Coldsore - En Dolor y Rebelión (2021)

The recent rebirth of Sterile Records brings a welcome return to Nigel Ayers' stewardship of a label which releases work of persons other than members of Nocturnal Emissions; which may seem a strange point to make and I'm certainly not disparaging Earthly Delights as anything other than the home of the hits, but Sterile issued some weird and wonderful stuff back in the early days - Controlled Bleeding, Maurizio Bianchi, and others - and it's always nice to have someone else coming through.

Naturally I'd never heard of Coldsore, but a minute or so of the first track on the Bandcamp page was enough for me to be sure, and now I've been listening to this thing for the best part of a week. They're from Finland, they make a noise, and they're politically progressive - which makes for a nice change. This one is inspired by and dedicated to the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico - which gets a thumbs up from me, obviously. Coldsore's tumblr page seems to make reference to something called doomdrone, which I'll ignore because labelling gets on my tits, although there are probably worse descriptions. What we have are two lengthy pieces of approximately thirty minutes each, utilising electronic and possibly environmental sounds - nothing resembling an instrument, or even suggesting that you could plug a keyboard into it. It's the ambient howl of factories and processing plants abstracted to the point of resembling music, so even if it's not exactly tuneful, there are notes which do what notes customarily do and the effect is powerfully haunting, even moving in an emotional sense without coming too close to anything you might call noise. For the sake of making the usual lazy comparisons, En Dolor y Rebelión isn't a million miles from Nocturnal Emissions more droning efforts - at least in terms of mood - although there's an element which reminds me of Einstürzende Neubauten for reasons I can't quite pin down, a sense of space perhaps. It doesn't feel like something generated from within a metal box. I seem to have ended up listening to quite a lot of atonal things this year, and this is undoubtedly one of the best.