The sights, sounds and words of the week in noise.
NEWS
Every Tuesday is now Record Store Day, sort of, thanks to the American Association of Independent Music. Participating retailers will now devote the second day of the working week to specialty vinyl releases, new vinyl pre-releases ahead of other formats, reissues and special pressings.
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Alex Griffin — who you might know as a life is noise contributor, Tiny Mix Tapes writer, Ermine Coat player or just a general top bloke — has launched his own zine talking about all things musical over at Bonzerzine. He’s kicked it off with a review of Perth outfit Verge Collection and an interview with the fine folk of Shit Narnia. Dig it.
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In jealousy-inducing festival news, Riot Fest has revealed the bulk of the line-up for the 2015 iteration which takes place in Chicago, Denver and Toronto over three weekends in August and September. Iggy Pop and Motorhead get top billing at multiple stops, while the festival’s biggest leg in Chicago appearances from Faith No More, Drive Like Jehu, L7, Echo & The Bunnymen, Death, Indian Handcrafts and a slew of yet-to-be-announced acts. You can check the full line-up at riotfest.org.
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Seoul is now host to a tremendous public vinyl library with over 10,000 records. The venture is the latest in a series of library projects by credit company HyundaiCard and follows on from their Design and Travel Libraries. The Music Library also carries over 3,000 books and every issue of Rolling Stone from the last half-century. You can check out the website here. [via FACT]
READ
Why Swans Whipped Sheet Metal and Licked CBGB’s Floor to Make ‘Filth’ | Rolling Stone
“Although the band’s initial release, 1982’s Swans EP, built off of the city’s dying no-wave scene, the ensemble came into its own with its debut full-length, Filth, the following year. Full of lumbering rhythms created by two bassists, two drummers, one guitar, a whipped metal table and some suffocating tape loops, the record is primal art rock at its most vitriolic, anticipating industrial, sludge and noise-rock in one fell thump. More threatening, Gira intermittently snarls imperatives about power – “Flex your muscles!” “Take control and keep it!” “Don’t talk until you’re spoken to!” – in a way that made Henry Rollins sound like Olivia Newton-John at the time, as the band dismantled rock to its most threadbare essentials.”
Feurio!!!! The Strange World Of Einstürzende Neubauten | The Quietus
“There are many legendary bands who name is a shibboleth for a certain kind of taste or knowing insiderism, but whose recorded output is less adequately attended to than it deserves to be. High on that list of bands are avant-noise German collective Einstürzende Neubauten, a band from West Berlin born from the apocalyptic Cold War paranoia that gripped that city for decades, whose music is famous for the explosive din produced its unusual and repurposed instrumentation. Over their three and a half decades of operation this has included jackhammers, sheet metal and fire, an instrumentation perfectly suited to the broken terrain of a city smashed into submission and never properly rebuilt.”
LISTEN
KU?KA — Flux 98
Is Laura Jane Lowther synesthetic? The intensely lush textures that fill every space of Lowther and company’s songs are so rich in sensory detail that it feels like she’s almost translating the taste of colour into soundwaves. Flux 98 is the third single from her forthcoming EP, Unconditional, and channels sounds from above the clouds and below the ocean’s surface, awash in high-end synths and Lowther’s distinctive heightened falsetto. Unconditional is out August 14 through Midnight Feature.
Hope Drone — Every End Is Fated In Its Beginning
Australia’s Hope Drone — who you may have heard are now signed to Relapse fucking Records — have released the first taste of their forthcoming long-player, Cloak of Ash, which is due out July 14. The 9-and-a-half minute track is brimming with the ecstatic dread, marrying ferocious black metal intensity with hazy ambience over a daunting two-chord refrain. Expect big things.
WATCH
Neurosis — Times of Grace at Maryland Death Fest
MDF is consistently one of the strongest heavy festivals of the year. If you’ve been following the LIN Facebook, you probably saw our commander-in-chief’s live updates from the front lines with YOB, Conan, Ufomammut, Melt Banana, Full of Hell, Inter Arma and a metric fuckton of metal’s finest. Professional live footage has been hard to come by, but this crowd clip from Neurosis’ set is nothing to sneeze at. Even from 100 feet back on video, Neurosis is a stunning and exhausting behemoth of a band.
Sam Prekop — A Geometric
Like a degraded VHS tape playing old Windows Media Player visualisations, the video from Sam Prekop’s A Geometric is an analog-to-digital mindfuck of colours and shapes. There’s something vital lost in our HD aesthetic, and the lo-fi strobing geometry from video artist Nick Ciontea is a perfect match for Prekop’s pulsating and oscillating synths. A Geometric is taken from The Republic which is out now on Thrill Jockey.
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