Haswell & Akita's partnership started taking shape back in 1995 when the former called up Merzbow for a performance in the UK, at the Disobey Club. They started to record some material together only later, in 1999. I think you already know who Merzbow is: one of the first experimenter who mastered improvised live noise created with different devices (if you ever saw one of his early live pictures you should have noticed the amount of little effect stomp boxes and the long tangled wires). Russel Haswell has been active for about five years and collaborated live with Carl Michael Von Hausswolff, Peter Rehberg and Mika Vainio, just to name a few. "Satanstornade" contains material recorded live at London's "The Abbey" in June 1999, and the sound has been transferred directly into a Sony MD four tracks device. The four tracks of the album are noisy, chaotic and confusing. "Fend Off Your Miserable Grief" opens the album with four minutes of grinding noises interrupted by digital pain. Because of its cyclic background sounds, the seventeen minutes of "Unlock The Mysteries Of The Sun" remind me of the early Boyd Rice's experiments done using his roto-guitar, but the duo added tons of hiss and stuff. "Track 5" (which is really the third) has got a slight rhythmical structure made of bouncing noises, but along with that there's a tornado happening between your ears. The last one is the most powerful of the batch and it's called "Testicular Fortitude". With this one you've got "listening suffering" at its top: in the background there seems to be a guitar sample which is raped by an incredible amount of digital hiss, bleeps and buzz. For this release, which will hit the streets on November 25th, Warp decided to skip a bunch of catalog numbers and jump all the way to number 666. You've been warned! If you are into brutal industrial/power/noise then you got yourself a winner right here: two of the greatest geniuses of the genre for a CD that is a good as it is extreme! Don't miss out!

Great single and third release by this Belgian band called Murnau. It's difficult to judge their project only by listening the two tracks of this 7" (which is a limited edition of four houndred) but the title says it all. "Null" and "Void" are MISANTHROPY's two tracks and in eight minutes they can annihilate your thoughts for an hour. It's hard to describe what treated noise can create but these two along with the drawings of this picture disc are capable of creating a picture into your head. Eight minutes of sound sculptures which make me ask for more. This is the first Murnau's release I'm listening but I'd like to know how they deal with the lenght of a whole album. Meanwhile, I recommend to you this one...

Remember the "Projekt:100" compo? Well this is very much in the same vein for those looking into Projekt’s sound or getting introduced into ethereal-darkwave. This also includes Unto Ashe's unreleased "Don't Fear The Reaper". I still say go for Projekt 100, but hell, they’re both inexpensive so try both.Rating: 8. Also recommended is Projekt’s "Across This Grey Land" and their new one "The Arbitrary Width of Shadows".
Sadly it's only available at Hot Topics, that god awful excuse for a store. Get the CD then torch the place!

Some of you might remember Swiss musician Laine Gebel, aka Ex Nihilo (but also behind the Cicerone and Cogito projects), because he was interviewed in one of our back issues and because he also appeared on one of our CD compilations. For those who don't know him "Lie" might be a good start, as it is a collection of early material from his demo tapes, CD-Rs and official CD releases "Visions" and "Apres le Chaos". The only previously unreleased material is the very title-track, which has a faster industrialized version of Queen's "We Will Rock You" beat with martial organs and Laibach-like vocals. Ex Nihilo brings a wide array of sonorities to the table, zooming in on electro and industrial primarily, but picking from ambient/trip, dark/goth, techno/dance as well. Give it a try. On a different note, if there is one thing I didn't understand about this deserving label after reviewing two of their albums, it is why they keep releasing previously released material from all these bands... I mean, in both cases (Ex Nihilo and Eye) the bands are quite prolific and I am sure they could or even already had put together an entire new record, and yet the Third Brass Collective opts for collections intended to offer the bands a platform for promotion of innovative, controversial or atypical electronic music. I mean, if they have the resources to put out CDs why don't they release new material while trying to offer these bands a wider exposure? That's just my 2 cents.

Members of the Third Brass Collective, Sobria Ebrietas walked the 3rd step in their discography with "De Bene Arte Moriendi", an album that processes a 360 degrees spectrum of sonics. I like that John Cult metaphors their music's apparent chaos with a David Lynch movie. He's also right when he says that it would perfectly fit as a soundtrack for one of his movies. We are dealing with a convulsionary blend of dark-ambient and industrial music and experimental-noise. Think Cold Meet Industry meets Ant Zen meets Staalplaat/Soleilmoon. These guys love to sample stuff (especially vocals and beats) and play it back slower. They are really into slowing down voices and entire metal band's riffs (an aspect of their production that, if I was them, I would further explore) complete with drums and guitars, which is returned as a slow evil sombre powerful industrial mayhem. They remind of quite a few different bands for quite a few different reasons (Nada, Neubauten, Flugschaedel, Neurosis and of course all the more or less anonymous experimental-noise artists out there, just to mention a few...). Unfortunately, if you take into account all nine songs of this record, the focus is more on their experimental/noise/dark/ambient soul rather than on the furious metal harshness that I like so much in this project. In particular the opening song really steps into industrial-metal territories a la Flugschaedel (if somebody remembers this great German band they'll know exactly what I am talking about) with Neubauten's Blixa's voice samples from one of their earlier records (I believe "Haus der Le" or "Tabula Rasa"). Funny to mention that the albums starts with the same sound it finishes with. Yeah, I think you should check this record out when you get a chance and listen to it at least once, 'cause it's very dynamic and full of surprises, but definitely an interesting one.