A sudden crack of a gas-filled tube, the resulting high-pressure spurts, the gradual reaching of saturation level and the activation of the alarm system on the initial track "Oscar" introduces this release on renowned Austrian label Editions Mego by San Francisco-based versatile artist Jim Haynes, who already applied the principles of his artistic research, which he summarize by the formula "I rust things", focused on graphical experiments of "corrosion" of photographic images and investigations into rust and decay. He explains such an interesting multimedia transposition of his work, he said: "I have focused on how decay parallels and relates to the perception of time when cycles of activity dwindle toward stasis. While I still incorporate much of the visual sensibilities from those aforementioned processes, sound has emerged as a central medium for my current installations and performances. Drawing from shortwave radio static, electric field disturbances, controlled feedback manipulation, and numerous textural scrapings, I manifest a broken minimalism whose magnetic drones give the impression of timelessness, when in fact the environment is quite active. This engineering of disparate materials and media seeks to evince the unpredictability of decay, to manifest its potential for a rough hewn beauty, and to bare witness to its inevitability.". Based on some recordings he made in a couple of weeks in October 2012, the following long-lasting track, "X-Ray" and "November", could be imagined as the after-shock sonic description of the above-mentioned explosion: static cold hisses, frozen gearwheels, spectral death raffles of withering machines, asphyxiating obfuscations, mist-shrouded beeps utter the atrophy of an imaginary industrial giant in unison and implicitly forewarns listeners of the rising hope for renewal...

This new retrospective of the industrial/noise and power electronics undergrowth by Cold Spring piles some sonic material from side project AX, before its abrasive sonorities merged into the bicephalous project Novatron in association with Kevin Laska, by British bassist Anthony Di Franco, former member of Skullflower, also known for his artistic indentities JFK and Ethnic Acid and for his long-lasting militancy in the historic power electronics/rock collective Ramleh. The name of this compilation could encapsulate the harsh claws of AX's style as it's knotty, convoluted, lumby, shady and somehow stifling like a thick forest as well as creaking, concrete and sharp-edged like audible displays of a metallurgic factory. After the initial heavy dull thud which renders an obsessively slow cortege on a electrically excited downpour on "Kortex", the creepy drilling of "Track 1" and "Track 2" from his mini-album "Ax II" is maybe the highest peak of expression and the most appalling and diversified moments of his infernal machineries, while the two corrosive parts of "Nova Feedback" are the ones where the presence of guitar strings, even if heavily distorted and scraped, is clearer. The acid bath of stunning dissonances on "Heavy Fluid", the asphyxiating crumpling of noisy dykes on "Theme One", the piercing strangulation of high-pitched frequencies and sinister clangs on the title-track "Metal Forest" and the plumbean congestion of noises which seems to catch in the grips the inner molecular mantra of a metal block on the final "Cluster" complete this interesting shake of noisy manifolds from Anthony Di Franco's archives.

In spite of the relatively limited array of sounds, mainly venomous puffs, electrical clips from ammeters or plugs, mainly muffled bass bumps, plucked steel tongues, obscure suctions, buzzing surges, surgical incisions, Danish electronic music composer Jon Egeskov aka Pixel dishes catchy dynamics out on "Mantle", his fourth release on Raster-Noton, where he tempers his rhythm-driven approach to a series of hyphenation/articulation of electrons with recurring shifts and skips. Most of tracks sound quite obscure and somehow stifling and the rare breaks are snap-shots when his threatening electro-mechanical entities seem to get some air before they keep on drooling fused silica, neodymium, tantalum and corrosive magma. It's quite interesting to follow the strategies that some aggregrates of buzzes seem to enact to ensnare the whole sonic sphere, particularly on some tracks such as "Ericson Sandstone", "Steel Tape", "Nesting Screen" or "Plump Bob". This is another proof that even perturbing industrial machinery can sound somehow funk.

Lovely Polish city Krakow must be really inspiring as "Kallista" (meaning "very beautiful") is maybe the third or fourth record which is somewhat related to one of the leading center of arts and culture in Poland. The involved artists, Kotra, Zavoloka and Dunaewsky69, got so stricken by its mysterious beauty during a visit in early 2012 that they tributed this record. According to their own words, Krakow is "an obscure area of inspiration and misunderstandings, old city of new art and technology, place of imminent comfort and lazy silence, convenient space for breeding bizarre and radical ideas". Those ideas have been poured into 24 astonishing tracks, which they assembled with the support of some friends in Studio of Electroacoustic music of renowned Krakow Music Academy, whose support consisting of giving the possibility to the trio to have access to its wide collection of old analogue synthesizers, modular systems and sound processors (some of them belong to that collection since early 60's) has been integrated by the precious collaboration of young Slovakian sound artist Jonas Gruska and two skilled Polish composers, Michal Pawelek, who helped Kotra, Zavoloka and Dunaewski69 in grabbing some field recordings, and Marcin Strzelecki, who built some oscillators. Such a choral effort made this release really heterogenous from the structural viewpoint and even though it was equally trebeled by the three involved artists, each contribution renders different strategies of coalescence between modular pulses, uncut noise, sharpened sine waves and electric shocks without lacking of a certain sense of amalgamation. Mottled electronic scalding of abrasive tracks by Dunaewsky69 such as "Krolewska", "Huta" or "Niesamowite" flow into the polymeric sonic pulsations, artificial vivid entities and unpredictable surreal inserts by Zavoloka ("Krak", "Cichy-Btonia", "Planty") and more epic-oriented flares by Kotra (I particularly enjoyed Kotra's "Emaus", "Bunkier", "Wyspianski 2000" and "Solvay", whose saxophone sample comes from Ayane Yamanke) in a fascinating aggregate of sounds, which sound like squeezed from history and places of a city "that always sleep and always awake". The psychotropic multicolored doilies Zavoloka adopted on the artwork wisely recap the collaborative spirit of this delicious hash that I cannot but recommend.

This striking conceptual album and the related sound installation, based on the sound spacialization system I.M.E.A.S.Y. and performed in an ancient Etruscan hypogeum in the archeological park of Cecina, a little town close to Leghorn (Italy), during the spring solstice within the programmatic-conceptual event "Metasound ' Independent Curatorial Experiences in Contemporary Art: from the object up to the event: sound art, multimedia and practice of the art of listening", was initially limited to 50 private copies. Three years later, Cold Spring decided to reissue it in order to avoid the this remarkable sonic artefact could sink into the oblivion of the underworld the involved artists ideally climbed down. The Roman consul Albino Cecina, which gave the name to the above-mentioned town, ordered the construction of a villa, whose ruins can still be visited. The cavity of its cistern and its mysteric tunnels became the perfect location for Chtonian Music project by Italian philosopher, composer and sound artist Pietro Riparbelli aka K11 and Sandro Gronchi, head of Radical Matters, who involved an impressive number of sound artists and musicians from different but somewhat contiguous stylistical ground (Philippe Petit, Seth Cluett, Gianluca Becuzzi, Francisco Lopez, Aderlating, Andrea Marutti, Burial Hex, Christina Kubisch, Deadwood, Francesco Brasini, L'Acephale, Luciano Maggiore, Massimo Bartolini, Nordvargr, Utarm, Y.E.R.M.O) emphasized the sacral function of that ancient place with a sonic performance which sounds like a contemporary devotional rite to the Goddess Demeter/Persephone, the queen of hell and bride of Plouton/Hades and the symbolic representation of "the awakening of the soul and its cyclical path of death and transfiguration" behind her myth, who inspired the religion of the Mysteries, imported by the Etruscans in Italy. After the initial "Mvndvs", where Francismo Lopez immediately catches listener's attention by rendering natural amplified sounds on deep ultra-low frequencies by Seth Cluett and unexpected distorted rumbles which lacerates the apparent stillness like heavy thunders, the five following parts of "Katabasis" sonically describes the descent in the underworld by means of remarkable performative peaks such as the mindblowing raving ascension of Part II with the catchy vocals by L'Acephale and the heady drones by Utarm, the entrancing piano by Burial Hex on the magmatic fog by Andrea Marutti and Pietro Riparbelli in the third part ("Epopteia"), named after the final initiation rite in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the dusky electrical excitement of the first part, the grazing guitars by Francesco Brasini on the immersive virtual underworld moulded by Becuzzi and Bartolini on the narcotic organ and unearthly shouts by Riparbelli, the metallic rolling balls and the resounding crack on the ground which ushers listeners to the end of the obscure journey in the fifth part, before the final representation of "Nuktelia", a sort of supreme demonaltry when wizards with snkes twisted on their arms, moved at flickering light of torches in long orgiastic processions. Due to the high number of guests, under the stylistical viewpoint, "Chthonian Music" harvest from a wide range of styles: dark ambient, doom metal, dark-folk, field recordings, art rock, drone, classical music, musique concrete, ritual ambient flocked to celebrate the mysteries.