Gangleri – music reviews

So, what has been in my players recently?
Yesterday I put Incendium II in my player and then I had to think about this compilation that starts with Turnbund Sturmwerk. I couldn’t remember which compilation it was, but after scanning my collection for a while, I remember the red cover and then I knew it: Juche! Juche is a nice noise compilation, only the Con-Dom track is one that I skip. When it was finished, I put in Incendium II again, starting with the Vestigial track and ending with Ex.Order, two magnificent tracks.
Previous days I have been playing Thorofon (the older material), the Vestigial album, but also Geneviève Pasquier (the female half of Thorofon with a great industrial electropop sound) and Audio Output 3, a great “tekno” compilation. It has been a while since I got new music, so I will look around a little to see if anything interesting was released.

Inspired by the live DVD on Steinklang I reopened my search for Thorofon material. I had some older material (Final Movement, apparently recently rereleased) which contains old-style and not my kind of noise, but I ran into the New Heroes 2lp of 2005 and this release has a nice balance between industrial, noise and the more progressive sounds of This Summer Suicide and Dogpop.

About a year and a half ago I got the debut mcd of this Italian project. Impressive and very dark ambient. Later I got two compilations featuring this project (Incendium II and The Old Europa Café box) with also very interesting tracks. Apparently I missed a 12″ on Power and Steel. It is not surprising that CMI picked up this project, even though (like I wrote in my previous review), Vestigial is darker than most of the CMI dark ambient projects. Vestigial is heavier, more industrial and has a nice noisy touch here and there; heavier with many very low frequencies, the way I like it! The music is quite ’soundscapish’, but nowhere too monotous. Actually, this is a dark ambient album the way dark ambient should sound. The package is also very well done. A highly recommended album!
Links: Vestigial, Cold Meat Industry

Murpey’s Law caused some delay to this release, but I finally got my copy yesterday. In the series of DVDs with reports of the shows at the October 2004 Steinklang festival in Vienna/Wien, this is the second. Here we have to rhythmical industrial/noise projects. Tormentum is not too great, only a few nice tracks in their 41 minutes. The sound-quality is not too good either, the right speaker sounds really flat and no, that is not caused by my equipment. Thorofon is more interesting in every way. The sound quality is much better (fortunately), the visuals are more interesting (two persons on stage and they even walk around, plus they include a woman and that helps too), the music is more interesting. It is no This Summer Suicide, but Thorofon showed both their old fashioned noise side and the more rhythmical sound. 52 minutes, not such a bad deal!
Links: Thorofon, Steinklang

I noticed that Gangleri recently receives hits with searches for Lore Of Asmoday. I found that strange, since the band quit almost 10 years ago. I don’t remember exactly when and how I got to know the band, but I do know that in that time, I loved them and bought several of their demos and wrote reviews in the media that I wrote for in the time. One review (I guess the last one) ended up on Sententia or Monas (the previous names of my website) or so and can now be found on Gangleri. That is were people run into when looking for the band. Read the review for a story of the band.
Since there seem to be quite a few people looking for Lore Of Asmoday, I did a little searching myself. The band has a Myspace and a website, so I guessed the band has come back from the dead. Indeed, the Myspace blog suggests that this may happen and there actually is new material. Some of the old material can be downloaded as mp3. The weird ways of the scene.
The sound seems to have shifted a little to a more goth-oriented one and in the past 10 years my musical taste didn’t stay exactly the same, but perhaps I will listen to some old and new material when I find the time.