Skip to main content

Various Artists - Golpea Tu Cerebro: Spanish Underground Cassette Culture, 1980-1988 (Insane Muzak, 2018)

Noise compilations are already pretty dodgy affairs. "Hey want 20-odd blasts of random, context-less noise blasted at you for 80 minutes?". Usually not so fun. But I snagged a groovy Vinyl-on-Demand comp called Mexican Cassette Culture 1977-1982, which I guess this one maybe stemmed from (first release from this Insane Muzak imprint, which sounds like a name John Olsen might come up with, or one who was aping John Olsen might come up with), and it was great. But it was VOD so you got like 6 or 8 sides, a few tracks from each group, some longer sidelong pieces, etc. A bit of time to sink your teeth into each artist. This one is the aforementioned 2-4 minute blasts variety and after a while it's hard to really hear anything at all. As a bit of a history lesson in subversive music in Spain in the 80's it's interesting, but it's not much fun to listen to. Meh.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

MKWAJU Ensemble - KI-Motion (We Release Whatever the Fuck We Want, r. 2018)

DOPE re-ish of Midori Takada's 1981 debut album as MKWAJU Ensemble - you may recall last year WRWTFWW released Takada's Through the Looking Glass LP, but this one's even better - a wild mix of Japanese ambient and African rhythms played on marimba, vibraphone, synthesizer and percussion. RIYL Terry Riley or Tubular Bells, or even more new age-y weirdness like Vangelis, but these rhythms are so wild I wouldn't bat a lash at all if you told me the Animal Collective bros stayed up nights listening to these. Check out "Angwora Steps", totally out of pocket. "Hot Air" is a spacious breather, the other tracks pile up the rhythms in slowly-shifting crescendos...crazy stuff.

Abstracter - Cinerous Incarnate (I, Voidhanger, 2018)

I was not aware of these guys, who formed in 2010 as a noise duo, and slowly evolved and added more members and turned into a kind of death/blackened doom metal project. They've got ties to other noise acts I don't know (Sutekh Hexen) and other industrial acts I don't know (Only Now). Quite a stew and the band pulls of something that sounds truly different. It's got a tentacle in each of the aforementioned genres but blends them really well. It's quite hard to pin them down in fact. Big, heavy riffs with a production level along the lines of a sludge/black metal record but sharp instrumentation and just a dirty atmosphere...ambient noise passages separate a couple tracks as a nice diversion...very cool

Grouper - Grid of Points (Kranky, 2018)

I've never really liked Grouper much, lots of other wogs go ga-ga over anything she puts out but it all leaves me cold. I wrote her off for a while, heard some hype for this new one, and I'm back to writing her off again. It's the same ghostly vocal samples/quasi religious/hymnal vibes..haunting and ethereal and...nothing that gets me all wound up. Pass.