand-born experimental composer and sound art pioneer Annea Lockwood returns to Black Truffle with On Fractured Ground / Skin Resonance, her third release for the label. Having recently celebrated her 85th birthday, Lockwood shows no sign of slowing down in her exploration of new sound sources and collaborations with an ever-growing intergenerational pool of performers – here with Vanessa Tomlinson. Her creative vibrancy is alive as ever on the two recent works presented here, which demonstrate both her engagement with the social dimensions of sound and the deeply reflective, meditative aspect of her art.

On Fractured Ground derives from material recorded with Pedro Rebelo and Georgios Varoutsos for the soundtrack of Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon’s opera-film, History of the Present (2023). Working together in Belfast, Lockwood, Rebelo and Varoutsos made extensive recordings of the city’s ‘peace lines’, the dozens of walls erected since the beginning of the Troubles in the late 1960s to separate Catholic and Protestant areas of the city. Struck by the immensity of these barriers, ‘the brutal way they sever neighbourhoods’, Lockwood and her collaborators focused not on the sound environment of the city, but on the walls themselves, playing them as gigantic resonant instruments, using their hands and objects such as stones and leaves. Continuing to work in her studio with the material collected for the soundtrack after its completion, Lockwood composed the work presented here, occupying a space somewhere between her own extended-technique percussion music and the Cagean tradition of hyper-amplified small sounds. From deep, gong-like metallic tolling to dry scrapes and uneasy groans, the piece’s sustained attention to single sounds derived from unorthodox sources draws a line all the way back to Lockwood’s classic Glass World (1967-1970). Its spaciousness and delicacy are at odds with the dark historical background of the Troubles, creating a moving listening experience somehow haunted by the shadow of violence and conflict.

Skin Resonance is a collaboration with Australian composer and percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson. Developed through conversations in which the two discussed the idea of ‘sonic attraction’, the piece focuses on Tomlinson’s relationship to the bass drum, reflecting on the complex web of connections embodied in this seemingly simply instrument, which is at once ‘animal, wood, and metal’. Approaching the instrument in a suitably elemental fashion, Tomlinson’s performance strips away conventional technique to explore the resonance and timbral properties of skin, drum, and metal hardware, producing overlapping waves of texture that at times seem closer to wind swishing through leaves or the ocean than anything usually associated with a drum. Emphasising the symbiotic relationship between performer and instrument, Tomlinson’s voice is heard at times, exploring the field of associations and connections the bass drum suggests to her: ‘Maybe the bass drum skin is an ear as well?’

Accompanied by insightful liner notes on both pieces and photographs documenting the recording of On Fractured Ground and a performance of Skin Resonance, this LP is a moving testament to the engagement, generosity, and openness that sustain Annea Lockwood’s work, still finding new directions after more than fifty years of activity.

Hailed by Pitchfork for his “ambient, intimate…songs that blossom gently with intricate musical details and enigmatic lyrics,” Conner Youngblood gained early acclaim with a series of self-released singles and EPs before breaking out internationally with his 2018 full-length debut, Cheyenne, which fused electronic and analog elements into a lush mix of bedroom pop and chamber folk. Youngblood toured the record heavily until 2020, when the pandemic forced him off the road and, hungry for fresh inspiration, he began enrolling in Russian, Danish, Spanish, and Japanese language lessons. He didn’t realize it at the time, but those classes weren’t just expanding his vocabulary, they were laying the groundwork for his most ambitious, experimental album yet: Cascades, Cascading, Cascadingly.
 
Written and recorded at home in Nashville, the collection is a dreamy series of meditations steeped in desire and yearning, loneliness and loss, exhilaration and escape. The lyrics blur the lines between fact and fiction, toying with magical realism and outright abstraction in various languages, and the arrangements are surreal and cinematic to match, hinting at everything from Cocteau Twins to Atoms For Peace. In addition to producing and engineering, Youngblood played every instrument on the album himself, and the result is a pure, unfiltered journey deep into the subconscious of a relentlessly curious artist, one with a boundless imagination and an insatiable appetite for sonic exploration. 

Playing with a Different Sex was the debut album by seminal post-punk band Au Pairs, released in 1981.

Described retrospectively by AllMusic as ‘one of the great post-punk records’, a review by Record Mirror on its release said the band’s ‘critique of all forms of possession and sexual stereotyping assumes a devastating power’. Themes include sexual politics and the torture of women imprisoned in Northern Ireland during The Troubles of the 1970s, as well as a stunning cover of David Bowie’s ‘Repetition’ about domestic violence. It peaked at No. 33 in the UK, and features the single ‘It's Obvious’, which reached No. 37 on the US Club Play Singles chart. Playing with a Different Sex is available as a numbered limited edition of 750 copies on turquoise coloured vinyl and contains an insert.