Kleistwahr - Where the Word is Never (2024)

It's probably fair to say Gary Mundy is a musical pioneer by some definition, at least by virtue of Ramleh being the other name most commonly associated with power electronics back when it was mostly tapes shared amongst friends of friends, photocopied lists of the same returned to the curious in stamped addressed envelopes. Whitehouse may have had the greater influence on what followed (although I suspect that's very much open to debate) but the appeal of Ramleh, at least for me, is that there was a lot more going on than just sonic assault. It was harsh as fuck, violent and free-form for sure, but it was never just random noise with the volume jammed on eleven; and this is as much true of Mundy's solo recording as Kleistwahr. Ramleh, for example, have switched between layers of screaming feedback fed through effects, to walls of guitar, to the single, It's Never Alright which somehow reminds me of the Groundhogs; and yet all feel like the work of the same individuals, communicating a similar mood regardless of how it's played.

Kleistwahr began back in the eighties with one foot in more or less the same cacophonous camp, but has continued to evolve - or possibly to refine its attack - particularly since the resumption of activity back in 2009, and more recently the annual release of one new album each year, sort of like the Beano Book when you were a kid, but more harrowing.

Frivolity aside, this is the latest, again representing a certain evolution from its predecessor - last year's For the Lives Once Lived in this case. The sound is loosely familiar - a pensive drone of organs, instruments and noises sharing some imaginary cavernous space which, for what it may be worth, definitively sounds like a studio - as distinct from the usual bloke sat in a cupboard with his digital reverb. It drones and it's dark, but it thankfully isn't - ugh - dark ambient. There's too much going on for this to sit in the background despite an undeniably hypnotic quality. Where the Word is Never expands on previous offerings in that it almost comprises songs - which isn't immediately obvious, but the more you listen, the more you notice the drones and the slow chords falling in line with the heartbeat rhythms of something happening a few buildings away; and similarly distant vocals deliver just enough of a legible narrative to underscore themes proposed by titles such as Hell Won't Want Your Soul or It's All Escape. The effect is akin to a droning soundtrack which doesn't quite admit to being comprised of songs, albeit songs on the verge of collapse, until third or fourth listen; and it's grim, except that it goes beyond grim into something uncomfortably numb - like Swans with all the ego and bluster kicked out of them, which actually makes it very difficult to describe, as may be obvious from this paragraph; and because it's all catharsis, there's something ultimately comforting about this noise, or at least a suggestion that it understands.

JFK - Weapon Design (2017)

I know I have a few things by JFK on ancient compilation tapes, but nothing that left so enduring an impression as to inspire my purchase of this record, which was based mainly on anything with ties to Ramleh being worth a listen and the fact that I liked the cover; and my superficiality has once again paid off, it seems.

Weapon Design gives the impression of having been recorded with synths and drum machines of a certain vintage, yet refrains from pushing the usual nostalgia buttons reminding us of how we all used to watch Doctor Who when we were little. If there's any invocation of things passed, it's the cold war and brutalist achitecture. It isn't noise - despite titles such as Secret Orders and Reality Slicer - because even if we don't quite have tune, there are notes and unconventional forms of repetition which do the job of music in the same way as angular slabs of concrete may be deemed art by virtue of grimly emotive force. Perhaps weirdly, the thing it reminds me of more than anything is Metal Urbain - not through any literal resemblance but it has the same icy singularity of purpose, to these ears. I could say it's the sound of, and reel off the usual list of dystopian horrors, but being non-vocal rather than strictly instrumental - because I'm not sure anything which produced this sound is actually an instrument - it really does approach something for which there are no words, which is possibly the point.

Formidable!

BLUE - V-Ekpyrotic (2020)

I realise this probably means I'm now the marketing department of Love Earth Music, but they keep sending me this stuff and it's always good; and as beautifully produced physical media it's particularly appreciated as an alternative to the more usual link to a Bandcamp page with the suggestion that I check it out*.

Anyway, this BLUE are presumably nothing to do with the English boy band of the same name, the seventies Scottish band of the same name who tried to sue the English boy band, or Eiffel 65. As with the New Harnessians, there seems to be a possibility of it being related to +DOG+ by some means, but I don't know and it probably doesn't matter.

I was actually expecting something like Tangerine Dream because the cover reminds me of that of Phaedra on some admittedly tenuous level, and although there's no real resemblance to Tangerine Dream, V-Ekpyrotic sort of does something similar - surprisingly. Where the New Harnessians' Tabla Rasa seemed to represent the harsh textural noise of +DOG+ pushed to a somehow more overtly aesthetic extreme, BLUE pulls back to something more brutal, more primal and which actually reminds me of Trev Ward's Nails ov Christ, presenting three huge slabs of undifferentiated noise and distortion which become quickly hypnotic, thus additionally reminding me of Tangerine Dream - albeit obliquely - and seeming to work against themselves, which is odd; it's an oddly calming and meditative screaming cacophony. Circinus, the final track, differs in incorporating a more violent dynamic with walls of feedback which reminded me a little of early Ramleh. As with other releases from the same label, the cumulative effect suggests some kind of narrative, possibly something to do with the formation of the universe if the titles are any indication, reinforcing my own hunch that this sort of thing represents music catching up with abstract expressionist painting - although it's actually a lot more dynamic and engaging, in my view.

Love Earth Music once again prove just how much variation is to be found in this kind of music, and even that it is music.

*: Not you, Ade.

Godflesh - Selfless (1994)

I've tried and tried with Streetcleaner, and while I can appreciate all which is great about it, I find it a bit loose and formless in certain respects; and hence a disappointment, having backtracked from Us & Them. However, Selfless, the third album, is much more in line of what I'd hoped Streetcleaner would be - crushing and intense, but where the first album howled, this one chugs. In fact, it's actually pretty tuneful for something which gazes so grimly across the plains of despair into the gloating maw of eternity - not tuneful in the sense of anything a milkman could whistle, but he could certainly grunt these riffs to himself while sorting you out for eggs and yoghurt, or remarking that's nice in response to a pensioner describing how she often enjoys a drop of milk on her porridge of a morning.

I'm inclined to wonder whether the lads worried over steering too close to becoming a variation on Black Sabbath, hence the wall of guitar initially serving as an effect rather than something which carries notes. Not that there's anything wrong with being a variation on Black Sabbath, but in any case it isn't really an issue. Even with this sludge variant on what may well sound like Chuck Berry when you play it at 78rpm, the mood holds, pinned down by its painfully slow rhythm and that howling into the void dynamic which I tend to associate with Skullflower, Ramleh, and the like.

Talking of Ramleh, it's probably no coincidence that Selfless should feature a track called Anything is Mine, although it resembles the Ramleh version mainly in terms of sheer force and aggression and isn't what you would call a cover, so far as I can tell. The biggest surprise for me, relatively speaking, has been noticing how these songs have an almost tender quality once you listen past the chug - bruised, abused and vulnerable, and something seeming to touch on a certain mania in the likes of Body Dome Light which suggests the kind of schizophrenic episode people associate with alien abduction - although it's probably a metaphor. I mention all this because I'm not sure this soft interior is anything the Swans ever quite achieved, at least not with such eloquence and not until they took to Simon and Garfunkel impersonations; and I mention the Swans as they seem thematically closest to Godflesh, but somewhat better publicised. Of course, all this bollocks may well be simply me noticing patterns, but then maybe patterns are the whole point; or summink.

All I know is that this one fucking rocks really, really hard.

Smiley face.

Smiley face.

Godflesh - Streetcleaner (1989)

Funny how certain things send you straight off in search of a particular bit of music. This one came back to me through the reproduction of a Daily Mail cartoon likening Muslim refugees to a plague of rats infesting host countries, just as Nazi cartoonists once made the same analogy with Jews; and the first track here is Like Rats which, aside from the parallel title, pretty much summarises the shittiness of a world run almost exclusively for the benefit of horrible Daily Mail reading cunts.

I was introduced to Godflesh with Us & Them, but for some reason have only recently begun to venture further into their back catalogue. I'm not sure why being as I love the shit out of Us & Them; although with hindsight, it's weird to consider that it's almost their album of uptempo pop songs, at least compared to this beast.

Actually, I suppose I was introduced to Godflesh - or at least to Justin Broadrick - much earlier when he recorded tapes of electronic noise as Final, and a few of his tracks appeared on the same noisy cassette compilations as some of my own stuff. I don't recall much about the music, beyond that one track was called Belief, but the fact that I remember it at all suggests it had something going for it. Also, the transition from power electronics to this sort of noise metal makes a lot of sense, and whilst Godflesh weren't the only band to go down that particular road, they remain the most listenable of their kind for my money - possibly excepting Ramleh who were kind of going for a different thing anyway.

Where Us & Them seems to share some kinship with Killing Joke or even Joy Division, Streetcleaner is a different, more primal monster. This one isn't so much songs as power electronics with riffs and a drum machine. Ordinarily, much as I love Brer Drum Machine, I'd raise an eyebrow at his use under circumstances where an actual drummer would have sounded so much better - like on Big Black's otherwise astonishing Atomiser, for one example. Streetcleaner initially sounds like it could do with a human bashing the skins, not least because the drum machine here is clearly programmed to have more or less the same effect as John Bonham, but after a few listens the reasoning for the choice becomes clear. There's something about the impersonal quality of a drum machine and the very fact of it being a machine which works so well. Music reviews employing the term jackhammer in reference to rhythm seem a bit of a cliché, but this one really does sound like that. It rocks like fuck whilst nevertheless resembling some inhuman mechanical process occurring inside the meat factory, the sort of thing with a start button and that big red plastic mushroom you bash to shut the whole system down when some poor fucker falls in and loses his legs. Add to this massive riffs delivered like concrete blocks onto a loading bay from the back of a truck, over and over and over, and every single one of them landing on your fucking foot.

It's huge and brutal, possibly an heir to the Swans, except Cop seems surprisingly subtle by comparison despite equivalent soul-crushing weight. Extremity has become a bit of a minefield in musical terms as of at least the last decade, mainly thanks to too many industrial types coming to resemble the enemy in their relentless invocation of the violence of civilisation. In fact I'm surprised there hasn't yet been a pro-UKIP power electronics act coming through, but give it time. Godflesh at least seem to have remained true to the spirit of dissent informing earlier generations of noisy buggers, the Grey Wolves for example - whom I mention partially because they're about as dark as it gets and I know they're good lads, and also because I know one of them occasionally reads this stuff, and because for the sake of argument I suppose Godflesh are the Grey Wolves with tunes, just about, at least in terms of what they do to your ears, brain, and arse.

It's hardly pretty, but then neither is the world which has inspired this particular hour long howl of rage, and sometimes it helps to be reminded of the fact with no punches pulled.

Brothers of the Sonic Cloth (2015)

I've been waiting for the musical volcano of Tad Doyle to once more spew forth its lava, raining molten death upon surrounding villages for some time, at least since the Hog Molly album whenever that was, and certainly since that wonderful decade when a new Tad album seemed like a fairly regular thing; and the reason for such anticipation is that Tad were pretty much the greatest rock band of all time.

The lad has apparently spent the intervening years running his Witch Ape studio up in Seattle, generally avoiding music business headaches, and occasionally titting about with his own ditties. Eventually he decided this material justified getting a band together, and so he did, and here's the album.

I'm a bit out of the loop with all the musical subgenres into which everything has split of late, but then I've reached that age past which all sense of chronology goes out the window, by which I'd guess probably a couple of years have passed since the members of Tad all went their separate ways when actually that was 1999, which was fucking ages ago. Oh well.

One of the subgenres into which metal has split is sludge metal, or maybe I mean doom metal. You were probably all sick of it years ago, but I never saw the memo. Lieutenant Pigeon may already have enjoyed a sludge comeback for all that anyone has bothered to keep me informed. Anyway, the first Brothers of the Sonic Cloth album is something along these lines so I gather, meaning it's quite different to the music of Tad in certain respects, same ballpark maybe but a different game. In fact, most of Tad's output sounds quite light-hearted and breezy compared to this. To my ears - with all of their limited fat old man points of reference - I'm reminded of bits of Black Sabbath, maybe Cop-era Swans with more of a tune, and elements of Ramleh, Skullflower or whoever. The guitar represents a great wall of grinding neolithic pain rolling over its audience at glacial speed with the bass like some growling animal prowling around out there somewhere; and the drums just fucking pound. The raw force definitely reminds me of the Swans, but Tad - or Thomas Doyle if you prefer - always had so much more going on than just bludgeoning noise. As with his earlier endeavours, there's some serious if understated melody underscoring this river of lava, invoking that uniquely wounded quality which characterises the man's finest work, serving to throw the whole into sharp relief as something more than just the sound of stars undergoing gravitational collapse but with guitars - if you'll pardon what is probably a fucking ludicrous and possibly overused simile.

It's good to have this guy back, and certainly not wishing to diminish the mighty force of Peggy Doyle or Dave French, but this is one absolute fucker of a comeback album - if such a term is quite appropriate - and clear evidence of why Mr. Doyle remains one of the most astonishing music artists of our time.

Peter Hope & the Exploding Mind - Hot Crow on the Wrong Hand Side (2015)

Older readers may recall Peter Hope as the tonsils of the Box, one of Sheffield's numerous finest, and this came my way specifically due to my having written about The Box @Doublevision a few months back, which is nice, and very much a trend I am keen to encourage.

Peter Hope seems to have become the living embodiment of the Def Jux independent as fuck maxim and presently runs the Wrong Revolution label, purveyors of all sorts or noisy oddities, discs, tape cassettes, and whatever the hell else they feel like doing at any given moment. His seemingly frenzied activity somehow presents the impression of some grizzled Beefheartian outsider living in a van by the river and scaring the shit out of anyone foolish enough to be out walking their dog at that time of night, which is almost certainly wrong, but that's nevertheless the impression I've formed and Hot Crow on the Wrong Hand Side does nothing to dispel it.

It begins well with Red C, a sort of Suicide-style grind scored for mains hum and antique drum machine; which runs into Hot Crow which sounds like it began life inside the dashboard of some LA lowrider driven by a bald, angry guy with his beard knotted into a gang sign - or more specifically we go from Alan Vega to a sort of distorted Lench Mob in the blink of an eye, and from thereon the swerves continue in similarly random and dramatic fashion. Oh Death is the next track, roughly a descent into gut-wrenching delta blues for Casio VL-1 played with hammers, and here is revealed the key to Hope's appeal, namely that he has a seriously great voice. I'm not sure about range or the technical stuff, but he really can sing, and as such probably qualifies as one of the few people whose music has ever been spuriously qualified as industrial about which this can be said; or can at least be said if we're working with the assumption that Bowie can sing. That said, any resemblance to Bowie's sausagery is defeated by their being significantly less room for parody. On the other hand, maybe I was thinking of Lux Interior...

This is an odd album, and nothing like I anticipated. It sounds quite basic whilst obviously being born from some sort of laptoppy sampley thing, cubase running on a computer cannibalised from reconditioned 1970s Grundig tape recorders springs to mind if that isn't disappearing a bit too far up my own journalistic sphincter; or, it could just as easily have been mastered on cassette, if you prefer, and this isn't invoked as necessarily a bad thing. Unlike certain laptop glitch bores whose names I've thankfully forgotten, this is just enough of a mess to keep it interesting each time you listen, distorted without turning everything into a Ramleh album, and not quite like anything else I've heard for a good few years, a surprisingly funky racket.

Brighter Death Now - May All Be Dead (2000)

About a million years ago when I ran one of those DIY tape labels that everyone now regards as having been so cool but no-one gave a flying shit about at the time, I came across the work of a Swedish electronics duo called Enhœnta Bødlar, apparently meaning One Handed Tormentor. They were weird - scary and genuinely peculiar - and I haven't really heard anything quite like them since. Ogreish Guttural Wounds, the vinyl album they had pressed up only to, apparently, bury most of the copies in the Ljungby woodland out of shame remains one of my most prized and oddest possessions, and so quite naturally I always wondered what happened to the two of them after we lost touch. Many years later, I discovered that the individual behind Brighter Death Now - a band whose name I'd noticed turning up in fanzines for at least a decade - was one Roger Karmanik, or Little Roger, or X-Terminator as he had been identified in Enhœnta Bødlar.

Whilst I hadn't exactly avoided the work of Brighter Death Now, neither had I been drawn to it, having assumed it would sound much like all those other bands with whom they tended to be associated. They've recently been described as death industrial, which is I suppose sort of like death metal with oscillators instead of guitars. It's probably as good a description as any, although as a genre it's something I kind of gave up on back in the mid-eighties; and something for which I can't help but feel partially responsible as former CEO of the DIY tape label who put out the very first Grey Wolves C60, back when they were called Opera for Industry and sported a logo resembling a hybrid of the Psychic TV cross and that of Philips, the Dutch electronics company. The Grey Wolves' Trev Ward and I wrote to each other quite a lot, and my own crappy noise  band supported Opera for Industry and the Subhumans on one occasion. They were nice people too, but all that power electronics noise was beginning to depress me, and I felt a cut-off point had been reached when I received a speculative letter from one Mike Dando opening with the words I operate the extreme electronics unit that the world knows as Con-Dom. I had heard the music of Con-Dom on various tapes, and now he wanted to know if I would be interested in sticking some of his tracks on one of my compilation tapes. I wasn't, and partially because whilst the name may well have been a contraction of Control & Domination as claimed, it sounded ridiculous to me, and still makes me think of schoolboys tittering over rubber johnnies.

Couldn't you think of something just a little more convincingly offensive? I wondered.

Additionally I was irritated that he considered himself a unit as opposed to just a bloke with a synthesiser and a tape recorder; and by the presumption that the world knew him as anything.

So that was it for me.

Anyway, here I am years later, mystified that such a thing as death industrial can exist in the year 2013, and listening to May All Be Dead by the bloke who used to be in Enhœnta Bødlar. I think the problem I had with much of the music that evolved into this genre is that the entire point was almost always revulsion on a physiological level, hence the barrage of ear-splitting noise and repulsive imagery, which worked well in a live setting but was often fairly dull on tape or the very occasional vinyl record. In a music venue the experience can be genuinely terrifying and hence oddly cathartic, but the tapes so often just sound like someone swearing at their mum with the washing machine going, because shock doesn't have quite the same impact when there's no adrenaline rush or flight or fight response to distract from the basic absurdity of the situation. Brighter Death Now get around this by producing something that's sonically quite interesting compared to the work of many of their contemporaries. It's still a horrible fucking noise with some bloke screaming over the top, but good use is made of samples and loops so there's always some sort of rhythm going even if it isn't necessarily of the kind which lends itself to percussion; plus the production quality is wonderful, so even though it's a wall of noise, you get the full textural detail of every last grain of cement. If anything, a lot of this actually sounds like that point in a Throbbing Gristle performance at which the three less-exhibitionist members of the group built up sufficient head of grinding electronic stream to drown out the sound of Genesis P. Orridge telling the audience about himself. It's expertly horrible, and utterly overwhelming, just as it's supposed to be.

To tackle the elephant in the room, this particular genre of music has often carried unfortunate associations with extreme right wing politics, which is probably thanks to most musicians and non-musician types generally being a bunch of morons who can't be trusted to put their leather trousers on the right way around without the aid of a diagram. The tendency to use shocking and violent imagery without comment by electronic musicians probably stems in part from Throbbing Gristle's documentary mode of expression; but shock relies upon presenting something unfamiliar, and thus only works for a while, requiring the sort of upping of stakes which gave birth to groups like Whitehouse and Ramleh; which in turn presents the problem of where there is left to go when all possible taboos have been transgressed in artistic terms. Unfortunately the only avenues that many musicians of this kind seemed to feel was left open for them were philosophical because - to reduce it to terms even a musician could understand - whilst records with pictures of Nazi concentration camps on the cover entitled The Really Fun Place may be shocking, and may challenge cultural hypocrisy and conventional concepts of morality blah blah blah, it's even more shocking if you're really into that shit; which is why so much supposedly industrial music has somehow ended up believing its own publicity, promoting a view which reinforces the most reactionary and authoritarian aspects of the status quo.

Although some artists - and some whom I fear Roger Karmanik of Brighter Death Now has promoted through his own label by one means or another - make no bones about pushing a racist or socially-Darwinian agenda, I would argue that there remains a distinction between those who actively admire Adolf Hitler, and those who need to think about whether they really want people turning up to their gigs in full SS uniform. You might not want either of them around for tea and biscuits, but they aren't entirely the same animal.

Because this sort of thing does bother me a little, I've had a virtual root around, although I can find nothing conclusively dubious about the politics of Brighter Death Now, if as a band they, or at least he can be said to have any political or philosophical drive. There is an interview - the link for which I seem to have mislaid - in which he made some comment about the preservation of Swedish culture which had the cadence of those who whine about immigration and foreign influence, and whom I generally tend to regard as clueless fucking wankers, but it seemed merely odious rather than actively suggestive of far-right sympathies. While Sweden maintained an official eugenics policy up until 1975, I'm going to assume its significant that the cover of May All Be Dead is so obviously inspired by those of the anarchist punk band Crass, and further assume that the raw horror expressed in the music of Brighter Death Now carries no overtly political or authoritarian agenda.

So if you've skipped the last two paragraphs, the verdict is: great and yet horrible music, and probably not a Nazi so far as I can tell. In fact, May All Be Dead seems thematically a great deal more personal than is common for this genre, resembling the earlier records of the Swans more than anything else, even if it musically echoes the more aggressive Throbbing Gristle material - a sort of acid enema for the human spirit; at least it would be nice to think that, and that there is at least one power electronics band of sufficient intellectual development to have risen above the customarily juvenile Nazi-goth bullshit, or so I would hope.