Gangleri – music reviews

Every once in a while I check to see if Cock Rock Disco has some new free tunes available. Well, there are eight downloads that I had not heard yet, I have only listened to four so far. Sickboy’s “Tweencore” and unfortunately also Duran Duran Duran’s “Powerforce Mix” are rather typical CRD mixes. Energetic, but not the extreme breakcore style, but a happy weird mix of all kinds of 70′ies disco and other music. Fun to listen to, but I hoped for something harder of Duran Duran Duran. The Toilet’s “Bullshit Makes The Flowers Grow” is a lot harder. F**cked up breakcore, also with weird samples, but the new element are the deathmetal grunt and screamed vocals. Herv is slightly boring. There are four other new releases to check out and if CRD is new for you, a lot more! Crazy and at times pretty extreme electronic music for weird people.
Cock Rock Disco

This morning I heard of the sudden pass away of Arjen Grolleman (1972-2010). Dutch people will probably know him. Arjen was one of the founders of the alternative radio canal Kink FM on which he enthousiastically hosted the weekly show called X Rated. In the early days I listened to X Rated each week, since it was the one and only ‘public place’ to listen to ‘dark music’. X Rated plays neofolk to industrial and difficult dance music to neoclassical avantgarde. In recent years the style was mostly avantgardistic and not really my style, so seldom listen to the show these days. Also coming to concerts, Arjen was involved in our minor scene. An active supporter and on a relatively large scale too.
Let us hope there is also music in the next life………..

Time flies. It has already been a week and a half since I saw The Prodigy live in the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam. I have known The Prodigy since their very first album, but back then I was still a metalhead and it was of course uncool to listen to The Prodigy. Since they release an album only once every five years, they have been easy to keep up with and I got all of their albums and each album proved to be better than the last one, the same goes for “Invaders Must Die“. I never really had the intention of attending a show, but I always said I would not mind to see them some time and then after a missed date in De Melkweg, they were announced to play in the Netherlands’ largest popstage, the Heineken Music Hall at 23 November. It was not particularly easy to get tickets, but we managed to do so, so the three of us (me and my girlfriend and a friend that I never go to concerts with) drove to Amsterdam where we entered the gigantic hall way before the horrid opening act Enter Shikari. 5500 People divided over the pit and seats in the back (including a massive balcony where we were) going insane over the old-and-ugly electropunk veterans. Conclusion: the show was a bit short, but definately the largest, the most energetic and one of the best I have attended to far. Nothing of the static industrial and neofolk concerts that I usually visit but a massive crowd of dancing people, a balcony that swung from high to low since everybody knew when the beats started, and music from “Outer Space” (a singalong) to “Omen”. Damn, that was great. I have visited concerts with these numbers of people, but that is usually at festivals and not so many people for the same band, I must say, I might want to do that more often, but of course, there are actually no bands that I like with such a big audience.
Sidenote, the same friend went to see Rammstein last Monday. I remember an announcement of them playing in the Willemeen, a 300 people venue in Arnhem, probably 15 years or so ago. The day before yesterday they played for 35.000 people and they will be back for the Pinkpop festival who hope to sell 70.000 tickets for that opening evening. Amazing how much bigger Rammstein is then The Prodigy…

The festival is still going when I write this, but we went only yesterday. Arriving much later than planned due to other activities, we missed the free performance of Sieben at the Dom square in Utrecht (but we saw Matt walking through the city), so we just quickly looked around at the tiny market. On our way to the Ekko were Brighter Death Now would be playing, we only arrived when Roger had already left the stage… Next up was the band that I came for: Triarii. It took a couple of tracks before the two men on stage (I heard a third was home with Mexican flue) got the swing of it, but I found the show as a whole pretty convincing. It wasn’t much more than music from a disc with some live drumming and live vocals, but isn’t that usually the case in our style of music? I heard one track that I think is new and some slightly different versions of tracks from one of the albums. Next up was Dernière Volonté. I have seen them a couple of times more and going better than yesterday. It wasn’t bad or something, but I know they can do better. What was nice were the live beats. This mostly played live made the music a bit thinner, but it is a much better effort than just having a cd running with all the music on it. After Denière we rushed to another location because Front 242 were playing. I was not at all impressed by their show. A few tracks from the only two good albums that they released, but overall nothing that shows almost 30 years of experience.
When walking through Utrecht to get our wristbands and walking from one venue to another, I was amazed that there were quite a couple of completely dressed up grufties walking around. Indeed, Summer Darkness is the Wave Gotik Treffen in a smaller version. Not all that bad, but hopefully a possible next time we have more time to look around a bit.

Not much “blogging” here I know. Just a few things then. I’m awaiting a couple of cds. The new Rome (which I have already pulled off the internet…), the full length of Herz Jühning, the Minamata box with old material and DVD with their nice show in Antwerpen a couple of years ago and the new Isomer. As for live performances, tomorrow we go to the Summer Darkness festival in Utrecht where Sieben, Triarii and Dernière Volonté will play with a range of other interesting and less-interesting bands, they also have a market. I’m curious if it will be a bit ‘Leipzig-like’ with different locations and some publically accessible things.
In september we hope to see Der Blutharsch, Bain Wolfkind, Deutsch Nepal and Of The Wand And The Moon at the Incubate festival in Tilburg who booked a whole range of bands including some ‘of us’. This festival is quite cheap by the way!

The Flemish group Werkgroep Hagal started with weekly radio shows under the name “Omroep Odal” on the Nationalistic internet radiostation Radio Rapaille. Two shows have passed, one about “Odalism” (I think you can gather the meaning of the term), one about Midsummer. There is a bit of talking (in Dutch/Flemish) and music varying from metal to folk and traditional songs/music and a little bit from the neofolk/industrial scene. Nothing groundbreaking music-wise and too political for my liking, but if you are interested, you can download the first two shows here or visit Radio Rapaille here.

For the third time I have attended the famous Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig. The first time was nine years ago. The disastrous year in which the festival went bankrupt halfway. The previous time was two years ago. Continue reading ‘WGT 2009’ »

In the days before email, the internet, P2P networks, etc. I got my music by sending cash in envelopes to people who sold things that I was interested in. Of course I also did my share of “tape trading”, since I could not afford to buy everything I wanted to hear. Working that way has given me quite a few of (mostly temporary) contacts. One of those was Mortiis. When I grew tired of all that similar sounding black metal, I started to explore the rapidly rising amount of electronic side-projects (usually that is) of black metal people, but when I got to know Mortiis and he got to know Cold Meat Industry, I learned that there was a very different and very interesting other underground music scene. I remember asking Roger Karmanik if he was not afraid that releasing Mortiis’ material would throw his label in the grey area around the metal scene with a whole new audience and that dark underground music would become a hotchpotch instead of a (black) metal scene (in decline) and an industrial scene. He answered:

You can see the date there. In the same year the double “And Even The Wolves” compilation was released, a European and an American version. The European version has Mortiis’ head on the back, the Americans got a different line of tracks alltogether. I guess Roger realised that using Mortiis he could indeed enlarge the customer base of CMI. I guess you all know what happened next. Being an ex-member of Emperor, Mortiis was stigmatisingly filed under “metal” and the same went for other CMI-releases that were also the first industrial records to be sold in Dutch recordstores (because of the popularity of black metal). The metal audience embraced CMI as a label (apparently also looking for something different), CMI got the growing audience it was looking for and the style that the label was mostly famous for “dark ambient” became both a trademark for ‘that other scene’ and the label. Did much change after all this? Yes and no. CMI is still connected to the metal scene in the eyes of many, because of Mortiis, but also because of cooperations with other (ex-)metalheads, especially on the sublabel Cruel Moon International. CMI went from being a purely Swedish, to being a Scandinavian a European (making Cruel Moon obsolete) and in the end a global music label, yet still mainly focussed on Scandinavia, because Scandinavians seem to be best in producing the sound that typifies CMI. The label did not reject its industrial/noise roots, but some sidesteps to (too) popular music were made, mostly only for one or two releases; gothic/medieval, martial industrial, much of it did not really seem to work out and for me personally in due time being a release from CMI did no longer automatically mean that it is good. Every now and then some brilliant finding is made (Pimentola or Vestigial for example), but the label seems to play safe in the last time with their own ancient projects such as ORE, Deutsch Nepal, BDN, Desiderii Marginis.
I have much more of such letters. Of course the authors never wrote them to be made public this way. They could be nice for ‘historical’ talks such as this. What do you think? It would be nice if mr. Karmanik read this so he could let us know and perhaps give his side of the story, but I would be surprised if he actually read Gangleri.nl.

Yesterday we were at the Cross-Linx festival in Eindhoven. We mostly came to see Michael Nyman. The “Michael Nyman band” gave a wonderfull show with Nyman’s typical minimalistic and repetative modern classical music. A minor point was that people seemed to have thought that it was necessary to amplify the music and the volume was way too high.
The rest of the program was all a surprise to me. A big surprise was Jacob TV. This was some kind of jazz version of Eboman. Sound and videosamples overlaid with quite rough jazz music (normally not my cup of tea) made with four saxophones, an electric bass, a harpichord (!) and drums. Pretty surprising and very nice, but this time the volume was WAY to high…
I think the big audience drawer was the strange Belgian popgroup (thus the “cross linx”) Zita Swoon. This is really not my kind of music and I left after about 45 minutes (of a 75 minute show).
The closer-off was a very experimental performance called Air Sensible. Two accordions, a stack of equipment and nine speakers set up in a square to get a ’surround plus’ sound. Not always too great, but interesting nonetheless (they could have used the surround trick more). Strange soundscapes with musical interludes.
Not bad at all! There is some strange music out there that I do not know and even though this is a relatively large festival from my point of view and the audience was mostly a classical one, it is nice to hear something different.

Sorry, photos are from my phone

Of course you all know Michael Nyman for making the music to (all) films of Peter Greenaway. He will perform at the Cross Linx festival that will take place in Enschede (19/3), Eindhoven (20/3) and Utrecht (21/3). The “cross link” is between classical music and pop and the pop-part is for the Belgian band Zita Zwoon. We bought our tickets some time ago and I look forward to hear Nyman’s music live.

I enjoy listening to the Last.fm tag-radio “electroclash”. It contains bands such as Vive La Fête!. Apparently there are quite a few more of such bands that mix (drum)computer rhythms with guitars, strange singing and a punky attitude. Last week I ran into some more by a strange coincidence, since I saw a “disco punk” cd on a list of one of my usual music dealers that normally do not sell such popular kind of music. The band is called Noblesse Oblige and they have a nice blend of electronic music, punkrock and a bit of gothic and wave; quite a bit like Vive La Fête actually, but later albums seem to have more of an own sound. Noblesse Oblige has a male a female singer. When I looked up this band on Last.fm, I ran into two very interesting other bands. One is called ADULT. (with dot), who have released nice but rather typical electroclash, but also nice and raw electropunk. Very nice are Motormark who have a great dirty and raw electropunk sound that I think will appeal to people who like the later recordings of The Prodigy. All mentioned projects seem to be couples by the way, or at least, a men and a woman who alternally sing with slightly distorted vocals. Nice!

Last week I got this email:

Hi guys!

I thought as fans of Jason Forrest you might want to check out him
re-inventing the Dr. Who theme… as well as 41 other
cryptically-titled tv theme…

http://www..peppermillrecords.com/pm010

PK

I downloaded that “The Box” ‘3cd’ compilation, but it is not really my thing. Very silly remakes of old (tv) tunes. It is not really the CRD kind of breakcore (but Forrest keeps up hope), but much slower and more tranquil and not even always with crazy beats. A few tracks are well done, most are say too silly for my liking. I have not yet tried any other Peppermill release, but if you want to try some free, strange and silly music, you might want to have a look at Peppermill.

Yes, you read that right, Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares, Squarepusher and many others are coming to Eindhoven. From 2 to 13 April the annual STRP Festival is held. Free for the larger part with all kinds of art, performances, exhibitions, installations, etc. Last year the festival was opened by the Chemical Brothers. This year for the opening weekend names such as Laurant Garnier, Michael Mayer, Morgan Geist, Luke Vibert, Birdy Nam Nam and Yuksek and those I opened with are attracted. First I heard about Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. In my hurry I ordered tickets only for Saturday (€ 34,-!) instead of the whole opening weekend (€ 57,-), but fortunately Aphex Twin is sceduled for Saturday, for the others no day seems to have been set, so I can only hope that Squarepusher and Venetian Snares will also play on Saturday (but I think that is unlikely). In any case, how often do you get the change to see such projects live and even at the same festival?

Well well, the Strp festival has anounced interesting names for their opening weekend. A whole range of experimental “IDM” projects will play on 3 and 4 April. I accidentally only bought tickets for Saturday (already € 34,- per ticket!), the night that Aphex Twin plays. Squarepusher has not been put in the schedule yet, but I can hardly imagine that they would put him on Saturday too. That would be great though!
Anyway, more info: Strp.nl.

Last weekend I ran into a couple of breakcore projects on Last.fm that could very well have been released on Cock Rock Disco. Both did in some way (compilation and album), but there seems to be much more neurotic breakcore out there than the crazy stuff of CRD. Both Mochipet and Otto von Schirach have great tracks in the Last.fm Kid606 ‘radio’. Mochipet sometimes seems to do breakcore/hiphop, a bit like Antipop Consortium, but both Mochipet and Otto von Schirach make completely over-the-top and impossible-to-listen-to breakcore on most other tracks that I heard.
There is so much crazy music out there and since there seem to be so many projects and labels in this style, I suppose there is also a large audience that listens to this stuff.

I have known Last.fm for a while, but I hadn’t really ‘worked with it’ until recently. I finally got a laptop (cheap second hand) which I connected to my amplifier so now I can play all the music that I have digitally too more easily. When I was looking for a proper internet radio and I couldn’t find any, I stumbled upon Last.fm again. I only knew this website for having popular music and it has suggestions for similar artists. This could be a nice way to discover new music. Then I noticed that almost anything has a “radio”: artists, ‘tags’, etc. “Radio” is a compilation (often virtually infinate) of tracks that users connect to a certain tag (musical style) or artist. This function is truely amazing. I play music that I would never buy. In the weekend I find myself playing old punk (The Clash, Sex Pistols), not too fast, but not too slow, nice music for a drousy Sunday morning. Last.fm has an enormous amount of music, most bands are on it and it can be nice to see what other users connect to a certain band. Just a test case (but a serious one): Devil Doll, what would be “similar artists”? The line names Fields of the Nephilim and Elend, yea right. The “radio” has much more interesting things to offer though, since it is filled with all kinds of old, strange and sometimes surprisingly nice progrock. Another such test: Diamanda Gallas. Similar artists are Einstürzende Neubauten and Nurse With Wound, uhuh. The “radio” also presents avantgardistic electronic music, but also experimental opera and vocal music, like Laurie Anderson and a magnificent song of Amy X Neuburg. What about Nicholas Lens? For a great many years I have been looking for something that comes just a little near this magnificent music, but without succes. “Nicholas Lens radio” has experimental modern classical (of course), but a bit too many ‘classical classical’, but a surprise (inspite of the name) are for example the OperaBabes, who combine opera with modern electronics.
This morning I started with rockabilly, because I was curious what it sounds like. Ehm, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, isn’t that just rock’n'roll. No problems with r’n'r, but I expected something modern, so I continued with psychobilly. That’s already more like it, this is more punk and the bands go from pretty old to pretty new, not bad! Apparently it is a small step from rockabilly to horror punk, ah, punk again with a nice gloomy horror sauce and …. gothic? Damn, these vocals sound quite gothic now and then and then I even noticed a tag “gothabilly“! Never heard of it, but I love it! Somewhere between rockabilly and death rock/batcave and I even noticed a great band that I thought had long passed: The Coffinshakers! I have their 95 and 96 demos, they claimed to play “vampiric country music” and I loved it, but after some vinyls I lost them. What they call country actually sounds a bit like rock’n'roll, but I think the same of Johnney Cash now and then. Anyway, nowadays they are put under the banners of rockabilly, psychobilly and of course gothabilly, there are even three gothabilly compilations (98 to 00 or so) one of which has The Coffinshakers. Cool!
Last.fm is truely amazing and just fooling around has made me known a shitload amount of musical currents and bands that I never heard of, from “chamber rock” to the weirdest avantgarde experiments from the 60′ies to the present day, modern classical, all kinds of weird old music. I have a difficult musical taste, but there is so much music that there is even a lot that I like.
Two minor points about Last.fm are that you can pick a certain song of a certain band to play (band’s pages usually have 30 second snippets) and there’s no fast forward.
Last.fm seems quite an ultimate website for music lover. Do not look for the newest or the new and they might not have everything (neither does Discogs.com), but they have pretty damn much!

I got this email today. Not really my kind of music, but perhaps you are interested.

I’m wondering if you’d be interested to hear my recent album… I’m not so sure how to classify it… original/folk-ish/acoustic music… a sparkling/melancholic/eclectic mix based around acoustic guitar, double-bass and vocals, with a variety of other instruments woven through.

I could mail you some mp3s… or you can download some songs online at my Sonic Bids page:
http://www.sonicbids.com/TomBolton

Or, if you let me know your address I’ll mail a CD to you.

Regards,

Tom Bolton
(Melbourne Australia)

www.sensibletom.com

Industrial metal from India? Hm. I don’t really intend to review metal, neither do I enjoy having to figure out how to download an album, but the Myspace tracks are not even that bad. Just read on if I caught your interest:

Hello

We’re Rat King from India and we hope to get our new CD (“The Plague of Hamelin” – A concept album based on a distorted version of the Grimm Brothers’ classic “Pied Piper of Hamelin”) reviewed on your zine. Unfortunately, we’ve run out of copies of our CD and so we’re trying to promote it through mp3s. I don’t know if you have strict policy against mp3s but I’m attaching a link to the whole album anyway.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TSZF7FOL

Here’s hoping you dig it.

Thanks
Deepak

http://www.myspace.com/raatkeeng

The new Sistrenatus album is called “Sensitive Disturbance” and seems to be due for early next year to be released on Cold Spring.
However the earlier project Funerary Call was buried, it has revived because of a request of a new album. The new material is more industrial/noisy than ‘ritual’ and you can listen to some excerpts on the FC Myspace.

It has been way too long since the last real album of The Prodigy (“Always Outnumbered” 2004), but finally a new album is announced. “Invaders Must Die” should be available by 2 March. As a teaser, tonight (that is 26 november) at 19.30 (that is 7.30 PM London time) the new single with the same title as the album will be available online for a week from theprodigy.com.