Back catalogue: Industrial/Noise

Review: Gravers kicks off with a strong various artists release that sets out is electro stall in fine fashion. Kovyazin D opens up with the rugged and hard hitting electro-techno of 'Modularity' (feat Alexandr) with its stomping drums and frazzled synths. There is plenty of gothic energy to the slapping machismo of the acid laced'Proven Witch Psalm' from Antoni Maiovvi, then Millimetric offers up 'Espace' with a spiralling synth line and more caustic drums. Anton Levdikov closes down with 'Vardi' and a dark, driving bassline. This is a high impact EP for those who like it tough.

Review: M Parent's penchant for texture is laid bare on this searing and arresting new EP for Zement. It opens with 'Gravel Pit' which sounds like an audio diary from a car-wrecking plant. Twisted metal, fizzing battery acid, and crushed glass all feature over a distorted baseline and broken rhythm. Those same scuzzy sounds define the rest of the EP from the acid-laced 'Ideal Future' to the coruscated funk of 'Acid Thirst' via the caustic intensity of closer Climb These Walls'. An impressively unique offering that very much has its own singularly sound palette.

Review: Maahrt is the debut self titled EP from a mysterious producer about whom we know nothing.His new 12" opens up with an eerie bit of slow motion and cosmic techno with tortured pads. 'Clag' is another twisted mix of sinewy electronics and broken beats for dark back rooms, while 'Noma' then picks up the pace with a more weighted bottom end dragging its heels through an industrial wasteland. 'Noma' (A Strange Wedding remix) is more ready for club deployment thanks to its chugging groove and a final Odopt remix layer sin more melody, rickety drums and cosmic energy.

Review: The 140+ BPM revolution race with scarcely a look in the rear view mirror. Malaizy here dropping two tracks that show just how wild and weird stuff can get in this part of the dance music spectrum. 'Burgercome' itself has hints electroclash, juke, ghetto tech, footwork, and EBM, without fully committing itself to any of those things by way of a DIY punk on speed in a Parisian warehouse party vibe.

Over on the flip, 'Stuck' is an entirely different beast altogether, which probably isn't that surprising considering the unique and particularly niche nature of the opening tune. Rather than setting a break neck pace, instead we descend into a staccato amalgamation of white noise, distorted drums and inaudible human murmurings.

Review: Having built his reputation via a trio of must-check EPs on Bokeh Versions, Mars89 transfers to Alex Hall's "mutant electronics" imprint Natural Sciences. The producer is a neat fit on the imprint, with "2020" containing a quartet of creepy, hard-wired, industrial-tinged cuts that seem eerily fitting for these troubled times. He begins with the bone-rattling beats, machine-gun percussion hits, ricocheting metallic clonks and gut-punching bass of "GoodThing", before successfully fusing mutilated industrial sounds and paranoid rhythms on "JoyCamp". Over on side B, "DayOrder" is a strangely swung slab of mind-altering electronica that defies easy description, while "MiniLuv" is a thumping stomp through lo-fi techno territory in the company of a steroid-fired monster.

Review: Curses is Berlin-based DJ and producer Luca Venezia, who has proven himself to be a reliable authority on all manner of deviant dancefloor sounds from the recent and distant past. On this compilation for Eskimo he takes up the challenge of spanning four decades of darkwave sounds by bringing seminal classics in line with exclusive new material for an epic 38-track compilation, which gets a thoroughly useful sampler edition for the vinyl DJs out there. The tracks on offer include Nuovo Testament, who get a punchy remix treatment from Curses himself before we can feast on the seductive minimal wave of Mary Moor. Curses also revamps JWB Hits The Beat with a strong Euro slant to the production, while the 12" mix of Sheffield pioneers Cabaret Voltaire's 'Blue Heat' rounds the set off in legendary fashion.

Review: Ground Groove is the third album from LA-based, Iranian-American producer and DJ, Maral. It begins with the sprawling, achingly heavy 'Feedback Jam', dense enough to distort reality crushed beneath the track's lumbering heartbeat and waves of distortion. As each wave recedes, samples trickle forward in the mix, voices and instruments rising and falling in uncanny reverse. 'Feedback Jam' serves both as an initiation ritual, and a thesis statement for the record that follows.
Composed largely on Ableton, Ground Groove features frequent 'live recordings from Maral on guitar, bass, and vocals - but to say it's a huge step up in mixing and audio quality is an understatement. The attention to detail is immense. 'Ground Groove's eleven tracks are 'grooves' in the obvious sense, each being driven by a persistent, propulsive rhythm, but the album's title may just as well suggest the glacial passage of time that standout voices like these emerge as landmarks.

Review: Drew McDowall is as complex and enigmatic an artist as Coil, who he worked closely with for many years. He's followed his own path as well as being tangled up in the world of Jhonn Balance and Sleazy, and now this box set on Dais offers an authoritative overview of four relatively recent LPs and additional exclusive material stretching over six CDs. 2015's Collapse, 2017's Unnatural Channel, 2018's The Third Helix and 2020's Agalma are joined by a disc of rare, alternative and extended versions and a disc of live performances. From oddly angled ambience to lithe, snaking electronica, there's a lot of different sides to McDowall's curious musical mind, and this extensive collection is a perfect way to navigate just part of it.

Review: Downwards' latest release shines a light on Melbourne's famed experimental music scene by bringing together tracks from two of the city's most interesting artists. On side A there's a chance to savour all four tracks from Bonnie Mercer's previously cassette-only release Old Moon, New Moon, with the experienced artist combining elements of desert rock (fractured, discombobulated, fuzz-toned guitar textures) with droning tones, reverb-laden samples and gentle washes of ambient colour. Over on the flip YLP - the duo of Joshua Wells and Harry Schwind- take over, delivering a suite of suitably cosmic tracks heavily influenced by Spacemen 3, Suicide and Sun City Girls.

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Review: Giving you a time portal back to the glory days of rap metal on a major label tip, Methods Of Mayhem was the moment legendary Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee took a break from glam metal to get down with the kids and serve up a fierce slab for the bros to mosh to. The guest line up is no joke, taking in Snoop Dogg, Fred Durst, George Clinton, Lil' Kim, Mixmaster Mike, Kid Rock and U God from Wu Tang Clan. Truthfully, it's aged well compared to a lot of the rap metal of the era, capturing a genuine hip hop swagger which more than stands up to the guitars, with production that reaches to sampling and synthesis as much as crushing riffage. It may not be the smartest creative expression out there, but neither is it trying to be. The main thing is that it kicks raw ass, which it absolutely does.

Review: Ministry have always enjoyed playing with album titles - 1989's The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste being one of the best examples. They've also evolved from a synth pop outfit at the turn of that decade into one of the pre-eminent industrial rock and metal bands of the following ten years, a process that helps them stand out among a scene that became increasingly saturated as time progressed.

Never by-numbers, then, and always looking to experiment with effects, samples, and structure, on stage their reputation for being uncompromisingly Ministry precedes them, and here's at least some form of proof. Sphinctour (lol) is an 11 track album containing recordings from various live shows across the globe, each of which invokes the atmosphere and gargantuan power of the outfit in question, with the only real problem being the fact you probably weren't there to see these shows happen.

Review: "Hopium" is internet-speak for naive "hope" in the face of oncoming calamity, where "hope" is imagined as a kind of injectable drug upon which media consumers inevitably get hooked. With this in mind, LA-based political synth-come-punk-metal ish act Ministry (the lifetime project of founder Al Jourgensen) deliver their latest album, HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES, which provides a window into the pysche of the contemporary hope-stricken worrier / warrior of today. From the opening war-cry of 'Goddamn White Trash' to the closing clamour of 'Ricky's Hand', it's clear the ultimate message is that there are two kinds of hope - the passive "hopium" kind, and the active kind that knows what it's doing.

Review: Ministry were a very different band in 1982, when Al Jourgensen started out as a synth pop provocateur straining at the leash to take things darker. He has repeatedly sworn off their debut album With Sympathy as a sanitised version of the sound he was pursuing, and this collection of live recordings from the year before it was released show a sharper edge to tracks like 'Revenge' and 'Effegy'. It's still absolutely synth-pop of the era, when the music was only one step removed from post-punk anyway, but most importantly the sound is clear and bright, showing the first iteration of the band at their best and playing close to home.

Review: It's fascinating diving into the earliest realms of Ministry, before they were even signed to record their debut synth pop album With Sympathy. Al Jorgensen swore off that first release as a misstep before they become chief architects of industrial metal, and this compilation supports his case when you hear the sound of the band at their first gigs in 1981-1983. It's a lot more confrontational than the polished, arguably brilliant, sound they were encouraged to release as they emerged from the underground. From the electro-punk thrust of 'Falling' to the raw version of 'Cold Life', they feel entirely edgier as a proposition compared to most synth-pop bands of the era. With additional gems like rare mixes of 'Everyday (Is Halloween)', this is an essential compilation for anyone interested in the roots of Ministry.

Review: "A record that sounds like dystopia", painting "a bleak portrait of an America that is on the brink of implosion" wrote one critic after first hearing AmeriKKKant, the 14th studio album by the mighty Ministry. If this is your first encounter with the record, it should take exactly two tracks to understand what said scribe - penning prose for The Spill Magazine - was getting at. There's anger, trouble, rage, frustration, disillusionment and a rallying war cry to stand up and stop the decline of Western civilisation at the hands of populists and fundamentalists running through every bar of every track. More so, this is also about standing tall and representing what constitutes an LP. Far more than a vessel for singles, AmeriKKKant is long form expression in the truest sense. Not necessarily a journey into industrial metal and sample-oriented experimental rock, but a manifesto for what they can represent.

Review: Big stadium sized synth wave stuff, those who are scared to tread anywhere near EDM and trance should be warned Minuit Machine are partial to a massive breakdown or two, or at least that's true of the original 'Don't Run From The Fire'. But none of that should be taken to mean there's anything distasteful here. It's actually very well-conceived stuff. Movie theme meets dance floor potential.
Not least on 'Lovers of the Night', which could easily be an anthem from a 2022 Lost Boys remake. Eerie, engaging, broken, trippy, and slightly sinister stuff that doesn't give up. Remix wise, things veer from the punchy uptempo big room techno-esque Rein version on the title number, to the more darkly hypnotic and - once you attune to the background harmony - quietly uplifting PARALLX take on 'Lovers of the Night', which take things close to Gatecrasher in 1999 at around 7AM territory.

Review: Another one of the very many top draw On-U Sound albums from days gone by gets a reissue here. 1984's Warzone by The Missing Brazilians (a project led by label founder Adrian Sherwood in collab with vocalist Annie Anxiety, members of African Head Charge and Dub Syndicate as well as various others from the On-U Sound family) is the only album the collective put out. It's a grimy mix of dub, industrial, electro, experimental, reggae and electronic sounds with famously abrasive textures. This reissue brings it back to the fore with a great mastering job that demands loud plays and close inspection.