Death Over China is the second part of "The Suicide Series by German noise artist Anemone Tube, where he is contemplating humanity's headlong rush into extinction. As he puts it in the press release, 'Death over China' is a retaliation of nature against humankind. In the same moment it is a dedication to our untamed curiosity for the essence of death and our (inherent in our collective action) secret death wish."

Death Over China is made up of primarily untreated field recordings made during a trip to Nanjing and Shanghai in 2007, with occasional bursts of fluorescent white noise and screeching feedback. Album opener "Black Death Rise" is the most raw and unedited sounding, painting a mental scenario of a street scene in Shangai: the lull of traffic, the play of children, a police whistle. The reedy whine of small engines. The sounds are expertly manipulated in space and time, panning from left to right and back again.

The stage is set, and Anemone Tube lures you into the psychogeography of these places, getting progressively more abstract as the album goes along. There seems to be a story unfolding, a point being made, and the ghostly atmosphere is constantly evolving, textures appearing out of nowhere, new sounds emerging, then disappearing into thin air, like the tiny bit of synth on "I Shall Ever Invoke." Keeps things moving along, keeps things interesting. With a good pair of headphones and some attention, Death Over China is as engrossing as a good movie or book, creating eccentric imagery between yr ears, layers of levels of meaning, that can be re-visited again and again.

With "The Announcement (Death Over China)," the moral of the story is revealed, where an older woman's voice proclaims, "I just want to kiss life. Where there's life there's hope," over and over, with a banshee wailing in the background, before being swallowed by the crushing miasma of "The Desecration From Within," the album's apex and crowning achievement. Rusted behemonth machinery, a warning siren, transgressive poetry from a tin can, it has a basement industrial feel to it, like it was summoned to be broadcast through beefy distorted PAs. Heavy as lead, and satisfyingly gritty. Anenome Tube is clearly not foreseeing an optimistic outcome to the Industrial Revolution in China, bleak and existential and doom laden. The overall effect is more hypnotic and ghost-like than violent, however, even the power electronics have a soothing quality to them; its like walking by the waterfront in the mist.

Death Over China is Anemone Tube's first solo release since 2001, and when you look at the classy smooth paper packaging, you really get the sense that this album is something special, that a great deal of time and care has been placed in putting this album together, it is clearly a labor of passion. As a piece de resistance, Death Over China was mastered by James Plotkin, so everything is in its right place, placed just so, and sounds totally great. In about 2 years time, this will be considered a rare and precious sound-art object, so get one while you can.

After I made the introductions of some of his collaborations and projects (Dream Weapon Ritual, Candor Chasma) on this space, I think you don't need further words about Simon Balestrazzi's eminent resume as well as about his talent in let sounds "speak", but it's the first time I present a record with the real name of this pioneer as signature. His third full length album seems to be focused on time as a subjective dimension and its paroxysms and not only for the mention of "The Persistence Of Memory", the notorious painting by Salvador Dali', whose famous melting pocket watches made it one of the most known emblems of Surrealism as time scansion sounds a leitmotiv during the listening of the three long-lasting tracks of this recording: "Under Pressure", the first one, could be associated to a sort of awakening, where the mechanical ring of a traditional wind-up spring-driven alarm clock rend the sonic space before it turns into a grandfather clock, foreshadowing the following immersion in daily life which drags the perceiver away from the perception of time by distorting it through its intricate web of sources of distraction, carefully portrayed by Simon till the moment when, more or less self-consciously, this sonic ego-narrator becomes itself a spring or a gear train of the gigantic engine of time. The above-mentioned "The Persistence Of Memory" could be considered a sort of hallucinatory journey inside that paint, where listener could even feel dial, spring or hands trickling on its skin while some sonic elements such as the elastic pulsation of burglar alarms, silent tolls, hyberbolic strindencies or the hypnotic noise which looks like grabbed during a nocturnal journey on a stream train amplify the voice of desires, fears or dreams while exploring that surreal landscape, before the immersive title-track where the listener will be surrounded by an entrancing thundering ocean of buzzes and feedback. Although "The Sky Is Full Of Kites" offers a very abstract and cerebral listening experience, the astonishing accuracy Simon used to mould sounds in a captivating way gives a certain concreteness to it. Each track has been associated to some black and grey paints by Daniele Serra, which could be considered as possible hazy interpretations of Rorschach diagrams by a contemporary man. Maybe you?

This delicate and intimistic release by young Scottish guitar player and songwriter Gareth Dickson could sound a little bit unaccostumed for 12k catalogue, as label got a reputation for abstract electronic stuff, but it's not the first time Taylor Deupree's label veers towards organic or acoustic sonorites so that it's not totally proper to speak about a stylistyical shift. Let's cache this lightweight matter of record keeping, I prefer to focus on the terse musical dainties Gareth profusely frees in this record, which seems to be inspired by a series of events occuring in his life I will not dwell on (you'll find more on label's introduction), which justified its temporary estrangement from composition as well as that mild (but not invasive at all) feeling of anxiety exuding from his music. To be honest, he's not a golden voice, but it tightly clings to the sounds he produces with his acoustic guitar by alternating gentle strumming and entrancing finger-picked melodic clothes (you could listen to a sort of combination in the wonderful tapping, which, mute in the beginning, turns into a lovely melody, in "Happy Easters"). Some phrasing as well as Gareth's vocal could induce an immediate comparison with Nick Drake or Bert Jansch and Gareth himself mentions them among most influential musicians (he also mentioned Aphex Twin, Brian Eno and Glenn Gould, but if you focus on compositional schemes you could listen many others...I even heard some similarities between the touching "This IS The Kiss" and Sebastian Tellier's "La Ritournelle") but it almost seems some of his ballads get closer to 17th century styles such as passacaglia or chaconne. A certain "ripeness" could be deduced by the semantic coherence joining together all tracks from the emotional upheaval of "Get Together" and "Noon" (an interpretation of Stevie Smith's poem "Not Waving But Drowning") to the final haunting metaphor taken from the biblical tale of Jonah, where the repetition of God's declaration of love to the anti-prophet ("I will love you forever") is going to lull the listeners to the end.

This album is the reissue of a obscure classic album from this Belgium outfit, a duo formed by Sandy and Hermann (of Ah-Cama Sotz), constructed upon what is supposed to be field recordings of the underwater world. The project was set specifically for the 150th anniversary of the Antewerp Zoo Aquarium and, so, most of the recordings used sound of this particular place.
"Orca" open this album with an immersive ambient soundscape upon the chant of this fish while "In de koalijne schijndiepten" is filled with subtle sound transformation of a sample and the juxtaposition of various sound samples. "Het enigma der dolfijnen" sounds like a Resident's outtake and, just to be clear, this is a compliment. "In the wake of the great Sea-serpent" is based upon a long drone coloured with samples while "L'ivresse des grandes profondeurs" deals with a more evocative, and cinematic, soundscape. With "Archeozoicum" begins the final part of this release with a more ritualistic mood. "Into the ultrasonic dephts" is a dark, obscure track filled with field recordings and "Wailing for the wales" use even an usual instrument, a saxophone, to extend the musical palette used. "Coda by Ivo and Dolly" is followed by an hidden track, the longest of it all, that close this album with a sparse beat giving unity to a variety of musical setting (from the almost noisy beginning to the cinematic ending.
Instead of using the particular field recordings to develop an almost freak album, this album tries to create a musical discourse out of this sounds reveling a particular depth in the construction of truly evocative soundscape. Recommended to fans of truly experimental music.

One of the most interesting release from Italian musical undergrowth, wisely gathered by Boring Machines, has been signed by Heroin In Tahiti, a project by Valerio Mattioli (one of the pen of renowned Italian music zine Blow Up as well as pulsing mind between noise band Thetlvmuth and DVD-r and VHS Rome-based label AAVV Videos) and Francesco De Figuereido (one leg together with Valerio Mannucci of Opium Child), sons of the so-called Borgata Boredom scene, an eccentric and very active group of musicians based in East Rome, whose lively cultural atmosphere, which got a certain visibility thanks to some notorious movie makers such as De Sica, Visconti or Pasolini, often related to folk daily life and its situations of social distress or intellectual alienation, facilitated digestion, revision and "italinization" of the most radical wing of American alternative-noise-indie-folk music due to its appropriateness with specific subjects. The uncommon adaptation of the so-called Exotica generation (if you know something about Les Baxter and other parsons of Tiki God, you'll easily understand what I'm speaking about), whose hints are broad in the stylistical references to Piero Umiliani as well as in the name Valerio and Francesco coined for their project, and the eccentric crossbreed between that cliched exoticism (totally stripped of its hedonistic nuances) and the typical "spaghetti western" sound is the main feature of Heroin In Tahiti's sound, so that they offer a synaesthetic listening experience where Mediterranean sultriness blurs with the stereotyped warmth evoked by a picture postcard from Polynesia, where grim cow-boys sip exotic cocktails after duelling amidst huge canyons of toxic waste, rusty car shells and burning tyres. Ho`olohe pono ("Listen carefully" translated from Hawaiaan to English!)!