Category Archives: UPDATE

SUMMER NIGHT AIR – ‘5 (remixed)’
SNA broke their 8-year hiatus with the release of the mesmerising album ‘5’ in Oct 2022. One year on, Crue Nature release ‘5 (remixed)’ which compiles ambient, house, electronica, post rock/shoegaze, dub and electro pop remixes from artists such as The John Cream Collective, Cathode (aka Steve Jefferis, one half of Warm Digits), Score (aka Chris Tate, from Salisman, One Key Magic, d_rradio) and ako (aka Simeon Soden, one half of Badger).

COLD COMFORT – ‘All Power No Sour/Selected Works’
Cold Comfort is Ben Forrester, a musician who since 2021 has been blending punk, electro, drone, metal, hardcore and slacker rock into one humungous sonic melting pot. This 20-track cassette compilation features the debut album “All Power No Sour” and selected works from 2022. Lyrically drawing from mental health episodes, political frustrations and paranormal experiences, this is a collection of revelations that is equal parts cathartic, raging and euphoric.

PLAGUE ARISH & PARADOX ENCOUNTER GROUP – ‘Tarred & Feathered’
A collaborative work of experimental sound art that melds modular synths with noise, dark ambient and industrial atmospherics into unsettling, thought-provoking soundscapes.

TIBSHELF – ‘Understander’
If you’ve ever wondered what a track that samples Albert Ayler, Jimi Hendrix, Terry Riley, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and ‘Withnail & I’ might sound like? Then this album has it. The second album of sampledelic plunderphonics cut n splice from Lee Etherington (founder of TUSK Festival/ former member of tape manglers Posset), twisting and screwing funk hip-hop techno, film dialogue, noise rock and a smorgasbord of every sound from under the sun into a fresh sonic glory like you’ve never imagined.

SHAN – ‘Knotweed’
Debut outing from the Tyneside noise rock/sludge duo, who channel their frustrations with employment, self and prescribed medication, and the current state of the UK through raw, stripped back, unadulterated punk rages. FFO: Unsane, The Melvins, Eyehategod

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Directives – ‘Glimmer’ CDr
With its much more accessibly rhythmic construction, Glimmer runs a very different program than the occult abstractions of 2021’s Protenomaly or 2017’s Usphutorontus Deius Nissesubla, both released as intimately handmade cassettes by Aubjects. As with Directives’ prior two releases, in the 8 tracks of ‘Glimmer’ there is a core source material of lo-fi cassette-recorded guitar improvisations, cassettes and reels from personal archives and iPhone recordings purposefully captured in significant places and moments. The songlike composition mode of these pieces stems from Directives’ long time love of remarkable explorers in electronic music including but not limited to Severed Heads / Tom Ellard, Haruomi Hosono / YMO, and misc releases from Mille Plateaux & Raster. Apart from these and other “IDM” and / or “bedroom producer” type material influences, the sound is still overtly dreamy, psychedelic and flavored with dashes of industrial / cassette culture aesthetics, 80s/90s psych / “shoegaze” and noise, centered around manipulated guitar sounds. Pro-pressed CDR in hand-painted / hand-stamped / hand-numbered paperboard jacket. Full color booklet on specialty paper, hand stapled / folded by the artist. Booklet encloses a small slip of blank notebook paper of specific significant origin, given randomized coverage of transparent shimmer. The recipient is invited to utilize this paper in a personally meaningful fashion, ex: write out a wish and burn. Package also includes accordion-fold mini-booklet, hand-cut / folded / stamped salvaged paperboard pull-strips for pocket items extrication of CDR (on R) and booklets (on L), and painted yellow outer salvaged paperboard strap w/ stamped & glued album title slip. Comes enclosed in salvaged plasti-zip bag for protection.

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Black Tempel Pyrämid – ‘Meditations On Consequences’ and ‘Sun Songs’
Black Tempel Pyrämid is an experimental American primitive Krautrock band from Walsenburg, CO. A sonic endeavor of Patrick R. Pärk, who is a deep diver of primitive droning Kosmische territories, prolifically releasing albums and performing under his own name and through projects such as Black Tempel Pyrämid, RUFFINI, Kösmonaut, Life Education and Teeth Of Glass. “Meditations On Consequences” was written and recorded between June – November 2022, in tandem with “Sun Songs”, which was written and recorded between September – November 2022. Both albums are heavily influenced by Grails, GY!BE, MMOB, and Ash Ra Tempel. A collection of sonic heady works will pull you in for a bizarre
and dark American primitive nightmare journey.

Mike Neaves – ‘You’re Welcome’
When he’s not playing in The Eurosuite, or doing stints with Sly & The Family Drone; Plurals or Nitkowski, Mike Neaves makes skittering fractured 160bpm techno. He’s had releases on Hominid Sounds and Rat Run Records. This is his latest album, is a masterpiece of spidery fractured techno, made on “not that much” equipment with all live takes from a sequencer. The cover art goes some way to begin to convey the sense of liminal disquiet from the tracks inside: A desk stranded in a decaying narrow room under ugly fluorescent light. Mechanical industry and fucked architecture. The jittery Monday AM interior of your skull, and the mutant sounds of the weekender you wish you were at instead.

Salisman & His Unwavering Circle – ‘Parched’
The house of the Unwavering Circle has been decimated. The organ stopped working. The pews are covered in dust. The pool has been drained following an unfortunate accident. This is the soundtrack for the troubled times of our dear Salisman: Rivers of synthesizers. Pedal steel drenched in warbling tape echo. Tense electronic rhythms and rustic percussion. Perhaps you might follow him, as he collects the remnants and the husks of his failures. Via discipline, perseverance and unmatched wit, he will press on.

Pound Land – ‘Violence’
‘Violence’ is the new album from Pound Land – eight filthy tracks of vitriolic desperation recorded by the core duo of Nick Harris and Adam Stone and featuring a number of guest musicians, including Steve Watson of Iron Monkey and solo artist Adam Petiss. ‘Violence’, the band’s sixth album, often veers towards a nineties alt-metal/industrial sound, along with the usual smatterings of customary Pound Land abstraction. In addition, this new album continues to aggressively push lyrical themes relating to the same old shit that seems to be getting worse: corporate hegemony, business culture, mainstream media influence, automation, class polarisation and economic austerity.

Dragged Up – ‘Hex Domestic EP’
Dragged Up are an off-kilter psych-garage proto-punk band. Formed in Glasgow in late 2018 by Eva Gnatiuk (Las Mitras), with Simon Shaw (Trembling Bells) & the writer Lisa Jones. In 2019, Chas Lalli (Vom/Bad Aura) & Julian Dicken (The Cosmic Dead) joined. In 2022 Stephan Mors (The Owsley Sunshine) replaced Dicken on drum duty.

ele0nora – ‘tuuljamuud’
‘tuuljamuud’ by eleOnora is an album with abstract meditative voice as its chore element. It is the artist’s first solo release which consists of improvisations from three different recording sessions made over the period of 13 years. Like the time range suggests this album is retrospective in its nature. Although the recordings were made many years apart from each other they display similarity in their mood. It is one of the moods that eleOnora has been developing in her work over the years – an idea of a statically flowing, slowly morphing, minimalistic voice holding space for the listeners. eleOnora (Eleonora Kampe) is an Estonian-Latvian singer and avant-garde vocalist. She works both as a solo artist and in collaborative projects that include noise and ambience duo Road To Saturn, static abstractions project Tencu/eleOnora and an avant blues experiment Ringhold.

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Clara Engel – ‘Sanguinaria’
Ten stunning new songs of transfiguration from the Toronto-based artist, accompanied by electric and acoustic guitars, talharpa, gudok, lap steel, melodica, and percussion. A mystical work, mixing classical and dark folk wanderings with misty soundscapes, which creates an abstract, new world atmosphere. An album with a deep longing at its core that makes for a subtle yet incredibly moving experience.

Baker Ja Lehtisalo – ‘Crocodile Tears’
A collaborative album of new wave industrial doom songs by Nadja’s Aidan Baker and Circle / Pharaoh Overlord’s Jussi Lehtisalo/ Early in 2020 Lehtisalo and Baker began trading sounds over the internet—fragmentary keyboard licks and textural guitar riffs, retro electro-beats and pulsing bass lines—slowly constructing them into songs that combined a sort of ’80s New Wave/AOR aesthetic with a heavy/noisy/shoegaze/industrial sound. The end result was ‘Crocodile Tears’, five catchily anthemic songs channelling the perhaps unlikely pairing of Godflesh and Jan Hammer, electronic pop and pretty melodies mixed with textural guitars and heavy metal riffs

TUNNELS OF ĀH – ‘THE SMEARED CLOTH (2012-2018 UNEARTHED)’
TUNNELS OF ĀH is Stephen Āh Burroughs, who was the founding member and vocalist for HEAD OF DAVID; a band who also featured Justin Broadrick and Dave Cochrane, emerging on the seminal UK label Blast First records in the mid-1980s, creating a sound that paved the way for industrial-metal and noise-rock. TUNNELS OF ĀH is Burroughs’ ritual dark ambient industrial project, which debuted with the album ‘Lost Corridors’ in 2013.

Charlie Butler – ‘Parts Unknown’
Charlie Butler is a Lanarkshire based artist who began a series of solo releases in 2021 exploring psychedelic, ambient, heavy and hypnotic sounds alongside being a member of Cody Noon, Neutraliser with Mike Vest, Mothertrucker and Head Drop. He has had work published by Weird Beard Records, Cruel Nature, Fuzzed Up & Astromoon and Panurus Productions. Parts Unknown” is Butler’s first full solo release since moving from Reading to Lanark.

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[mt142cs] Vasculae – Spectrum Art c-44/DL
Long-delayed ‘split fracture’ album offering mirror images of past, present and future Vasculae. On the A-side, recent sessions from 2020 and 2021 — the same period as the ‘Broken Lust’ album, continuing that inward struggle of darkened clang, enveloping tonal loop stasis and (un)restrained fragments of multi-tracked grit; noise-as-all-source. For the B-side, a glimpse of the project’s inception with a side-long harsh piece recorded in 2012 during the first five-hour recording session and painstakingly edited apart/together over the course of nine years. Edition of 100, with full color covers and labels.

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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.

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[tzpCS86] FUC LERRARI – ‘A Bot And His Dog’ CS
Artificial melancholy & lacrimal beats. Two sides to listen to in autoreverse while fantasizing a past life. Two sides to listen to in autoreverse while living a fantasized past.

[tzpCS87] CYDWYD s/t CS
Premeditated interpulsions & frequency training. Ultra-controlled electricity for a subjective narration of acoustic phenomena. The proof that the future will be augmented.

[tzpCS88] PATRICK LOMBE s/t CS
Back home after a year without public news. Raw songs & electroacoustic superintuitions. The limits of the experimental song pushed in its retrenchments of the impossible.

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Beast Flower Coiffeuse – ‘First Secret Shared At Sleepover Slurry Of Rectal Tissue’
Hell in the failing daylight. This piece of meat is talking. Crimson spray, white spray “Excuse me, do you long to take an easy ride?”

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various artists – ‘Spectrum’ 2 x MC/DL
Pre-Order now / Releases 20 April/ A compilation of 23 exclusive tracks celebrating a decade of Cruel Nature Records. Available as limited-edition double-cassette and download. 110 minutes of sonic diversity. 100% profits will be donated to The Toby Henderson Trust (https://www.ttht.co.uk/), an independently funded charity in North East England which supports autistic youth and adults, as well as their families and caregivers.

Beckton Alps2 – ’60 (Don’t Go Crazy)’
Beckton Alps2 is a self-taught producer who has used various digital audio workstations, soft synths and samples, to create conceptual recordings since 1998. Informed through the personal experience of homelessness and institutionalisation – which have been a backdrop throughout his life – isolation, psychosis, dissociation and poverty play key themes in his work. ’60’ is a sixty-minute piece of field recordings, processed harmonies and a morse code generator, with the morse code spelling out themes from personal forms of madness.

DIsciplinary – ‘Porkwind’
Dual bass and drums hardcore noise-punk riff assault from North East England, featuring members of Prolefeed / Lovely Wife / Tide Of Iron / Marzuraan. A raging debut that rips hard.

Tibshelf – ‘Supreme Flounder’
Sampledelic plunderphonics cut n splice from Lee Etherington (Tusk Music / early-Posset), twisting and screwing funk hip-hop techno and a smorgasbord of prime cuts into into fresh sonic glory.

Arsenne Arthur – ‘La Lune / Le Pendu’
La Lune / Le Pendu are two electroacoustic pieces mixing distorted samples, field recording, electric guitar, Epinette des Vosges and electronic noises composed by Arsenne Arthur (also in the Toru/Carivari bands). Inspired by the Tarot of Marseilles, the two pieces making up this EP are the fantasized sound representation of the major arcana XVII and XII. The first deals with dreams and dreamlike worlds, while the second brings back to the daily life of a life that lets itself be lived. These two pieces were originally composed at the Nice Conservatory in France, to be played in acousmonium (orchestra of loudspeakers) and have been remixed and mastered for this release on cassette.

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One Key Magic – ‘One Key Magic’
‘One Key Magic’ is the second album by One Key Magic, a duo comprising of political geographer Michael Mulvihill and electronic producer Chris Tate (Score, d_rradio, Salisman). Following 2021’s ‘Worldy Noise and Electronic Atmospheres’, this new album continues the duo’s exploration of electronic phenomenon produced by RAF Fylingdales, a Ballistic Missile Early Warning station on the edge of the North York Moors. The album features field recordings by Ivor Novella award winner David de la Haye and is an immersive mix of electro-acoustic improvisation broken by moments of soaring melodic guitar. OKM is part of Mulvihill’s research looking at the clash between electronic music and electromagnetic military technologies for an Arts and Humanities Research Council project called ‘Turning Fylingdales Inside Out’ at Newcastle University.

Katie Gerardine O’Neill – ‘Into The Beyond’
‘Into the Beyond’ is the new album from Dublin based artist and musician Katie Gerardine O’Neill. Spanning 12 tracks composed using a variety of tape recorders, reel to reel archival tapes, digital software, and more, O’Neill presents a follow up to her mysterious existential musique-concrete meditation ‘Message Green’ by diving even deeper into the sublime mystery of the universe with ‘Into the Beyond’. Fans of O’Neill’s deeply textured ambient noise art will be pleased to hear this work develop further sonically on tracks such as ‘Matrimony’, ‘Stormy Wobble’, and epic string drenched ‘10 Voices’. O’Neill returns to wordier self-expression on tracks such as ‘Vacuum’ and ‘Sleeper’, made when O’Neill spent a day with a Roland MS-20 in now disappeared JaJa Studios. Epic ode to the void and the importance of self-compassion ‘Animal’, is a Broadcast-esque slow-core ballad championing overcoming strife through determination and wonder. The track ‘Talk’ sees O’Neill lean into a dubby trip-hop reflection on love and loss that displays her poppier abilities. The closing track ‘Vue de L’Intérieur’ reflects an ever-present theme in O’Neill’s work; an unbreakable hope, joy, and romantic fascination with all things mysterious and unknown.

Austin Cash – ‘Judsonia’
An evocative slice of ambient Americana, told as a hallucinatory radio drama, based on Austin’s experience of living and growing up in rural Arkansas. “I recorded Judsonia in a room which had one chair and one lamp. I had a notion that it would be sort of a radio drama that played through the speakers of a car which was passing through that small town in Arkansas. It came together over a period of a few months where I was collecting sounds and recordings which didn’t clearly relate to one another until it was time to assemble them. At that point, the various pieces fell together into one long piece that now makes me think about liminality. Being in between political boundaries, inside and outside, old and new, sleep and consciousness, town and country. When I made it, I was reflecting on several years (maybe a lifetime) of making decisions that were not in my best interest in one way or another. It’s not exactly an original thought, but it seemed like the essential quality of at least my own behavior was a persistent push and pull between self-preservation and self-sabotage. Sometimes we get to live in that space in the middle.” – Austin Cash

Halalchemists – ‘Annihilation Men’
Shadowy North East England noise-makers plunder and rework archive material from mid-2000s performances and a classic 1983 The New Blockaders show at Newcastle’s Morden Tower.

Ddrome – ‘Power City’
Jamie Davis is the drummer with Dublin improv group Zeropunkt. ‘Power City’ is his second outing as Ddrome for Cruel Nature, following 2021’s ‘Beyond The Thunderddrome’. ‘Power City sees a shift away from the long format tracks of its predecessor. The familiar drum/drone collision still being in evidence augmented at times with more space and the bare bones of melody.

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