Aeternal Flux II

  This collaboration between Chris Abrahams, Oren Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim brings together three of Australia’s most innovative experimental musicians. Although Ambarchi is now based overseas, the trio's improvisatory practice retains a collective identity. This is an artistic interaction developed through years of friendship and enhanced by each musician’s refinement of his own methodology. The grounding of this practice and the open-endedness of the music generates an intriguing tension, a simultaneous augmentation and contradiction of the title’s semiotic chain of meaning. Placelessness is a term coined by Canadian geographer Edward Relph in the 1970s to describe the erosion of individuality of place under modernity. Capitalist imperatives (commercialisation, mass consumption) and bureaucratic standardisation instil homogeneity in the cultural environment. A companion concept in the field of anthropology, describing a similar form of alienation, is the non-place. Marc Aug é...

  This concert provides rewarding insights into the fruitful intermingling of genres that occurs on metal’s experimental fringe. Anocht and Klavier Krieger, two artists from Melbourne, join Tasmanian underground legend Striborg for a series of solo performances where the theatrics and bleak themes of black metal meet dark ambient textures and mutant synth pop. Anocht initiates proceedings with strategies inherited from Blue Sabbath Black Cheer’s noise metal scene, layering ear-splitting shards of feedback guitar over a low ominous pulse. His 30-minute set is a feverish trail of amorphous themes that shares atmospherics with the dank, tomb-scented exhalations of Gnaw Their Tongues and Abruptum. Tortured vocalising over synth tritones and chitinous squeaks gives way to an even more dour sequence of delay accumulated guitar riffs collapsing into a swirling fog of distorted moans. Klavier Krieger’s set begins with isolated, echo-drenched beats, opening space that will be graduall...

  Codex Serafini have found an appropriate home for their first full-length album release. Riot Season, an independent label based in England’s Black Country region, provides an outlet for musicians that share a similar spiritual intensity with the mysterious Brighton-based psych rockers. They’ve shared a stage with Japanese neo-psych superstars Acid Mothers Temple on at least one festival date. Mahti, another labelmate, features members of legendary Finnish avant-rock group Circle. The more raucous elements in their sound have a parallel in Shit and Shine whose 2004 noise rock mantra Ladybird Riot Season has re-released in an anniversary edition. In a manner  fitting  for such eminent company, The Imprecation of Anima sees a broadening and deepening of the mystic energy Codex Serafini has demonstrated on their previous Halfmeltedbrain EP releases Invisible Landscape (2021) and Serpents of Enceladus (2020). The album’s four, longish suite-like tracks evolved out of ...

  The high rise block depicted on the cover of Mules’ new EP Illusions of Joy could be the apex of Brutalist excess. Situated in monochromatic parkland, this hexagonal example of ‘high’ modernism seems to be sitting on a rotational base like a playground carousel. The curtains that cover its front-facing side accentuate an oppressive infantilisation; they could be on the verge of parting to reveal a puppet show of multiple domestic discontents. Is this structure really a bin photographed at a severe angle to look like a towering public housing edifice and whose steel grid design only resembles myriad balcony windows? Either way, this Photoshopped illusion serves well as symbolic counterpoint to singer Tommy Vincent’s lyrical concerns: hegemony, social control, technological addiction, the neoliberal race to the bottom (which, in Vincent’s wordplay, ends in a tie).   The stark image also offers the opposing paradigm to Constant Nieuwenhuys’ concept of ‘New Babylon’ which V...

  Soot: a flaky deposit of shapeless carbon produced in the combustion of organic matter. Layers of etymological meaning leave a powdery residue of irony around the title of this third album from German noise rock trio Trigger Cut. The Proto-Indo-European sed (‘to sit’) can be found alongside the word’s Middle English and Proto-Germanic roots - soote , sote , sot , sōtą .   Circumstances surrounding the album’s creation assign pertinence  to ‘sit’ equal to the word’s contemporary meaning. Fire destroyed the group’s rehearsal room in 2021, an event that left plenty of soot and members sitting around during an already limiting lockdown. The bird depicted in the cover art is the fabled phoenix rising from the ashes; not the most original or subtle of cultural signifiers, but one appropriate for this album’s blunt force. Trigger Cut’s return to the musical fold brims with pugnacious attitude, a firm resolve not to give in to calamity. Starting over again has meant refining...

  Some groups draw inspiration from a literary source; others elevate influence into creative symbiosis. Pace Mark E. Smith and Albert Camus’ novel The Fall (or Nick Cave with Harold Pinter’s play The Birthday Party ), the Brighton, UK-based psych rock outfit Codex Serafini do more than take their name from Italian architect and artist Luigi Serafini’s imaginary encyclopedia Codex Seraphinianus . They aim to emulate the work’s fantastical reinvention of the world. Self-proclaimed emissaries from Saturn, they operate under conditions of strict anonymity, performing in red robes and black masks. Although most of the tracks have lyrics, their female lead singer sometimes sings in an invented idiom, as asemic and open to interpretation as the language in which Serafini wrote his codex. Musically, they combine elements of sludge metal, freak folk, space rock, noise rock and psych fusion into a potent brew that can gather in contemplative pools or trickle forth speedily under its own f...

    The neo-psych continuum is both mutable and ecumenical in the 21st century. An audience after good vibes and warmth in the style of old school psychedelic heroes like The Beatles and Todd Rundgren has the paisley revivalism of The Flaming Lips and Tame Impala, the consolatory soulfulness of Syd Arthur for succour. A more aggressive, edgier form dating back to the acid punk phase of the late 70s/early 80s and further shaped by post-hardcore, post-metal and math/noise rock in the 1990s and 2000s caters for those seeking harsher bad trip revelations. Bristol-based group My Octopus Mind dwell somewhere in the second camp but are capable of a melodicism more suited to the first. They occupy a position in this musical spectrum adjacent by turns to the dystopian balladry of Radiohead/The Smile, the carnival grotesquery of black midi and Mr Bungle or the raw garage psych approach of Osees and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. This bonus edition of My Octopus Mind’s Faulty at...