Gaping Hole Tapes audio stream

All thirty-seven of the Gaping Hole tapes are now available to stream online. Gaping Hole was a sublabel of Scratch and Sniff Entertainment which focused on the nastier side of harsh noise. Since this sublabel got started in 2006, it managed to catch the rising wave of HNW, which was just beginning to make a name for itself as a recognisable subgenre. Hence you'll find a lot of great, classic even, wall and HNW tracks by many of the early masters (Infirmary, Vomir, Cannibal Ritual, Paranoid Time, Last Rape, Piss Horn, Wince, Rusalka etc).

Seriously, there's some properly high-quality walls going on here, and the good news is that, even though the sublabel has folded, you can still find most of these tapes out there. Do yourself a favour.

KEEP HNW BRUTAL!

Cannibal Ritual tribute page

I don't know why I didn't post this sooner, but I've started a Cannibal Ritual tribute bandcamp page. Cannibal Ritual was one of the first projects to fully dedicate itself to monolithic unchanging walls of static noise, i.e. Harsh Noise Wall, and is one of my personal favourite HNW artists. All Cannibal Ritual material was dedicated to cannibal cinema and was suitably brutal, lo-fi and obscure. I'm not sure if all of the CR material was made using an empty turntable as a sound source, but a good deal of it certainly was, and this gave the tracks a great grinding quality and often added a rhythmic element that was properly hypnotising.

The Cannibal Ritual material is not the easiest to get a hold of, for Ronald (Cannibal Ritual) released most of his own material, and quite often did so in very small numbers. The Thirst for Revenge Part II release, which you can hear above, for example, was only an edition of six copies. Furthermore, all of the CR material was on either tape or CDR, neither of which is famed for its durability. In fact, my own personal copies are pretty worn out, which you can actually hear from the rip I uploaded of Brutal Abortion/Fetus Slaughter. And so, for these reasons, I decided to do a tribute site; for to try and hold on to these recordings a little longer, and to try and ensure Ronald's deserved legacy as a master of HNW.

There was talk of a reissue box of tapes on Harsh Fucked for Life (Sweden), but Ronald dropped out of the scene without a word of warning in 2010 and hasn't been seen or heard from since. In fact, now that I think about it, even HFFL has folded. Which is strange, cause I remember when Karl just came on the scene, not long after myself, and not long after that HFFL became a real corner-stone of Euro-HNW. Strange to think. So anyway, needless to say, reissues of the Cannibal Ritual material are now extremely unlikely.

The other thing you need to know about Ronald is that he actually set-up and moderated the first two HNW online forums himself. I knew him only a little from those forums, but enough to know that now he's gone, he's unlikely to return. He really just didn't give a fuck about anything apart from brutal HNW and brutal old school death metal. And by the end, he didn't really care about the former anymore. He was vehemently opposed to all HNW that wasn't brutal as fuck and he used to delete threads and accounts on the forum in a heartbeat if he felt either didn't match his expectations of what HNW should be. He was a bit of a bastard like, but we all loved him for it, and he played a key role in ensuring that part of HNW would always be brutal, elitist and obscure.

The other thing I have to say is that I need some help completing the page. There are lots of Cannibal Ritual releases I don't have, so if ye can, I'd very much appreciate it if ye could send me audio rips and cover scans. I've got a few more things to rip from my collection, mostly tapes, including the excellent Thirst for Revenge tape, but my computer is a bit shite, so until I get that sorted there's unlikely to be more added without help. If ye think ye can help, please get in touch.

So anyway, in the meantime, stick on Cannibal Ferox (Ronald's favourite cannibal film, if I remember correctly), and get onto the bandcamp and turn it up full tilt in honour of an HNW legend.

KEEP HNW BRUTAL!

HNW Unplugged, Disabled Records

A new noise label called Disabled Records has begun a series entitled 'HNW Unpluged' which aims to publish HNW music made under the following stipulations:

no electricity, no fx, no editing, no layers.

It's an interesting idea and certainly one thats been kicking around the HNW scene for a while, in one form or another. And so it's good to see people finally having a proper stab at it. You can stream the releases at the label's bandcamp page.

Here's the thing though; none of this really sounds like HNW, at all. No crunch, no crackle. No well-defined, abstract lines and angles of sound. It really just sounds like acoustic harsh noise or industrial and, in that sense, it's not really all that original sounding. Still, it's good enough for a listen. And I reckon there's always a chance someone might actually manage an acoustic piece of HNW at some stage, so I'll be keeping an eye on it.

HNW Questionary; A View From Nihil interview

Over at the Noise Admiration blog, Sascha has devised what he calls a HNW Questionary. It's essentially a set of thirty-two incomplete phrases on the subject of HNW which he will be asking various HNW composers to complete. It makes an interesting change from the traditional interview format, and it is surely better suited to email correspondence, which has become the norm for underground interviews, than the old interview format. Sascha asked me to be the first to attempt the questionary, which I did gladly. You can read the AVFN edition of the HNW Questionary here. It features probably the most self indulgent response imaginable; cause I'm like that. Thanks to Sascha for asking, and I'm looking forward to reading the following editions, for I think the layout of the HNW Questionary will allow for some interesting comparisons and contrasts between different artists.

Emptyset

Powerful, minimal, textural, suprematist. Four words which may be used to describe both Harsh Noise Wall and the music of Emptyset equally well. Emptyset, we salute you.

AVFN, live in Glasgow, 28/04/12

I'll be playing the 13th Note as part of the Cave ov Lights all-dayer tomorrow. My set is slotted for a 5:45 start time.

A Portrait of Eliane Radigue

A Portrait of Eliane Radigue (2009) from Maxime Guitton on Vimeo.

"It's like looking at the surface of a river. There's an iridescence around the reefs, but it's never completely the same, according to the way in which you look, you see the golden flashes of the sun or the depths of the water. In a swimming pool you can see the reflections of the ripples on the bottom or have a vision of the whole and let yourself be carried away by what I call 'dream gazing', or fix on a detail and make your own landscape. There you can make your own soundscape."