In a 2011 interview with The Quietus (http://thequietus.com/articles/07199-william-bennett-cut-hands-whitehouse-interview), William Bennett talked about the effects of polyrhythms on the nervous system, that when we run out of body parts to move, 'It (the rhythm) goes inside, and things happen inside on a more metaphysical level. And on the more rhythmic tracks that's what I'm attempting.'

Cut Hands is William Bennett's so called 'Afro Noise' project. He's best known as one of noise music's longest contributors, as one half of the duo Whitehouse, formed in 1980. Whitehouse would push audiences to exultant states by use of transgressive sounds, language, imagery; a 30-some year barrage to break down all beliefs, all conditioning, to push someone through to a pure experience. Over the years, what most people have come to think of as 'noise' (power electronics, HNWs, synth explorations, tape collage) has become increasingly easy to assimilate: its the same experience every time. Bennett became wary of the technological arms race of the traditional noiz freak. After experimenting with a DJ night of Vodoun ritual drumming at Glasgow's Optimo club, Bennett realized the ritualistic potency and ability to confound and trance-form, when exposing audiences to the rhythms. He pared his music down to sparse percussive elements, then layered with feedback and buzzy synths.

'Black Mamba' is the second full-length from the project, after last year's 'Afro Noise vol. 1', which made everyone drool. Stripped down and sparse, cut hands weaves layers of djembes, doundouns, ksing-ksing and synths into a hypnotic tapestry that will make yr insides dance, for sure. 'Witness The Spread Of The Dream' kicks things off with a tmantra, read by Mimsy DeBlois, who designed the sweet, sweet voodoo album art, and sounds like a creepy hypnotism loop, until tearing into the pounding tribalism of the title track, that sounds like walking into a voodoo ritual, midstep. This tracks showcases one of the deadly strengths of Cut Hands: the ability to change tempo. Much of this record reads like bleak, gray British techno, but almost all dance music gets caught up in one BPM, one groove, and it takes a real prodigy to make a computer swing like a human. Cut Hands African ritual is the height of complexity, its like trying to count a snowstorm. The rational mind goes to sleep, overwhelmed, allowing for something beautiful and ancient to transpire. This version of 'Black Mamba' is a slight variation on the vinyl edition, released earlier in the year, and answers yet another question; yes, you do need to buy every Cut Hands release.

Its continually inspiring to see people who've been around for a long time constantly reinventing the game. They've had time to master and explore their craft, and sometimes it seems that the post-punk underground has been able to produce a number of downright geniuses. The clubs are perfectly poised to fall for Black Mamba, a part of a number of blackened post-Techno magicians rolling up their sleeves and getting primal. In a world that is predominantly defined by people making similar styles of music with similar gear, there is an increasing demand for electronic music that is homespun, handmade. We are all moving into the Heart Of Darkness, with ritual rhythms lighting up the night with the ghosts of embers. William Bennett, (and Raime, and Ekoplekz, and Shackleton), are sneaking in trance music to the clubs, bringing the ultimate dopamine fix, waking something ancient and powerful. Its coming out of a movement from Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, through '90s industrial music and rave. Its dark and its smart and its arty and its weird; i, for one, have not been this excited about a wave of music for a number of years. Hopefully, Cut Hands continual ascent forces cliche noise bands, as well as electronic producers, to step up their game and not get too fatted. And also hopefully, this decadent ritual will continue to spread.

On 'Someone Is Watching,' a re-release of a cassette originally released in 1998, Mikko Aspa utilizes the traditional pallette of Power Noise - rumbling static, vomitous vocals, haunted drones and tape loops - to construct a mental movie of paranoia and dread. Predicting the panopticon that has become the future, where every move and every motive is monitored by closed-system surveillance camera, and endlessly cataloged in neverending data-streams, Grunt's music sounds like the old avant garde's rage against the coming simulacrum. The barrages of white noise and hellacious howling has the carnal heft of circuitry and overblown speakers behind it, meat tearing at the blank screens of modernity, trying to pierce through the vile veil of data and figures to something primal and real. The id tearing through the machine.

At this stage, Grunt's music was composed mainly of loops made from live recordings, with scraping metal, howling feedback, and vocals added on top. Its got the ragged, live feel of a archetypal power noise performance - imagine thyself in a dank concrete bunker, with young men with closely cropped hair writhing like maggots in the pale light - to complete the picture. Mikko Aspa never had any intention of escaping the underground, this is noise music for noise fanatics, but it is not merely a bland genre study, either. Tracks like 'Information' has a digital sheen to it that predicts the MAX/MSP hackers soon to follow, and the synthetic chorus on album opener 'Watch Your Back' recalls Lustmord's earliest material. Grunt is bringing in outside influences, prying the lid off the hermetically sealed Power Noise genre. In short, he doesn't give a fuck. You can listen, or not.

This is not the most revelatory PN release out there, and may not be the best starting point if yr ears have not already become accustomed to listening to malfunctioning electronics and paranoid ranting, but the sonic pallette of the harsh noise world does lend itself well to the feel of industrial ruin and dystopian unease. Its like spirit of '77 punk rock taken to its logical, unfriendly conclusion.

Its cool to see underground, scene-only releases getting re-issued and re-evaluated. For most of its blighted life, Noise records were esoteric secrets, sold out of pulp paper magazines, at shows, out of basements and the boots of cars. Commercial pressures were irrelevant - no one was going to hear it, and no one was going to care. Its pure art, pure catharsis, pure release. Mikka Apsa, with his Freak Animal imprint, has released boatloads of gnarly crunchy noise, over the span of almost 20 years, and 'Someone Is Watching' is a chance to hear what the freaks were up to, before the simulacrum took over.

As we approach Kurzweil's singularity, epochs and eras are running together in a permanent ontological NOW. The future is unfathomable, so we strive to master history, perhaps in an attempt to better understand the times we are living in. We are attempting to eradicate the grievous crimes against taste found in any era, and reinvent ourselves in the process. Ghost Box, the label run by Jim Jupp (Belbury Poly) and Julian House (The Advisory Circle) have been ahead of the curve since the label's inception in 2004, materializing an alternate history located somewhere between the years of our lord 1954 and 1978. With 'Sleep Games,' the most recent and most realized work by The Head Technician, the force behind Pye Corner Audio, they have expanded their template by about 7 years, and allowed in cosmic disco forces into Belbury's town square, lit the pastoral avenues with phosphorescent lights and polished chrome.

The Head Technician, aka Martin Jenkins, is a self-proclaimed John Carpenter devotee, and the predominant mood of 'Sleep Games' is akin to escaping from New York in The Fog, while someThing follows ominously, just beyond the halo of yr taillights. But Jenkins is also obsessed with early Detroit Techno: Carl Craig, Juan Atkins, Drexciya, Underground Resistance. He adorns the '80s plasticine sheen of horror movie synth explorations with a pillowy thump and colorful sequencer arpeggios, making a cyberpunk superbeast of atmospherics and danceability. Its a way forward for Ghost Box, who could flounder under their own archaic electronica, if they weren't careful.

'Sleep Games' is an exciting listen; its supposed to sound like movie music. It seems as if something is going on. With track names like 'The Mirror Ball Cracked,' 'A Door In The Dry Ice,' and 'Underneath The Dancefloor' 'Sleep Games' conjures mysterious visions of night drives and haunted discotheques. Some have referred to PCA's sound as 'Spectral Electronics'. It sounds like someone driving a speeding Delorean to catch the library before it closes, with churning fog obscuring the fields and barns of sleeping Belbury, in an attempt to subdue the sleeping demon beneath the haunted dancefloor, so that the good townspeople may dance and take pills and make merry in safety and splendour.

All of the drum machines and synths are lovingly sources from analogue, giving an old school crunch and warmth to the proceedings. As the Earth is riddled with neat, meticulous ADD-addled bedroom producers, rough hewn homemade electronica seems to be coming back in fashion, things which are personal and irreproducible, that seem like they COME from somewhere. The soul of the circuitboards, and the chi of the vacuum tubes are captured and transmitted in the stygian troughs of the spinning vinyl, an ineffable specter that is increasingly mandatory, in the dense oversaturated music industry. Martin Jenkins gives a loving touch to everything he produces, and has found a spiritual home in the town of Belbury, as part of the Ghost Box coven. Mark Fisher, aka K-punk, one of the patron saints of Hauntology, has even given his blackened benediction to 'Sleep Games', acting as a creative consultant for the haunted tenement cover art, lovingly created by labelhead Jim Jupp. Every mark of excellence is present and accounted for, proving Pye Corner Audio and Ghost Box to be at the peak of their powers, taking risks and creating worlds. It is exciting to watch their world grow and shift, and it is a magickal world to lose one's self in. With '80s movie scores gaining visibility and respectability, starting with 2010's Unsound Festival in Cracow, Poland, which focused on horror-themed music, to seeing classic scores lavishly re-issued on vinyl by the likes of Death Waltz Recording Company, perhaps people are finally ready to hear Pye Corner Audio's mouldering electronica. Its his best work yet, and a triumph and a new direction for Ghost Box, which continues to set the standard for Victorian Techno.

On 'Order Of Noise,' the debut LP from UK producer Seb Gainsborough has elaborated on his native Bristol's heavy bass scene, and pushed the boundaries of electronic music in the process.

Bristol is the infamous home of trip-hop, claiming Tricky, Massive Attack, and Portishead as artists-in-residence. Vessel has conjured the same inky shadows and midnight confessionals, but stomped it with monochromatic techno beats, flickering sub-bass, wonky 8-bit basslines, and set it in a warm psychedelic soup to gestate. What could have potentially been a cluttered kitchen sink mess, or a middle of the road compromise with nothing to say. Instead, Vessel has combined the forward-driving futurism of Techno with dub's hall of echoes and wonky's cartoonish optimism into something personal and distinctive. He's moved beyond the narrow codifications of genre, and is working with bare sound and composition. Its forward-thinking electronica, and it seems like the pall of beatport-regurgitating mediocrity may be slinking away.
Vessel has claimed US noise freaks like James Ferrare (of The Skaters), as well as quintessential BBC Radiophonic tracks as inspiration. He has applied the noodle-y electronic ambiance of oscillator worship to early, crisp Dubstep (think Kode9, Benga, Appleblim), to make one of the first lo-fi/club crossover records, that i suspect we will be seeing a lot more of. Its extremely refreshing to see the Dubstep influence reined in and used tastefully, after a few years of monsterstep wobble abuse, and 'Order Of Noise' reminds us what was so tasty about its blackbelt beats to begin with. He has melded the bass-worship with a solid, housy thud that brings to mind Scuba's 'Personality', as well as some of Regis' recent output. Its hard and its dark, but its also lighthearted and fun. Some of the cartoony effects can sound a little goofy to my ears, but its not a dealbreaker. The bass is lean and precise, warm and full, and the background drones add some interesting color to the normally sterile world of laptop production. Two tracks, 'Lache' and 'Court Of Lions', with their martial beats and cavernous reverb, seem destined for dancefloor greatness, and are worth the price of admission by themselves.

Seb Gainsborough is part of a young collective out of Bristol called Young Echo, alongside Zhou, Kahn and El Kid, and it is thrilling to watch this city spit out unholy legions of ninja warriors, that keep the state of electronic music healthy and vibrant. The futuristic plasticine sheen of the wonky beats suggest a burgeoning optimism that many of us are feeling, even if we're afraid to admit it, and it seems that music is GETTING EXCITING AGAIN. I know, we've been let down so many times in the past, and it seems our heroes are always bought out by corporate shills for a pound, so the more reason to snatch up this new batch of innovators before they get bought by Red Bull.

'Order Of Noise' bobs and weaves through many styles and tempos, a story starts to emerge. Its unclear exactly what it is, but it seems like remembering the club as yr walking away, climbing into a cab, climbing into bed. Its distant but infectious - its like Richard H. Kirk pracrticing in a garage down the road from a top-40s club. Experimental but catchy - Vessel has ideas, and he's not afraid to try things out. I think he's succeeding, and we are all benefiting from the journey.

Recommended.

From subterranean corridors to ghostly '50s living rooms, NY 5-piece (and guests) PAS take you for an odd, auditory journey. Described by spokesperson Robert L. Pepper as "more soundscapes than "songs" in the traditional sense," there is still a dystopian sci-fi vibe that makes for a coherent listen.

Employing a battery of traditional band instruments - guitar, bass, drums, keys, trumpets, and percussion - PAS then illuminates these grooves with sonic bric-a-brac - found sounds, field recordings, and countless synthesizers. PAS flirt with atonal jazz, sound collage, doom metal, and '80s horror movie music during its sixty-minute duration. What could have been a stylistic clusterfuck ends up instead as an engaging auditory hallucination; a streak through the collective HORRORSHOW id of its creators. Don't get me wrong, this record is not cloaked in shadows and soaked in gore. If anything, its more polished chrome and burning red neon than cobwebs and candles.

The band claims that 'Flanked By Women And Pumpkins,' conceived during a tour of Poland in 2011, is "uncommercial". "There are no clearly defined melodies, no structural landmarks that give you any sense of traditional anchor," says Robert L. Pepper. The thing they may not realize is that many of us have spent the last 10 years blowing the dust out of our Eustachian canals with krautrock, harsh noise, drones, and field recordings. I have found, after repeated investigations, that 'FBWAP' falls nicely in line with the current Zeitgeist. Anybody that gets off on the endless grooves of classic cosmische jams, retro-futuristic techno, or John Carpenter-esque synthesizer scores, will find much meat on this bone.

I was all primed to hate this record, initially turned off by the glossy cardboard packaging, but the initial warm bass pulse of 'Electric Rain On Adams Bridge' seduced me. It comes off like a techno record, before degenerating into noisy crackling, then sluicing through some disembodied jazz. Its not as incoherent as it sounds; there is a universal pulse to this record. Its got a groove. It worked its way into my kitchen CD player for a week, before moving onto my headphones, making my trips to the bank and the shoestore far more futuristic and abstract.

'Flanked By Women And Pumpkins' was produced and mastered by Robert L. Pepper, dispelling the myth that a musician can't mix and master their own work. He has a deft touch; the recordings are full and well-rounded, and help to distinguish this record from the legions of bland noise imitators. Every sonic element is glowingly rendered in spacious reverb; all the pieces work as a whole. There are no jarring changes in volume, surprising considering the varied genres and instrumentation. The spell is never broken, and the listener is treated to 12 surreal, walking dreamscapes.

Purveyors of art-house classicism and bored-room jazz, take note. There may be clues here as to how 'high-brow' 20th-century Avant-Garde techniques can come together with current DIY-sweaty basement experimentation.

Uncommercial, my left ear. Go buy this.