Black Metal in Soft Pink Mood

Extremity on the cube. A gay professor of literature
has made one of the most interesting cover albums ever, titled
Why Do the Heathen Rage?
(Electronic Profanations of Black Metal Classics)
The cover art looks as if it was designed by a Satanist Tom of Finland.
Because of it one of the label main distributors
has refused to carry the record.
Out now on Thrill Jockey Records (US)

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The Soft Pink Truth is the solo alter ego of Drew Daniel, one half of Baltimore-based electronic duo Matmos. Mr. Daniel has taught the history of electronic music at the San Francisco Art Institute and a sound art seminar at Harvard. He now teaches in the English Department at Johns Hopkins University. He has written a book about industrial-experimental-electronic band Throbbing Gristle; released a similar album in 2004: Do You Want New Wave (Or Do You Want The Soft Pink Truth?) which consists of house covers of classic hardcore and punk songs; produced remixes for Björk, Herbert, Grizzly Bear, Dat Politics and more. And he is a black metal fan.

Black metal is a very special subgenre of heavy metal. It was born on 1 November 1982 by British band Venom. That day the band’s second album titled Black Metal was released. Strange fact, but Venom’s music was fast, harsh and primitive rock and roll rather than heavy metal at that time. It stood nearer Motörhead or Ramones, than Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. As special features their lyrics had dark, occult and devilish themes. But Venom’s music and texts were refined and gentle compared with the subsequent, more and more extreme bands. Today’s black metal bands’ music is just like a mix of noise of coffee grinders and sounds of a pig-killing. Unfortunately some bands and many fans take the Satanist rubbish seriously. But the blackest black metal bands are adherents of white supremacist and Nazi ideologies. The words beget acts. In this case their fruits: violence, church arson, suicide, murder. All these in welfare states of North-Europe mainly. And they say always: I did it only in self-defence.

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And then this man resolved to make a peculiar electronic black metal tribute album. And who was the first man whom he invited to cooperate in this? Antony Hegarty (Antony and the Johnsons). By the way, the others: Jenn Wasner from indie-folk rock duo Wye Oak, Terrance Hannum from drone-metal band Locrian, his Matmos partner M.C. Schmidt, Irish composer and  vocalist Jennifer Walshe and more.

And the music? Well, it’s not an easy pop album. A Mix of electro-industrial, drum’n’bass, trip hop, house and EBM. It came Kraftwerk, Björk, Madonna and Leather Strip to my mind. Some covers are spiced with samples of house hits. The album requires a good piece of sense of humour. At first it was very strange, but as I listen to it repeatedly, so like it increasingly. But „Who in the world wants to hear this?” Nobody, basically. Black metal people aren’t going to like it because it’s faggoty disco, but actual dance music people aren’t going to like it because it’s weird people screaming about Satan.” (Drew said this in a Pitchfork interview.)

Venom + Sarcofago covers

The album not requires know of the original songs, but you can listen to those here. There you can read about some words about the bands: Venom, Beherit, Sarcofago, Sargeist, Darkthrone, AN, Mayhem, Hellhammer and Impaled Northern Moonforest.

Niggas On The Moon With Björk

deathgrips

Notorious experimental noise-hop band
Death Grips has made his new double album
„niggas on the moon”
featuring Björk on all 8 tracks.
You can download its first part titled „the powers that b” free.

From New Records

ooioo

OOIOO is a band of Yoshimi P-We (drummer of noise punk, chaos fun band UFO or Die, founding member of avant-garde noise rock Boredoms). It was allegedly founded as a fake band for a magazine photo shoot in 1995. The joke has turned special cosmic tribal music, now in Japanese gamelan style

„Gamel” LP, CD on Thrill Jockey

lustfory

Lust For Youth started as the Swedish Hannes Norrvide’s cold wave synth-pop project.  It has became a trio. Their music is like the eraly Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, New Order or Desireless (do you remember Voyage, voyage?). This “record deals with the rootless, sometimes almost inhuman, nature of traveling and touring. Hotel rooms and strangers’ beds, drugs and clubs, and the impossibility of living a regular life.”

„International” LP, CD on Sacred Bones. 3rd track is a remix.

 

KK NULL & PÁNDI K.U.K. TOUR

 

KK NULL (from Japanese metal band, Zeni Geva) & the Hungarian drummer BALÁZS PÁNDI, somewhere over the rainbow

This is one side of a 7 inch vinyl record to be released for the tour.

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more info about the gigs

 

From New Records

boriscut

Japanese experimental metal wonder Boris states about their new album: „the band masterfully intermingles sludge-rock, blistering crust punk, shimmering shoegaze, epic thunderous doom, psychedelic melodies and just about everything else they’ve ever done.”

„Noise” album on Sargent House in June. Pre-order

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French punky country surf garage rock’n’roll by Sapin from Rennes

„Wrong Way” album on Azbin Records. The label’s team members are from such great garage bands as Le Pecheur, Regal, Animal Trophies and The Skeptics.

From Fuck You Land with Love

Black Moth Super Rainbow mix anything with everything.
Their hotchpotch is called as experimental music.
The frontman’s side project is TOBACCO
plays nerve-racking electro-noise hard pop
on analogue electronic instruments and tape machines.
Streaker

from the album Ultima II Massage on Ghostly International. Direted by Eric Wareheim

Wahorn Presser Reunion

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From New Records

Black Ice Cream Experience

helado

Peculiar experimental tropical music from electro-noise tunes to danceable pop melodies by Helado Negro. Son of Ecuadorian immigrants, who has grown in the Latin-American bustle of South-Florida. His interest was arouse by the sounds of tropical nature and environment: subwoofers in the cars, howling music of portable stereos, uproars of night parties and more. Since then he looks on every device as musical instruments. I’m glad to hear about him again, because

Third part of his EP series Island Universe Story on Asthmatic Kitty. Cassette or digital

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Back To Back. Nice Texan hardcore punk – raw, brutal and fatal

7″ by 540 Records

From New Records

bulbul

Bulbul started as a one-man band with guitar, drum machine and vacuum cleaner in Austria. It became a trio. They speak numerous musical languages from jazz to metal. They did cooperation with Leonid Soybelman (Ne Zhdali, Kletka Red), KK Null (Zeni Geva). Horribly funny music.

„Hirn fein hacken” album on Exile on Mainstream (Germany)
and Rock is Hell Records (Austria)

Some shows in Austria, Germany, Czech and Switzerland

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Carsick Cars are among the leading alternative Chinese rock bands. They describe themselves as noise rock band, but the measure of noise shows low degree. (Perhaps the Chinese notion about noise differs from the Western conception.) Soft Sonic Youth-like, Velvet Underground influenced indie rock with Chinese motifs on a surprisingly good album which was co-produced by Hamish Kilgoure from The Clean! (Influential New Zealander indie rock band.)

„3” album via Maybe Mars (China) and Tenzenmen (Australia)

Their side projects: 1. White+. Kraut-like electronic duo. First CD was produced by Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds).
2. One of my fav Chinese bands: Snapline. Post punk trio. Debut album was produced and released by Martin Atkins (drummer of PIL, Pigface and many more).

An interview about the Chinese musical underground

Shower Scene with Lilacs and Champagne

 

Lilacs & Champagne is an alternative project of Emil Amos (drums) and Alex Hall (guitar) from Grails which plays instrumental cinematic music. They have started a fantasy record series Midnight Features. Inspired by the Marvel comics series What if? These were alternative stories of well-known super heroes of Marvel. In musical equivalents of these the band places himself into various musical eras. The first chapter, the Shower Scene takes place in the 70s, and was inspired by the background music of TV shows, crimes, dramas, romantics and more.

Shower Scene + Maple St

EP out now on Mexican Summer

From New Records

suddeninfant

Industrial blues where performance and body art meet improvisation and noise on the album „Wölfli’s Nightmare” by Sudden Infant on Voodoo Rhythm.

He is a Swiss composer, body and performance artist. Composed music for contemporary dance, theater, films, radio plays, and installations. Among his numerous collaborations there are Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and The New Blockaders.

Wölfli (1864-1930) was a Swiss art brut artist, unconscious father of the surrealism and a mental patient. He used the Campbell’s soup cans as artistic motif at first. An article about Art Brut and Wölfli in Hungarian.

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When I have heard the Sunday Morning at first yesterday I was delighted at it because I thought that it’s a „real time” song but it was written in 1958 by Margo Guryan.

She is singer, songwriter, lyricist and musician, her sole album was released in 1968. Her songs was recorded by Carmen McRae, Julie London, Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Nilsson, Saint-Etienne and many others. She refused to tour so she became disinteresting for the music industry as a performer, but worked on as writer and produced records for others. Then she worked as a piano teacher and produced music books for students. In 2007, she released a new single, entitled „16 Words”. The track refers to one phrase from a speech of G.W. Bush in 2003. Look!

27 Demos on CD by Oglio and cassette by Burger Records

Winer Waltz

Excerpt from N1 Ear

“If I get raped it must be my fault and if get bashed I must’ve provoked it / And if I raise my voice I’m a nagging bitch and if I like fucking I’m a whore / And if I don’t want to I never want to (‘you never want to, you never want to’) / And if I love a woman it’s because I can’t get a real man or it’s for his enjoyment / And if I ask my doctor too many questions I’m neurotic and need pills / Because I still can’t get a safe birth control while some fucker’s roaming the moon”

leslie

After Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and Nico, before Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, Leslie Winer has made the first trip hop album. Witch was released in early 1990 in London. It was simply credited to ©. It will be re-released on vinyl by Superior Viaduct on 29 April.

Leslie Winer is an American born poet, writer and musician. In the beginning she played with jazz bands as a pianist, then befriended with Burroughs and Jean-Mihel Basquiat as a university student in New York, worked as a super model in the 80s, went to London, worked together with Adam & The Ants bassist Kevin Mooney and Karl Bonnie of Renegade Soundwave, took part with her spoken words in the last song of Sinead O’Connor’s debut album in 1987, then made her first album Witch, which was released in early 1990. Her main instruments were the sampler and the desktop. (Witch was re-released in 1993. It also passed unnoticed.)  She contributed to Bomb The Bass, Mekons and Holger Hiller songs and went back to America in late 1990, wrote some tracks for Grace Jones and Jon Hassel, signed to Geffen Records, but her second album 3 Bags Full which was recorded in 1993-94 stayed unreleased. Her third album Spider was recorded between 1994 and 97. It was released around 1999 in very limited series by Austrian minimalist and deconstructivist fashion designer Helmut Lang to promote one of his shows in New York.

These are raw jazzy experimental trip-hop albums with spoken words and sampled, dubbed music. Her albums remind me „Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales”, the collaboration album of Burroughs and Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. On the other hand her songs bring Velvet Underground, Lou Read and Nico to my mind.

Since then there were collaborations with French composer Christophe Van Huffel, Swedish composer and conceptual artist Carl Michael von Haushoff, British singer-songwriter and BMX champion Alice Temple, and put JJ Cale with touch with Samuel Beckett for nothing under the Cajun moon.

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She is living in France, playacting as co-editor for the Herbert Huncke estate. He was a beat poet and writer. Ms Winer reads a short story from Huncke.


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