2012/03/18

something a little different...

If you haven't noticed (and I'm pretty sure I get zero traffic, so... you haven't, because you're not reading this), I try to post once a week, on Sundays.
This week, though, I'm going to do what this post's title says. I resurrected my five-and-a-half-years-dormant noise project and made a new four-minute EP... and then I decided to jump on the bandcamp bandwagon (or bandcampwagon, if you will). So, instead of uploading a rip from a tape in my modest collection, I instead offer a free EP of my own creation, which you can download here: http://oskoreinoiseindustries.bandcamp.com/

A little background... Earlier today, I sat down to listen to a bunch of new tapes I just got from SAORS, and rip them to mp3. First up, a split tape between Ecuador noisecore band Cacasonica and Fonograma Trapek, who I know nothing about. The Cacasonica side was great, I prefer the split CDrs I have of them with Colico and Captain Three Leg but this is still good stuff. Then I flipped the tape over for FT, who I've never heard of before. About ten seconds in, my shitty twenty-buck boombox decides to chew up the tape. To get the tape back out, I had to rip the door off the boombox, rendering it useless.

I started listening to a wrestling podcast, then after a couple of minutes I decided to also rip apart my now-useless boombox with a pair of pliers because I'm mature like that... and, somewhat influenced by Frank Goshit I decided, hey, why not use Audacity to document the process. About an hour (and one gashed finger) later, I have a binbag full of broken pieces of plastic and sixty-two minutes of too-minimalist-to-be-fun noise (and feedback, since I had Audacity set to play what it was recording and my laptop mic was picking that up as well as the noise I was making). I split the recording into sixteen parts of about four minutes each and put them all on top of each other, and now it's dense enough to be interesting for me to listen to... though I am a little disappointed with how normal the handheld vacuum cleaner I used to clean all the little pieces off my bed sounds...
 
I guess this kind of noise might be frowned upon by the art noise scene who actually know what they're doing, it might be more appropriately labeled shitnoise perhaps... but fuck it, I don't listen to noise so I can sit here and try to work out what effects pedals the dude's using, or which fancy computer software the sounds have been fed through. This is primitive, but it's a genuine aural documentation of destruction. Whatever. If anybody actually does download it, I hope you like it enough to keep the file and not just delete it.

2012/03/11

Bodies Lay Broken - Execrable Excrescence Of Exsufflicate Exenterating Exertion


A friend of mine was raving about these guys this last week, so why not throw this demo up here now.

Bodies Lay Broken were a goregrind band from St. Paul, Minnesota. Musically, they were a totally serious project, but when it came to song titles and imagery they chose to go the less serious route, throwing together medical-sounding terms with no regard for whether or not they made sense and throwing as many hidden 'tributes' to their favorite gore/grind bands into their packaging as they could... and putting Hello Kitty images on their merch (which is great 'cause I wear their t-shirt to my kindergarten teaching job and the kids love it!). Despite a great in-depth 'biography' that has them forming in 1992 and releasing a large number of demos, EPs and an LP or two in the '90s, their first real release was this 2001 demo. After this demo, they changed vocalists and went on to release split EPs with Machetazo, Black Market Fetus and Head Hits Concrete, and a full-length CD/LP. The splits and this demo were collected on a second CD. All of it is top fucking notch goregrind with awesome riffs throughout, the LP especially is one of my favorite goregrind LPs of all time. They split up when one member, Hagamoto, returned to Japan around 2004~2005. Hagamoto has also been involved in Gevotais Borken and Brob, as well as the excellent Patisserie (which is in some ways kind of a continuation of BLB) and, I believe, Pantalones Abajo Marinero, where he pretends to be Hispanic. Other members of BLB have been involved in bands such as Hope You Choke and Pandamonium.


...yeah, I'm not as good as BLB are at coming up with verbose alliterations...

2012/03/04

Fuck... I'm Dead / Vaginal Carnage / Captain Cleanoff / The Kill live shit

Let's start back off with a bang.

Back around the turn of the millennium, I was an awkward teenager with few friends, living in a bullshit seaside resort town in the south of England that completely lacked any sort of punk or metal scene whatsoever, let alone grind or noise. Consequently, I spent as much time on the internet as our finances and primitive dial-up connection would allow - back then it was a pay-by-the-minute deal, 'cause my family couldn't afford one of those new-fangled cable/broadband connections. Downloading one three-minute mp3 from a band's website took the best part of half an hour. I spent a lot of time in chatrooms with other dorks from around the world, while we all talked about how kvlt we were. Dumb days, to be sure, but it led to me being in possession of this great little tape.

I heard a couple of songs from Fuck... I'm Dead's demo tape thanks to some old webzine or something, and was raving about them in a chatroom when some dude from Australia told me he had these live recordings of F...ID and a few other Aussie grind bands of the time... as well as a videos of F...ID and The Kill, which I sadly don't have in digital form (I think the VHS is somewhere in my parents' attic). We agreed a trade and he sent me this tape and the video in return for four or five taped copies of CDs I owned. He also sent me his own band Arbitrator's self-released MCD, which is some great experimental death metal. We've got (mostly) complete live sets from four of the best in the post-Y2K Aussie grindcore scene, plus there were 10 minutes or so left at the end of each side so he threw on some of his favorite songs from the Catasexual Urge Motivation album, The Encyclopedia Of Serial Murders. All the live sets were recorded at The Arthouse in Melbourne in 2001.

Fuck... I'm Dead, for a short while there, seemed to be everyone's underground darlings. The weird name ("must have come up with that during a multiplayer session of Goldeneye 64," commented a friend) probably helped. They put out a demo tape limited to just 100 copies, then self-released a split 7" with Sanitys Dawn on guitarist Dave's No Escape label. Then Razorback signed them for a CD, and they seemingly had a ton of other released planned, but only a split CD with Engorged came out as far as I'm aware. There was a live CD/DVD a few years later, but I don't think they've done any studio releases for about 10 years now, which is a shame. For those unfamiliar, they play(ed) a somewhat death metal tinged form of grind - I guess you could call it deathgrind if you wanted to sound like an idiot - which was characterized by the use of a drum machine. I was never really sure why they used a drum machine, since their vocalist Jay is a great drummer himself. Anyway, they play 16 songs with some nice banter from Jay in between, studio recordings of all the songs can also be found on the Bring On The Dead CD. Recorded May 19th, 2001.

Vaginal Carnage were a very underrated goregrind band that didn't exist for long - they split up when the vocalist passed away in 2004. They released an awesome MCD on No Escape, other than that I don't know what they put out, but I'm sure there must have been a demo tape at some point. They play 12 songs, and this set is from the same night as the F...ID set. Most of these songs are not on the Dildo Detention MCD on No Escape, so this is a great recording to have. Four of the twelve songs don't have titles on the tracklisting I was sent, and are not on Dildo Detention for me to be able to fill in the gaps. If anybody downloading this can let me know the names of any of these songs, please do - I'm totally OCD about my mp3 tags...

Closing side A of the tape is the song Supraliminal Psychosadistic Motivation by CUM.

First up on side B is one of my absolute favorite grind bands of this millennium, Captain Cleanoff from Adelaide. Totally awesome fast-as-shit old-school grind with some amazing riffs. They've put out a split 7" with Open Wound, a self-titled MCD on No Escape, then after a long period of inactivity a full-length on Obscene Records, I think. And now there's a new full-length upcoming on Blastasfuk. Surely a few other releases that I'm forgetting, too. Anyway, this set was recorded before the self-titled MCD came out, so it's mostly pre-MCD stuff with a few songs from the MCD too. The tracklisting doesn't have titles for some of the newer songs, but I filled in the gaps by checking the MCD tracklist. This recording has 12 songs, but I think they played 13 on the night - if I remember rightly, this recording ends with the vocalist saying "we've got one more". Oh well, 12 songs is 1200% better than none. Recorded May 19th, 2001.

Last live recording supplied by The Kill, and recorded on September 7th, 2001. The guitarist from this band runs the Blastasfuk label, and that's a pretty good indication of what The Kill sound like I guess. They've put out a demo, an MCD on No Escape, and a live MCD and studio CDEP on Blastasfuk, plus a few other splits and things which recycle those same recordings. This set was recorded when Neil from Undinism was still in the band, so well before the MCD came out. 15 songs, mostly from the demo but a couple from the MCD. I guess this was the first time they ever played Blown Noise, and they fucked it up a couple of times before Neil decides to skip it and go on to the next song, but Roby and Jay (yeah, the vocalist from F...ID is also the drummer in The Kill) overrule him and they nail it on the third try. I used the demo and MCD for the song titles, so a few of them are different to what's written on the 'sleeve'. It's possible that the whole demo is included in this set, but I'm too lazy to check now.

The tape is topped off with four more CUM songs.

So, yeah... this is an upload I'd been sitting on for a while, because it's all unreleased stuff - premium content! - but I guess it's a nice one to use to relaunch the blog. No proper cover, but I scanned the tracklisting that was sent to me with the tape and have included that because hey, why not. It's a hefty download, and a full 93 minutes long, but it's worth your time... and hey, you don't have to listen to the whole thing at once.

Sorry for rambling on so much! I'll try and make the next one shorter...

fuck the feds // rebirth

Okay, so Megaupload got FBI'd out of existence, and for a little while there it looked like the whole internet might go with it, or some shit. Rather than change to another filesharing site, only for them to get taken down in another week or two, I stopped bothering to update my newborn blog.

Enough time has passed, though, and it looks like all the piracy fuss has died down for now, so I figure it's time to start it up again. I've re-upped all of my old posts on Mediafire (which is kinda annoying because MF only seems to work when it feels like it) and updated the links. And now, hell, maybe I'll even make a new post...

2012/01/15

Putride Defecation / Infected Pussy / Gronibard / Carnac Attack



Okay, let's go somewhere that isn't Japan. I was always totally antisocial as a kid, plus I grew up in a pretty small town with no real punk or metal scene, never mind grind and noise. So when I was around 16~18, I'd spend a lot of time online hunting out new bands. Obviously, one band on this four-way stands out as being better known than the other three; six months or so before Gronibard's self-titled first album came out on Bones Brigade, I wound up chatting to some French dude on ICQ (my French is pretty good). He recommended Gronibard to me as his friend's band, and sent me a few mp3s of songs that wound up being on that first full-length. I was instantly hooked, and more than a decade later that album is still a personal favorite. I think the dude I'd been talking to went on to do his own label, Meatbox 5000 or something like that. Anyway, another thing I stumbled across online was a webzine done by Necrophil, the vocalist of noisecore band Infected Pussy. I don't remember the webzine's name now, but at the time I checked it regularly. He had a little distro attached to it too, and when I had the money to start ordering records that was one of the first places I started to buy shit from. That one name, Gronibard, on the front of this tape made it a no-brainer.

This thing is an all-French affair, with four quite different bands contributing. First up, we have Putride Defecation. They play a retarded - in a good way - kind of noisecore; their songs are broken up by goofy-sounding old French disco-pop music which adds to the fun of this part of the tape. Their song titles are all in French and take the same dumb, humorous approach to things like sex and toilet humour that Gronibard are known for. I don't really know anything about this band, but I really dig their stuff on this tape. If I recall right, I was a bit unsure when splitting the tracks whether I'd gotten it right... not sure if my memory serves me well, but I think the last track, even though it's the longest, is nothing but that goofy disco-pop thing, no noisecore. So I might have split the tracks up wrong, but I can't see that being an issue for anyone.

Finishing up side A is Infected Pussy. I guess these guys were somewhat well-known in the underground noisecore/grind scene of the mid-to-late '90s, or maybe I just think that 'cause I was a reader of the vocalist's webzine. They did splits with a bunch of other better known bands, including Dead Infection, Squash Bowels and C.S.S.O., but the only other InfPus record I have is a split CD with Mucupurulent. They split up some time around '99~'00, then reformed in 2003 playing the same kind of groovy and goofy goregrind that Gronibard had by then become well-known for; I actually got to see them live in late 2003 and felt that they were better at goregrind than they had been at noisecore. Their stuff on this tape gave me too much of a headache trying to split it up into the right number of songs, so I just gave up and left it as one mp3.

Starting us off on side B is the band that I considered the main attraction when I picked this thing up. This tape came out in 1999, a year or two before Gronibard signed to Bones Brigade. Their earlier material is much noisier than the chunky, groovy style they developed on their CDs, but it's undoubtedly still the same band, just taking themselves (even) less seriously. Like with the Putride Defecation tracks, I wasn't 100% sure if I split the songs up correctly; I think I got halfway, then realized I was going to end up with one song too many. So it's possible that I split one earlier song in half, and then included two songs together on one mp3 somewhere in the middle. Whatever, it still sounds the same that it would.

Finishing up the tape is Carnac Attack from Brittany, the northwestern region of France. Brittany is historically a Celtic area, closely linked with Cornwall in England, as well as Wales, Scotland and Ireland. There is some kind of separatist movement there, but it is non-violent and not well-known around the world. Anyway, as a Welshman, I feel a certain affinity for that part of the world - actually, at the Infected Pussy show I mentioned before, I made a good friend for the evening by telling a Breton that I'm Welsh; he declared me his brother. I guess he was pretty drunk. Anyway, my point is, when I first got this tape and saw the insert, I remember I was kinda stoked to check out this Breton group whose contact address was their own record-label, named in the Breton language. I was a little disappointed when I listened to the thing and found that it was just noise. Actually, at first, I kinda hated it. In the years after that, I became much more a fan of noise, and now I can enjoy this part of the tape too. Like the Infected Pussy tracks, though, I was totally unable to split the recording into the correct number of songs, so it's all one mp3.

Man. I think I've typed way too fucking much about this tape by now... haha, sorry. Anyway, I think this is a pretty interesting little tape. It's cool to hear some stuff by Gronibard from before they became so well-known, but actually I think my favorite part of the tape is Putride Defecation. Anyway, it's nothing life-changing, but I think this is a great little tape... definitely worth a free download and an hour or so of your time to check it out. Especially if your French is good enough to understand the dumb song titles and intro samples. Released in 1999 by Carnac Attack's own record label. Cover scans are included, but the color on the front cover has faded quite a bit over the years... sorry.

2012/01/07

肉奴隷 (Nikudorei) - 自慰録 (十周年記念作品)


Nikudorei, sometimes known as the English translation 'Meat Slave', is the noise project of a fucked-up dude called Okada. Some of the stories I've heard about this guy are pretty fucking insane. The project has, over the years, included other members and/or session musicians including Vivian Slaughter of Gallhammer (playing saxophone) and - in my favorite period of Nikudorei's output (Niku's best release in my opinion being the split 7" with Anal Massaker) - Kenny Sanderson of Facialmess.

I picked up this tape from Allman - the record store run by the owner of H:G Fact - when I was, as I mentioned in the last post, in Japan in 2004. I guess it's a sort of celebratory release to mark Nikudorei's 10th anniversary as a (non-)musical entity. The entire sleeve can be seen above (and is also included in the download), and I guess I don't have much info to add that can't be seen on there. Both tracks measure in at a little over 7 minutes; considering they were recorded ten years apart, I'm not sure if this was intentional or coincidence. I guess he found the earlier recording and then intentionally made another recording the same length... or maybe the recordings are intentionally edited down to the same length. Nikudorei has, over the years, experimented with including grind/noisecore influences in its output, but these two recordings are pure harsh noise. Not as good as the Genital Torture full-length or the aforementioned split with Anal Massaker, but I do like this tape; when it was released, Nikudorei was going through a bad spell of releasing mediocre live recordings, and this one is definitely a few steps above that standard for me. The fact that it's released by the reliable H:G Fact should back that opinion up. Worth checking out if you like noise.