From The Headphones — Molchat Doma, Pharmakon, OCS, Buñuel, The Bug
Molchat Doma
Belaya Polosa
Sacred Bones
Released: 9/6/24
I will not be the first unoriginal voice to note that Molchat Doma’s dark synths and post-punk industrial propulsions bring to mind strobe-laden goth nights, clubs humid as the evening’s patrons take rhythmic instruction via one thumping sound system and handfuls of chemical encouragement. Belaya Polosa is an evocative album for sure, but Molchat Doma’s treatment of shadowy electronics (“Ty Zhe Ne Znaesh’ Kto Ya”) and penchant for icy guitar (“Belaya Polosa”) possesses a thoughtful level of composition, the rhythmic component key but not to the detriment of melodic layering (“Chernye Cvety”) and zigzagging dance-pop tonality (“III”). Belaya Polosa is a varied listen and Molchat Doma do themselves great service by standing firmly on the correct side of that fine line between the “modern take” or the much simpler “pastiche.”
Links:
Molchat Doma — Official / Bandcamp
Sacred Bones Records — Official / Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Stereo Sanctity:
In the four years since their last album, Monument, there was so much change in the lives of vocalist Egor Shkutko, bassist / synth player Pavel Kozlov, and primary songwriter, producer and arranger Raman Kamahortsau that it was only inevitable to hear a transformation in their music. “The entire album is a prism through which we tried to reflect what has happened to us,” the band says of their new work. Kamahortsau once again handled the production duties, though the sonic spectrum on Belaya Polosa is markedly different from past albums.
From the opening synth swell and drum machine throb it’s clear that Molchat Doma are operating on another level. The band gained a following with earlier albums that sound like third-generation bootlegs of banned recordings from the Eastern Bloc made after a few key entries in the Factory Records catalog were smuggled in from the West. Belaya Polosa propels them into a new direction while retaining their cold minimalist delivery they’re known for. The basement grime and dirty tape-head sound of their previous work are now making space for digital luster and shimmering production values.
Moving on from the band’s past sound was only natural given the album’s themes of change and turning away from a troubled past into an uncertain future. “It's a different band,” a member of Molchat Doma says when asked about the advanced arrangements and timbral ear-candy of Belaya Polosa. “A different sound and context, but the same style and the same emotions.” And indeed, Molchat Doma retains the duality of being both cold and feverish in their delivery while pushing their music into expanded territories through an armory of new textures. The trio continue to harness the sound of harrowing beauty thriving under harsh realities.
Pharmakon, the terror-inductive, gut-strewn and corrosive gear-churn project by artist Margaret Chardiet, has authored a new LP titled Maggot Mass, which will be out October 4th via Sacred Bones. While still committed to bleakness, Chardiet’s latest single, “Methanal Doll,” sounds less compositionally tied to the Power Electronics realm than prior Pharmakon material. The single’s video seems to pay aesthetic props to transgressive auteurs Richard Kern and Nick Zedd, featuring twisting worms and scurrying bugs, rotten eggs, draped corpses, oozing candles, and naked tree fetishists rubbing themselves raw against the bark while smeared with mud or thick glops of makeup. Combined with Chardiet’s Neubauten-esque percussive sonic savagery and unvarnished, reverb-dripping throat, the whole package is appropriately ominous.
It should go without saying, but the video is not suitable for the cubicle. You’ve been warned.
Links:
Pharmakon — Bandcamp / Instagram / YouTube
Sacred Bones Records — Official / Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Stereo Sanctity:
Maggot Mass is the fifth full-length album by Pharmakon, out Oct 4, 2024 on Sacred Bones Records, and sees the resurrection of the project after a 5 year hiatus. From the death of an internal set of rules and structures that (Margaret) Chardiet built for Pharmakon at its’ conception, the project is reborn in a new form: this album marks a notable pivot in sonic, vocal, and lyrical styles for the 17-year project, hearkening to Industrial and Punk while still maintaining its’ vitriolic and experimental roots in Power Electronics and Noise.
'Maggot Mass' introduction from Pharmakon:
Maggot Mass is bred out of a disgust for the dysfunctional relationship that humans have developed with our environment and the rest of life on earth. It touches on the wounds of loneliness inflicted by that broken bond, and asks us to face the mirror in acknowledgement of our personal and systemic culpability.
What peace can be made with privilege, when we understand the true cost of our comfort is death and not dollar? What peace can be made with death when we impose on it the same bankrupt pecking order in which we organize our lives? To what extent is life worth living in the solitude of this self-imposed species loneliness?
Human beings measure our worth only in relation to our selves, on the scale of an endless and exponential accumulation of things. This is what we call wealth. This is what we deem to be power. We calculate our meaning in money, assets and objects. Influence, superiority, and control. Western heritage dictates a hierarchy of beings, and places ourselves at the very apex of evolution. We think of ourselves as somehow separate from the rest of the “natural world," its’ primary narrators, and at the center of every orbit. This delusion transforms bodies into objects, land into property, and people into expendable tools.
If our value were determined instead by the richness of our reciprocation to the very fabric of being, the very existence of existence, our role in the ecosystem of land and of people… then who could say that a human being has more worth than a measly maggot?
A maggot eats death and alchemizes it back into life: breaking down matter and recycling its’ nutrients. One gift begets another. It soon undergoes its’ miraculous transfiguration into a fly, and continues on to pollinate 70% of plants: midwives and messengers to the flora of Earth. And we? We pollute instead of pollinate. A select few profit from scouring, pillaging and staining the dirt at the expense of the many, with net losses to the diversity of life on the planet, and by the degradation and death of those who are trampled just to serve their greed.
In an attempt to reconcile grief and loss on both a personal and global scale, I sought solace by envisioning rebirth through death. I longed to revel in the reciprocation of decay, to celebrate the beauty of regeneration through degeneration. But these dreams were impossible not to wake from, and I had to acknowledge the gaping chasm between those possibilities for communion with the earth and the feasibility of that connection in this reality, under the thumb of our ruling systems. The grip of capital that squeezes dry every facet of our lives and even our deaths.. I imagined one of many possible paths through this chasm. What if our final choice, our last act and lasting legacy was one of giving back what we received from the chaos of creation. If we gave not only our lives but our deaths to the cause of the existence of existence…
once I slough
off this human skin
I will find my home
and ancestral kin…
in the coffin-birth
of my cadaver’s ecosystem
Additional to his latest Osees recording, SORCS 80, main-Osee John Dwyer is releasing material from his OCS project, an intimate live recording titled Live At Permanent Records. Performed alongside OCS bandmate Brigid Dawson, lead single “Dreadful Heart” offers preview of the album, which will of course be made available in a series of limited edition 2-LP pressings and 6-single 7” box set.
Via Tell All Your Friends PR:
CREDITS
John Dwyer: Guitar, Vocals & Haken Synth
Brigid Dawson: Vocals, Tambourine & Shruti
Tom Dolas: Electric Piano (Block Of Ice)
Nick Murray: Drums (Block Of Ice)
Andres Renteria: Percussion (Block Of Ice)
Live Sounds by Cos The Casual Prince
Mixed By JPD
Mastered by JJ Golden
Artwork by Liorzh
All Songs Artificial Head ASCAP.
PRESSING INFO
pre-order: 2024-09-06
release date: 2024-11-29
6x7“ Boxset:
handmade & screenprinted wooden box
limited to 200 copies
(only available at Rock Is Hell Records)
Factory edition w/ offset printed covers:
crystal-clear vinyl
(distributed by Midheaven/Revolver, USA)
crystal-clear vinyl w/ alittle bit blue & red
(distributed by Forte Distribution, UK)
1st LP solid red vinyl, 2nd LP solid blue vinyl
(distributed by Sounds Of Subterrania, Ger) (distributed by Homeless Records, Australia)
Digital via Castle Face Records & Midheaven/Revolver
Links:
OCS — Bandcamp
Midheaven— Official
Rock Is Hell — Order link for the 7” box set
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Tell All Your Friends PR:
During the holidays of 2023, Brigid Dawson and John Peter Dwyer, the duo known together as OCS, got together at JPD's house in Los Angeles and started transcribing a nice list of songs. "Some new, some very old that I’ve never played live ever and put together a holiday set list which we performed two nights in a row at Permanent Records Roadhouse in Los Angeles and did a bit of it at a charity event at the Lodge Room," Dwyer remembers.
Seven tunings later, the Live at Permanent Records LP is ready to be shared. The first single from the LP is "Dreadful Heart". "It was a lot of fun and there was a lot of libation and celebration," Dwyer continues. "We surrounded ourselves with good friends and came up with this charming off kilter set of recordings. I think they capture the casual energy of the evening in the mood of the crowd."
Live at Permanent Records LP is due November 29th via Rock Is Hell.
Following his recent departure from Oxbow, I’m happy to hear the band’s former frontman, Eugene S. Robinson, on the mic. His Buñuel project is putting out a new album in late October called Mansuetude, the labels SKiN GRAFT and Overdrive partnered up for the release. A nicely turbulent appetizer surfaced in the form of new single “Fixer,” which features Couch Slut’s Megan Osztrostits, another violent presence with a microphone and dark fixations.
In addition to Osztrostits, Mansuetude also features Converge’s Jacob Bannon, The Jesus Lizard’s Duane Denison, cellist Andrea Beninati and saxophonist David Binney.
Release date is 10/25/24.
Links:
Buñuel — Bandcamp / Instagram / Linktree
SKiN GRAFT — Official
Overdrive — Official
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Rarely Unable:
Buñuel recently announced their fourth full-length album Mansuetude, and first release outside their outlandish trilogy of albums. Today, they share a second preview of the album in the form of "Fixer", a track featuring the snarls of Couch Slut vocalist Megan Osztrosits.
Mansuetude is a co-release between SKiN GRAFT and Overdrive, arriving 25th October 2024.
The music on Mansuetude warps and buckles with complexity, freedom, tenderness and primaeval energy all at once. The album includes a handful of exciting collaborations, with "Fixer" being the first taster of this combined energy. About the track the band comments;
“Following a Breaking Bad trajectory and owing this account largely to a friend of his who had been called The Crystal Meth King of Oklahoma by the FBI, the FIXER follows a drug czar’s Man Friday as he cleans up that which inevitably needs cleaning up when you’re living a life of crime.”
Megan Osztrosits of Couch Slut adds;
“When Eugene hit me up to ask if I wanted to do vocals for a track, I said yes without even hearing it. He rules and I am psyched for this absolute ripper of an album.”
From March of 2023 till February 2024, producer Kevin Richard Martin, known professionally as The Bug, composed and made available online a series of numbered EPs titled, Machines I - V. Culling from this material, Martin is issuing a two-LP album of selections simply titled Machine that’s releasing October 4th via Relapse Records.
Having sampled two of the album’s available offerings via Bandcamp, “Buried (Your Life Is Short)” is set to a buzz-laden crawl that’s littered with dark dub echoes, while “Bodied (Send For The Hearse)” is carried by a punching bass beat and atonal downward swirls. The Bug’s shadowy and monochromatic vision leans toward dystopian, suitably soundtracking nightmarish scenarios within his captivating circuit-spliced environs.
In addition to the 12 tracks collected for the album, the 21 tracks from the Machines I - V EPs are also available in a physical 45 rpm box set.
Links:
The Bug — Bandcamp / Instagram
Relapse Records — Official / Bandcamp / Instagram
Pressure Records — Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Phantom Limb:
Machine is Kevin Richard Martin’s first solo instrumental record as his revered alias The Bug, starting life as a series of self-released “floor weapons” (to use Martin’s description), landing in instalments between 2023 and 2024 on the Bandcamp page of his own PRESSURE label. And now - always his intention - Martin has collated a single, powerful, unified statement from those EPs. The album detonates apocalyptic dread-tech mutations of crushing intensity, fusing a unique new strain of futuristic dub with deadly deep electronics and killer bass riffs worthy of the heaviest metal. It is, writes Martin, “ice cold and dystopian.” It celebrates “atmospheric pressure, and the joy of full body assaults, via oversized sound systems in undersized club rooms.” Machine also represents thelatest metamorphosis of the Macro Dub Infection philosophy Martin germinated with the groundbreaking series of compilations he began curating for Virgin Records as early as the mid-90s. As The Bug, Martin’s music is formed from an overwhelmingly explosive sub-bass pressure, as relentlessly in-the-red beat production amplifies mutant industrial sound design, fuzzed, expectant crackle, and bleak greyscale harmonics. Machine is no exception: no speaker exists big enough to withstand its weight. A fusion of William Gibson-inspired sci-fi and Jamaican sound system-influenced brutality, the record personifies the “killing sound” after which Martin named his legendary 7" series that unexpectedly attracted the likes of Massive Attack and Grace Jones to his magnetic production style.
The double album represents a cohesive and narrative journey through dystopian wildernesses. Throughout, the production shakes with scoured textures, black hole gravity, and deceptively crafted nuance, as Martin’s singular mastery of ferocious and annihilated bass music holds the record together in a visceral and pummelling assault. Indeed, Martin describes the EP sequence from which the album was culled as “separate parts of theoverall puzzle that becomes fully realised on this longform album.”
Key moments on Machine such as “Buried (Your Life is Short)” and “Bodied (Send For the Hearse)” live up to their names. The former is earthmoving in its sheer weight, opening with a riff-made-machine synthesis of coruscating tectonics over a heavy stepping beat destined to destroy dancefloors. “Bodied” begins with an acid-corroded 4/4 kickdrum, around which noxious fumes sputter and billow, spitting pure poison that no human body could survive. It is industrial-strength doom-riff-dub, as slow and low as sonics can possibly go. As such singular music, few comparisons exist, but considering an instrumental SWANS in dub or Aphex Twin covered by Sunn O))) yields something close, though Machine turns up the crushing, pulverising intensity even further still.
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
