Back catalogue: Industrial/Noise

Review: "I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring," David Bowie famously quipped at his 50th Birthday concert in Madison Square Garden. That was 1997, and sadly we can now look back at the years between then and now as the last the icon would enjoy, although given the pantheons of unreleased material, music and other, we still have more than his legacy alone to learn from. He certainly kept his word, then, not least by opting to work with Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, a band that found inspiration in myriad styles and sounds, from Human League to Pink Floyd, carving out a 'industrial electronic rock' niche for themselves. In addition to tours and one-off shows, recordings of their collaborations are remarkable, generating fresh wholes from the enormous sums of these parts.

Review: If you like dense, challenging and austere industrial noise then read on: French sound curator and in situ artist Jerome Noetinger is a master of that who has proven himself over more than 30 albums. Sur Quelques Mondes Etranges is another one of his avant guard outings with electroacoustic designs at its core. The album is divided up into two sides of shorter tracks, then one 18-minute piece that takes up a whole side, and then one side of 21-second locked grooves for you to mix up however you see fit. The whole record was made in three days in a Hamburg studio and is a fine showcase of his ability to make palpable metal texture and real-world dirt out of sound waves.

Review: Lisbon has a lot to answer for in electronic music. Not just a great city to party in (and we mean great), the Portuguese capital has, for a very long time now, been responsible for some of the most cutting edge beats and pieces being made in Europe as a whole. More impressive still, it has managed to build this reputation due to the predominance of location-specific noises. The country's colonialist history means the population is hugely diverse, resulting in a real cultural melting pot, and tunes are a major outlet through which people can express their identity.
A place packed with characters as big as the impact of their respective sounds, Teteu, AKA Normal Nada the Krakmaxter, AKA Qraqmaxter,AKA CiclOFF, AKA Erre Mente, certainly accounts for a good number of those personalities on monikers alone. And, as Tribal Progressive Heavy Metal shows, his tunes are also hard not to notice. At once harsh and yet also delicate, or at least spatial, we run from a plain evil gabber-chip music-fairground ride oddity ('Alive'), to dubby proggy techno ('Da Gamer'), off-kilter pianos and UK funky drums ('Batida 2 Dance'), and snare-bass minimalism ('Nai Na Chi (Na China)'), among other adventures.

Review: Steven Stapleton is Nurse With Wound. Originally a band, sometimes abbreviated to NWW, since 1978 the English act has explored a range of dark and brooding styles, including industrial, dark ambient, drone, and noise. Well known for sound collages - usually pretty intense in nature - influences come from the dada and surrealist art schools, cabaret music, John Cage, The Beach Boys, Krautrock, and Musique Concrete. She & Me Fall Together In Free Death is, in this instance at least, the highly anticipated reissue of the landmark album which proved just how good NWW is at all forms of song craft. Work here edges into the eerier end of Liars collaborating with Tom Waits' at his most experimental and that's really clutching for reference points. Quite unlike anything else you'll buy today, we promise.

Review: There has been a steady stream of Nurse With Wound material released and reissued recently, with the fathomless creaks of Salt Marie Celeste still looming in our lower registers. Now Dirter are digging right back to the start to present a definitive version of the very first Nurse With Wound venture, originally recorded back in 1980 with a line-up of Steven Stapleton, Jim Thirlwell and William Bennett. Although it wasn't released until 10 years later, this amalgam of tape cut ups, sludge and noise make for a compelling time capsule on the various extremes of sonic exploration that were to come from all three. As you might well expect, there are additional tracks included here you would never have heard before, making this one for long time fans as well as those just beginning their NWW journey.

Review: Do we really want to know What You Should Know About Yourself? There's a high chance we find out something we don't want to hear but alas, the NX1 duo poses the question anyway across a broad selection of techno sounds on 11 different tracks. The moods are often introspective and provide an opportunity to get lost in deep thought and challenge yourself. The dramatic ambient start makes way for crunchy drums and fizzing synth disruption on 'Based In Lies', then dark and hard drums define the monstrous menace of Polarized Soul' and industrial clatter brings the heat on the militant and marching grooves of 'Cosmos Inside You.' A fierce album of uncompromising techno.