Back catalogue: Industrial/Noise

Review: There's a delightfully celebratory feel about this debut volume of Cititrax Tracks, a new 12" series from Minimal Wave offshoot Cititrax. As beautifully presented as we've come to expect, Tracks Volume 1 boasts a quartet of dancefloor-ready smashers from a blend of new faces and label stalwarts. Amato (aka The Hacker) kicks things off with the glistening EBM funk of "Physique" - all restless synth refrains and pounding bottom end - before LIES affiliate Tsuzing go all dark, psychedelic and twisted on the thrillingly intense, acid-flecked "King of System". An-I go all DAF (with a touch of Front 242) on the fuzzy and dystopian stomper "Mutter", before Cititrax regulars Broken English Club delivers a storming chunk of industrial-tinged analogue funk ("Glass"). Bravo!

Review: Boris Barksdale's Eternal Remorse originally saw the light of day on Portugese label Eye For An Eye as a digital release back in 2018, and now it's getting a vinyl pressing. A physical release feels appropriate for this pointedly dusty release, which leans in on synthwave influences to create a thoroughly dark and gnarly atmosphere. '5.0.5' steps out on a tough, dishevelled rhythm section, with seriously degraded synths falling apart behind the jackhammer drums. '7.0.8' takes the intensity up a notch, hitting with an industrial bite, while 'Sentier' channels even more of that Ministry-flavoured malaise with its disturbing yelps and screams. 'Sramota' has the hallmarks of a mid 80s bedroom beatdown from a blackened soul, 'Take Notes' delivers yet more pounding, percussive punishment, and 'Geezer' rounds things off with a bleak and troubled slab of EBM dragged from the underworld to stalk amongst all nightcrawlers and ne'er-do-wells.

Review: Rampant and 'up for it' as usual, the Cititrax label is back with a new set of wayward technoid experiments for the more trained ears on the dancefloors. This time it's Romania's Borusiade and newcomer The Sixteen Steps who share two sides of a wax plate and, of course, proceed to annihilate any idea of a quiet night in. The former sets off with the mechanical acid bumps of "Infatuation", guided by an eerie set of vocal blurs, and that's followed by the comparatively more beat-centric techno of the apocalyptic "Confutation". On the flip, The Sixteen Steps first lands on "Signals From The South", a house banger with noxious levels of mutant bass at its core, followed by the single-minded industrialism and sheer techno brutality of "Promises On The Run". WOWZAH!

Review: Jason Barton is one man, London based experimental project BArTc. Insubstantial As Ghosts is his 14 track debut album and it comes on the label run by Colin Potter, who is well known for weird electronics thanks to his time as a member of Nurse With Wound. Barton has said that influences include Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Chris Watson and industrial legends such as Coil, Skinny Puppy and Einsturzende Neubauten. The music is built in many layers of synths, found sounds and environmental recordings. It results in organic and experimental sounds that are heavily distorted with various effects.

Review: We're starved for two-sided 12"s in the world of ambient music, but Chris Madak aka. Bee Mask has refreshingly graced us with one this week. It should be said that there's Skee Mask and then there's Bee Mask; the latter is far more unsung, undeservingly so. Madak's music is abstract and cerebral enough to have lent him credo enough to have released on the likes of Weird Forest, Spectrum Spools and Room40. But this latest reissue, 'Versailles Is Not Too Large Or Infinity Too Long', hears him plunge the ethereal heights for the US label Unifactor. Originally released on cassette on Chondritic Sound in 2008, these pieces deserve the renewed attention and the fresh laying to wax, since they're not 'regular ole' ambient cuts in the slightest. Unafraid of indulging the high end freqs, Bee Mask fleshes out a mood of uncertain, urgent bliss - sizzling, crunching and soaring the drone, as if its maker were a modern Icarus flying too close to the sun.

Review: .Apocalyptic fusionistas Blood Of Heroes return to complete their trilogy of albums with Nine Cities. Every bit as powerful and abrasive as previous long players Remain and The Waking Nightmare, once again they take the dark imagery and intention from the original 1989 film and surge it into an unclassifiable and somewhat bewitching brew which has strong notes of IDM, metal and drum & bass. Highlights include the reflective dubby waves of 'Skara Brae', the high voltage tension of 'Lower Atlantis' and the skin-exfoliating 'Jerush-A-Salem'. Bloody good.

Review: Rhode Island based metallic experimentalist duo The Body have become renowned, not just for their own unique brand of heaving, caustic, dread-laden doomgazing, but for their dynamic slew of collaborative projects which has seen them work with the likes of deathgrind extremists Full Of Hell, sludge metal bastions Thou and noisecore industrialists Uniform, to name but a few. Orchards Of A Futile Heaven is the latest work to join this ever-expansive list of collaborations, seeing the pair link up with Berlin based DJ and experimental producer Dis Fig (aka DJ Felicia Chen) in an effort "to find new avenues to make heavy music that looked beyond tropes of metal and electronic music by merging the two". The resulting maelstrom offers a cacophonous swarm of distorted, screeching electronics and ethereal, menacing vocals submerged beneath layers of haunting, nocturnal, sonic malevolence. Perfect for all the family.

Review: Slovenia multimedia, electronic and rock group Borghesia formed back in 1982 from members of an underground theatre group that was known as FV-112/15. They also ran their own alternative club and had an illicit, illegal aesthetic based around anything taboo, banned or prohibited in the country at the time, much like the likes of Front 242 and Nitizer Ebb. Rugged City was an album first released in 1988 and only in Yugoslavia. It collects the best tunes from previous albums Escorts And Models and No Hope No Fear and is a perfect overview of their powerful mutant sound.

Review: Originally conceived in 2019 during a tour with industrial hardcore purveyors Uniform, Japanese psychedelic noise-rock juggernauts Boris would invite their co-conspirators on stage to reimagine the trio's classic "Akuma no Uta" as part of their encore, with the resulting chemistry inspiring both acts to begin crafting a fully collaborative album. Many years of exchanging ideas from one home studio base to another has finally bore fruit in the form of the hideous yet glorious Bright New Disease. Combining almost every nuance of each group's genre-less machinations, the project swells and extends in every sonic direction from harsh walls of screeching noise to retrofitted Japanese D-beat hardcore, with time in between for aquatic, shoegazing serenity and mechanized industrial venom.

Review: .Geneva, Switzerland duo Bound By Endogamy are taking no prisoners with this collection of eight intense workouts that seem to straddle a multitude of genres and somehow emerge from the chaos with something new. Unsurprisingly, given what's here, the pair - Shlomo Balexert and Kleio Thomaides - are prominent figures on the underground punk and squat scene in their hometown, and there's plenty on this record that feels as though it's got to that time in the morning and you're still wandering around a disused labyrinthine building trying to remember where the front door was. Combining the ferocity of hardcore with the atmosphere and futurism of electro and rave, it's growling but crisp, distorted and DIY, dancefloor and weirdo all at once. An album that will not disappoint anyone who has been keeping an eye on this outfit as they emerged from strong successive cassette releases and a single 7" into this full throttle, self-titled long player.

Review: Given that he's been releasing long-players on the regular since the dawn of time (well, 2007), you'd expect Alexander Ridha AKA Boys Noize to know what makes a good album from an artist primarily known for the dancefloor-igniting nature of their work. He does, of course, as his latest album emphatically proves. With the help of a string of eye-opening guest vocalists and collaborators, Ridha deftly navigates between growling, mutilated, club-ready slabs of fuzzy post-electro and techno, and vocal and instrumental workouts that draw just as much inspiration from synth-pop and electro-disco. The results are uniformly inspired, with our current picks of a very strong bunch including Jake Shears hook-up 'All I Want', the breathlessly intense techno-jack of 'Xpress Yourself' and the tender, Chilly Gonzalez-voiced 'Ride or Die'

Review: It's been a delight to see Oliver Ho's Broken English Club project develop artistically over recent times, with some fine records for Jealous God and Veronica Vasicka's Cititrax label along the way. Suburban Hunting sees Ho deliver his debut Broken English Club album, featuring some 11 tracks of primitive electronics and cinematic pseudo techno cuts. Tunes like "Vacant", "Derelict", or "Scum" all share a loose techno framework, but the real aesthetic is much vaster than that, verging on remnants of post-punk, industrial and all that goodness and hybrid class that came out of the late 1980's. It's another fine addition to the sublime Cititrax discography, and we recommended it just as much as the previous numbers.