Sweden's The Pain Machinery bring the harsh cold of their country to us with an earth shattering explosion of power electronics, rhtyhmic noise, industrial dance, ebm, dark and industrial. All of these elements, spiced up with a huge number of well-implemented samples (sci-fi movies, records by Neurosis and others) and a driving and slamming attitude. "The Venom is Going Global" is like a pneumatic hammer of sonic brutaility where distortion fights with melody and everything comes across nicely and heavily. The venom will hit you straight up, and there seems to be no antidote.

IN A WHILE is the new release of the Spanish band Stereoskop. The mini CD contains eight track of which four are different mixes of the main title. "In A While" is a good electro goth track and it sticks immediately into your brain since the first listening. The remixes don't add that much to the original album mix, they only expand the original tune but without changing musical genre as they are always true to the electro goth registry. The other four tracks are "34 Hook Or By Crook" (a very good energic tune that remember me some late Siouxsie & The Banshees stuff with electronic arrangements and a catchy refrain), "Somersault", "What Are You Up To" (Siouxsie meet Garbage into a powerful mid tempo track) and "This Puzzle" (something like an electro ballad with good moments). The new album Electrika has been released and it will give us more arguments to judge this band.

Our partner in crime TG Mondalf, who used to run RhythmUS Network (now part of Chain D.L.K.), started his very own recording label, Latex records, and, right off the bat, picked up one of the biggest underground dark wave bands: Written In Ashes. After eight years and a line up that consists of members of The Elysium Facade, Trance to the Sun, Black Winter, Love Nancy Sugar, theStark, sexwithsarah etc, the four-piece has put together a new full lenght album that brings together eclectic and dynamic guitar playing, equally mutating vocals searching for a balance between goth singing and slightly filtered electro voice and a music structure built on a solid foundation of dark/goth jamming, electronic programming and textures of pads, strings etc. It's hard to achieve the status of "signature sound" in this genre, because everything is always on the edge of being inevitably derivative. The oveall sound is hard to pin down, but I am sure if you had a map with the Mission UK, the Cure, the Sisters, Rosetta, Lycia and other a bunch of other underground bands that are now probably looking up to Written In Ashes, you'd probably be drawing lines to join all the dots.

This is Manufactura's second album, and its first on Hive. It is a split release with Manufactura's own label(along with Scott from Converter), Aurical media.

Featuring a Aghast Veiw remix, and additional work from both Daniel Myer(haujobb, cleen, ect), and Scott Sturgis( converter, Pain Station) This cd varies greatly over its length.

What it does seem to be is consistent on a heavy bass sound. Moving from heavy rythmic noise, to vocal driven moments of noisy ebm, and decent moments of synth driven ambient soundscapes. Musicaly well produced, my only gripe is the samples at the begining of some of the songs. seems like they are a little out of place, or even ruin certain songs. Listeing to a girl scream tends to turn me off, since it seems like an old hat, due to the prevelant amount of American Pe that uses it.
All in all though this cd is highley recomended, and I am looking forward to the next installment, and a live preformance.

POLISHED SURFACE OF A TABLE is the latest release of a Russian artist called Alexei Borisov. The thirteen tracks of the CD paint different sound canvas that sometimes tend to destabilize the audience. Digital impulsive and treated noises duet with treated vocals just to create particular moments, sometimes with a melodic structure (like on "L.Y. Match") which function as background to sound experiments and sometimes with pure rhythmical structures which could have almost random rhythms as well as more structurised construction (like on "Zaraza - Volume 1" where different noise layers duet until they fade out just to include vocal samples). Concrete music and experimentation seems to be the main subject into Borisov's sound as well as the construction of alienating experimental suites. Like a sort of magmatic digital cut up, Alexei's music sweep away your thoughts creating a blank zone where you can only watch a polished surface of a table...