Omnibadger – ‘Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III’
Stoke’s finest birthing their second (not third) LP from found sounds, industrial scuzz riffs, dubbed-out delays, whitenoise, dictaphones, and eight-tracked drums.
Waterflower – ‘All Art Is Ecological’
Waterflower (Sabīne Moore) is a multi-faceted eco-futurist artist from Latvia. Using plants and mushrooms as instruments, Waterflower creates a blend of experimental electronic music that speaks to the urgent need to protect and preserve our natural world. The album “All Art Is Ecological” challenges us to reconsider the role of art in shaping our ecological future, featuring an array of tracks. The mostly instrumental, cinematic album includes one track recorded on a found piano during tour travels, tracks with mushroom-generated music, and an improvised duet with an orchid-generated melody. The album highlights Waterflower’s interest in ecology, originally through plant and mushroom music practices, inspired by Timothy Morton’s essay that states that every artistic practice is ecological in a philosophical sense. As we are living in the age of extinction, art can help us embrace the moment and live central in our own catastrophe.
Volk Soup – ‘Incompetent Hits: The Singles Vol 1’
Volk Soup have been building a steady body of work. Over the past couple of years, they’ve been consistently releasing singles and pairing them with B-sides of equal stock. Now all compiled together, ‘Incompetent Hits: The Singles Vol. 1’ is a tidy encapsulation of a band at their embryonic best.
Gvantsa Narim – ‘Apotheosis Animæ’
Latest album from the enigmatic sound artist, who takes inspiration from religion, esotericism and Georgian polyphonic music, fusing classical arrangements, meditative drones, and ethereal atmospherics, into an aural experience of contemplative rapture. Her latest work was written in late 2022 / early 2023 and tells the dark and cold story of winter. Apotheosis and soulful whispering like the wind, where the immensity of mysticism reigns.
Eijra Woon – ‘Sophia’
Breton musician Eijra Woon, is probably known to some as a member of the groups Nádleehí and Zeijra, who oscillate between ambient, post-rock and experimental approaches. Alluding to aspects of Gnosis and the Fall of Wisdom, “Sophia” contains three studio tracks and a live track of quite different designs, each using different constellations of sound sources such as santur, various guitars, korg, metal objects, percussion and voice, maintaining an atmospheric framework. The album expresses a cathartic process both on a personal and a mythical level through four tracks. From suffering, imprisonment, doom and despair to relief and deliverance. It’s about turning deep trauma into a strength.
Of One/Whirling Hall Of Knives – ‘Recoil/Greywash’
OF ONE: Alan O’Boyle is one half of early 90s electronic act Decal, one half of Legion Of Two, all of Legion Of One, and a legend in Irish underground electronic music; releasing his sounds on esteemed labels such as Planet Mu, Rotters Golf Club, D1, Leaf, Law & Auder and Saberettes. In 2021, Alan launched his new project, Of One, releasing two albums for Front End Synthetics – the first new material he has issued since 2009. Cruel Nature welcomes Alan’s latest recording, ‘Recoil’, an epic throbbing acid-techno monster club banger. WHIRLING HALL OF KNIVES: A collaboration between Magnetize and The Last Sound, Whirling Hall Of Knives’ harsh smouldering circuits and eruptions of panicky white noise have a profoundly unsettling quality, a sense of gnawing paranoia but interspersed with moments of almost euphoric epiphany, as if in the grip of an unshakeable 4am psychosis a growing sense that the door will be kicked in at any second and the world outside will come pouring in. Psyche electronics of a particularly greasy and grime-flecked hue. Like Surgeon jamming with Dead C. Like rave gone bad.