Nnevteiga-New Codes of the Unfun CS (Tendresse, 2014)

So the other day, some jerk was giving the Wizard a hard time for having nice things to say about most of the records he reviews, even if they're abrasive and/or boring. Apparently it never crossed the kid's mind that the Wizard MAY ACTUALLY ENJOY painful, abrasive noise and in fact SAYS WHAT HE MEANS AND MEANS WHAT HE SAYS when he raves about music that most humans find completely unlistenable. As longtime readers know, the same goes for me: most of what I like is what most people hate, and often the more miserable a record is, the more enthusiastic I am about it. On that note:

Blame it on the recession or blame it on the numbing dominance of the European Union's ruling class, Brussels' Nnevteiga excels at droning, hypnotic noise that digs into your psyche like toothpicks to yr fingernails. Their second cassette-LP finds these Belgians digging deeper into the carrion pit of misery they began excavating on last year's self-titled debut. There's the same mix of grinding monotony, sheer brattiness, and a knack for hummable beats buried beneath sludge.

"Cold You and I" epitomises the band's sound: squalling feedback yields to a moronic metronome and the singer gulping, gurgling, and intoning beneath the grey film of choleric bathwater (that would be the synthesizers, I suppose). There's a delightfully numb-yet-tuneful bassline, added layers of vituperative noise gunk, and still that fucking gurgling bloody mess called singing.

I could continue this review, but that would be like describing my mental state: you can guess what the rest of the record is like without me spelling it out for you, right kids?

Sure you can. So hurry yr asses over to Nnevteiga's bandcamp page. There you can blow out your eardrums in style, before BUYING THE FUCKING THING. Which you should do; the artwork is gorgeous and the good folks at Tendresse Records send you weird 3D cards when you order copies of the tape. Said cards are really fun to waste hours staring at when you're cracked out of your mind on cheap beer, Varnelli, and whatever drugs you managed to scrounge from your longsuffering housemates.

The Dictaphone-s/t (Totally Wired, 2013)

Quote-un-quote-noise-rock bands are a dime a dozen these days. Most of them drop forgettable records on forgettable labels, before sliding back into the scuzz pit of hipster trends and idiot fads that bequeathed us such luminaries of dogshit culture as The Killers.

Not so the Dictaphone, hailing from St. Martin's home town. First-gen No Wavers' avant garde pretensions aside, the fundamental intent of this sort of music is to annoy the listener, preferably in the most obvious and thus even more irritating way possible. The Dictaphone are past masters of this sort of nuanced-'cause-it's-not annoyance, and they don't let us down on their new(ish) LP. Everything I liked, and which you probably hated, about their previous essays in the obscene, is present here. Maybe the boys spent the past year huffing the ashes from St. Martin's reliquary, or they just found better recording equipment; either way, their sound is honed down into a precision-guided missile of pure, snide snark on this LP.

"About Blank" could be a lounge tune as written by Klaus Kinski: it offers the lilting repetition of lounge music, with a numbingly snide blandness I could only see the famous Hungarian dishing out. Nuthin' but a 4'4 time metronome, deadpan robot talk-singing, and the occasional blare of a synthesizer somewhere in the neon haze. There's a bit more life to "The Recording," but not much more. Really the best track here is number 3, "Verkehr." In my review of these guys' first LP, Let's Not, I described one song as ripping off the drumbeat from "All Tomorrow's Parties" while leaving the rest to the ages. Either these guys read the review and loved my comparison, or their speed habit coincides organically with a love of Lou Reed pop blueprints: "Verkehr" hijacks the bass vamp from "Rock & Roll" to weave it into a stand-alone piece of cosmic krautrock. Gradually this bass riff builds into a piece of coruscating majesty replete with animal-noise sound effects. "Hardness of Nuns" is the next highlight. Ditching the sophisto-70s references of "Verkehr," this is a bit of knuckle-dragging moron music almost as goofy as the Gorilla Biscuits LPs gathering mold in my record collection. This song sounds like if you spent all day reading 'ole Martin Heidegger then got punched in the face: you're still smart but in a really fucking stupid sorta way.*

Blahblahblah, if there's a point to this review it's that The Dictaphone is by far the best band making monotonous music these days.**

But don't trust my word for it, dear readers, FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF! Then you can buy the real deal from Vienna's Totally Wired, once you bow down and acknowledge the Dictaphone's brilliance. 

*Really, it's your fucking fault for reading that hippy dipshit's ontology mumbo-jumbo, anyway!
**Yes, that's a genre. If you don't believe me, ask my long-suffering friend who used to work at the record store with me. And no, I'm not telling you his name. Or why he would be an expert on monotonous music. He just is.

Deformities-Sometimes I Wish for my Own Death EP (2013)

What do you get when you throw Bodymore's finest together? The best throwaway EP of the year (anyone who thinks that a record consisting of 2 songs that don't exceed two minutes can't be the year's best EP shouldn't be reading this blog). Drew from Sick Thoughts and Nick from Kent State team up for epic, and epically brief, scuzzfuckery on this one.

The eponymous opening track mixes the hilarity and relentless monotony of Sick Thoughts' best with the (slightly) better production and (slightly) more complex guitar work of Kent State. A goblin may have invaded the studio while they were cutting "Still Separated II," to take over signing duties. The guitar slices in and out, and Drew's arrhythmic patter makes it sound like to drummers were dueling while the tape was rolling.
There's not much else to say: you either love sloprock noise or hate it. The latter type can fuck off, the former can revel in Deformities' idiot majesty.

Peopling-Bulbout EP (2013)

Following a familiar course for noisemakers over the years, Peopling's second EP finds Ronnie progressing a bit from his debut: after all, most of us have trouble listening to pure noise for sustained periods, let alone making a career out of it. Whereas that was 9 parts all-out, aural assault to 1 part beat, Bulbout has adjusted the ratio more towards 6:4. There's still plenty of noise fuckery, especially on "Bulbouts in Bloom." But even that has a discernible, if patchy, beat fighting valiantly with the aural fuzz for room on the mix. The opener, "My Glitchy Kelly Roland," sorta reminds me of Pere Ubu's "Laughing." There's the same tension present, between the puerile desire to offend and a more measured attempt at making a collage out of different found sounds. Not bad for a 3-song sophomore effort, indeed.

Check out "Bulbout," and BUY IT, here.

Noise from China 2X LP (2013)

This is the sort of “horrible noise” or “skronk” Bangs praised/lambasted/extolled back in 1981/2. It’s also the coolest thing I’ve heard all year, and undoubtedly the best thing to come outta China since the Black Death (look it up, genius). It’s also a standing refutation to the idea that only us decadent, debauched Westerners are capable of making truly sick, contorted and sadistic noise. I know nothing about any of these bands and care even less, but whatever. Of course, I didn’t listen to the whole thing-who the hell could listen to two CDS’ worth of longform noise improvisation in one sitting, I ask you?-but I’ve listened to most of the tracks over a few days’ time and this is the best noise I’ve heard since Druids of Huge broke up.

As far as I can tell-not knowing Mandarin and everything-this is a comp of recent Chinese noise (go figure, right?) compiled by a dude who’s pretty prominent in the noise scene. By “Chinese” I assume we’re really referring to Beijing, Shanghai, and Canton. It’s hard to imagine the peasants of the interior grooving to artists doing their best to ape Chicago’s BloodyMinded or Prurient from NYShitty. The comp kicks off with Orgasm Denial’s “Hawk Meets Penguin”: a squalling freeform piece of disgusting, feedback-drenched squalling noise. Ronez follows up with “Cosmic Frog Bizarre Warfare” (dontcha love these names?), which is a similar bit of noise, although heavier on the high-pitched tone terrorism as opposed to feedback. Ronez even throws in a bit of Mars-esque vocal contortionism. It’s a nice touch. It was also at this point that I realized one of my room mates was knocking on the door. Turns out she’d been doing so for a few minutes, asking me to turn down the “fotens romore” (‘fucking noise’) issuing from my rat’s nest of a room.

Most of the rest of the tracks follow the same general pattern: no instrumentation, simply a savage noisebox attack on my eardrums. In my review of HURE’s EP back in January, I outlined what I think of as the basic dichotomy in noise music. The people on this comp fall well to the other side of HURE’s colossal noiserock apocalypse. I threw this on with the window open so the whole time I was guzzling beer listening to this, the sonic misery coming outta my computer blurred with the motorcyles, buses, and people shouting down on the street: I recommend you take this in similarly. Either that or pop some Xanax, do a few lines of coke, guzzle some wine, and throw it on. IT’s that sorta mindfuck of a record. For a minute there-I think a bus broke down-it was diesel engine exhaust and shouted Tuscan profanities fighting it out with piercing feedback.

I just read an interesting article on the burgeoning Sinopop scene and its deep connections to the CCP’s efforts at developing “soft power” in East Asia. After listening to a few tracks of this comp I’m very curious to know more about Chinese noise, and its position vis-à-vis the wider society. Is this a buncha Beijing Uni dropouts getting blackout drunk on rice wine in a Shanghai back alley squat? Rich scions of the Shanghai bourgeoisie, recording on high-end equipment paid for by slave labor? Who knows. Somehow this sort of sadistic noise lends itself to either possibility, heroic avant-gardism or dilettantism, well, cruelty. If there’s any Lester Bangs-type weirdoes in China, get in touch and school me on what’s good across the pond. 

Buy a copy of this monstrosity from the burgeoning Tenzenmen Records!

Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing-Eeling LP (2013)

This band has the worst name I've heard yet, in going on two years' worth of music blogging. It just sounds awkward: two gerunds in one band name? That's a little much. I'm not a nominalist, though, so heroic music critic (ha!) that I am, I'm willing to give everyone a fair spin before I change the soundtrack to Nino Rota.

Girls Pissing on Girls builds up impressionistic portraits of decrepit living, occasional outbursts of nightmarish action, and a barely-perceptible but pulsing rage beneath the static gloom. There's no forward momentum to these songs. They lumber along in an autistic sleep-walking nullnode procession, like someone who took too much Ambien and is stumbling around the hallways of their apartment at 5 am with the lights off.

The band is adept at sucking the listener into these freakish soundscapes, forcing one to keep listening even though the lumbering tension and lack of cathartic release winds you up something terrible. At the center of GPOGP (see? The name doesn't even make for a good acronym!)'s sound is the undynamic tension between the synthesizer and drumming: the synth is the canvas for the noisescapes sketched out by the rhythm(less) section and the harsh, flat intonations of the dual female-male vocalists. Best tune: "The Dance of Salome," which manages to maintain the eerie ambience of the previous few songs while making it almost warm. Fans of Swans will dig this; the LP also reminds me of Broken Water's majestically flawed Seaside and Semikrasky ropera.

Check out Eeling over at Tenzenmen Records. Then pick up a copy of it from the same peeps.

Hure-s/t EP (2012)

Take one look at a video of these guys live, and their sound isn't surprising at all. Colossal, mindlessly repetitive drummachine beats, fucked noise boxes, and propulsive guitars channeling a psychotic breakdown. In a word, noise.

A lot of people were doing this sorta thing in Chicago back around 2006-'08, but leave it to the Germans to do it more systematically and efficiently than us Midwestern Yankees. Noise like this generally adopts one of two tactics: It sometimes attempts to pop your eardrums with piercing, streamlined feedback (for that, go to Bloody Minded). Or the noisebots go for towering walls of guitar-and-drum sludge, hammering away at your forehead anvil-fashion, until you succumb to the numbing repetition of it all. Hure does the latter. This is ugly, savage music played by guys wrapped in duct tape. "Kopf" is the best track here, encapsulating Hure's line of attack: insistent guitar strumming, a drum machine that relentlessly slams and whams, and fucked feedback trilling in the background somewhere.

Needless to say, it's not for casual listeners. You either like noise or you don't. Many of us got into it after years of listening to hardcore, and being bored by its stupidity. Well, noise is dumb but in its own unique ways. Hure knows what they're doing, and does it well.

Listen to Hure here.

Muuy Biien-Knife Fights EP (2012)

Muuy Biien's "Knife Fights" EP might be the most brutally simple recording I've heard all year, and that's saying a lot. It sounds like the band recorded this into a boombox with pots and pans percussion, on an amp with only one channel.It shreds.

 The first four tracks race by in a blur of frantic, truncated guitar riffing and wham-bam boom-bap drumming. The rapid-fire stop-start musicianship, snarled vocals, and hyper-compressed feel of the record all remind me of The Middle Class' Out of Vogue EP, with the arty pretensions gutted and thrown out. In fact, Muuy Biien's music is so concise, a better comparison might be with Tennessee hardcore heroes Koro."Father" sums up Muuy Biien's sound: a rushed snare drum starts the track, which whizzes along to a total time of 42 seconds. The drums are a panic attack, but with none of the showy musicianship of blastbeats or ineptitude of punk drumming: it's simply fast, minimalistic, and efficient. I can't tell if the guitarist is playing chords or just strumming patterns on the guitar as fast as he can; the guitar sound is a tornado frenzy.

The real headfuck, though, is "Rotter": the recording is such a departure from the first four songs, I initially thought it was another band. The song consists of a series of guitar notes repeated over and over, with a warm wash of watery ambience slathered all over it. Halfway through, handclaps shimmer into existence somewhere in the mix. "Rotter" is the dream the rest of the EP was in such a hurry to get to.

Look for this one on my year-end list. You can listen to the EP on Muuy Biien's bandcamp page; then, go buy the real deal for only $5 over at Wondertrick Records! The Muuy Biien LP smokes too, so this is the band to watch in 2013.

Toxic Parents-s/t CS (2012)

Toxic Parents' debut tape is further evidence, following on the heels of last year's Sarongs tape, that Upstate New York is the unlikely locus of a vibrant no wave/artpunk scene.

I wanna substitute an account of the last time I took 'shrooms for a real review of this tape: it sounds like the soundtrack to a long, convoluted  trip.  Toxic Parents songs plod along at a glacial pace, letting you soak in all the shrieks, howls, and found sounds you could ever want while nodding out in a pile of your own puke.

"Inherit" is a vicious stew of rumbling drums, dual, fighting vocals, and guitar that sounds like steam engines hissing. Underneath that there's something that sounds like a trumpet; oddly, the song is funky in a very whitepeople sorta way. "Cavity" sustains the mood: one could call this noise dub. The song drifts along in a trashy haze, with a heavy beat, yet atop that beat is a wave of pure negation: squalling guitar and incoherent, muttered slander and imprecations. "Growing" breaks this mood a bit, and might as well be an outtake from the "No New York" compilation. "Provide" slides back into the groove: more undulating bass, and that insistent, tribal beat once again do heroic battle with twisting, hissing guitar noise.

This, along with Ferns' Dreamdecay EP, is the best noise album I've heard in 2012. Toxic Parents draws on the misanthropic sounds of Detroit's Blight, while developing a rhythm section that almost makes you want to dance. In a very erratic, seizure-induced sorta way.

Listen to the tape, then buy it, here.

Big Swamp Thunder-s/t CS (2012)

I haven't had a coherent thought in several days, and generally, in these situations, I blast some noise until clarity returns.

Rochester's Big Swamp Thunder are perfect for a little cathartically distorted oblivion. Found sounds, atonal shouting, distortion that sounds like insects: these are just some of the many delights awaiting thee, dear listener, on their debut tape.

"In Virtue" opens with some savage skronk that could be an outtake from the "No New York" comp: shrill horns, breaking glass, and what sounds like someone clacking away on a videogame console. "Gargantuan Pfailure" opens with tape hiss that eventually develops (sorta) into noodling insectoidal noises and a meandering bass that gets pummeled back into the ground by clickclack drumming.

Big Swamp Thunder could adequately be described as sounding like how a panic attack feels: everything's moving fast, in no set direction, nothing stops long enough to impose order. But anyway, it washed some of the bad shit outta my head and I can get back to reading about medieval legal disputes. Fun!

Listen here. Then go buy the tape over at Anonymous Dog Records!

No Trend-Teen Love 7" (1983)

I'm often accused of being a misanthrope. That's probably true, BUT!: compared to No Trend (or at least the version of No Trend presented on this and their first LP, 1984's "Too Many Humans"), I'm a hippy.

NT was infamous in the mid-80s US punk scene for their obnoxious performances (including the use of blinding runway lights to separate themselves from the audience) and unpredictable, consistently contrarian albums.

This is by far my favorite: three tracks of trudging, grinding noise that gives you a good sense of why Lydia Lunch later collaborated with the band. "Teen Love" is a touching tale of teen stupidity in Reagan's America: the first two tracks, "Mass Sterilization (Caused by Venereal Disease" and "Cancer," sound like they read: vicious, gleefully nihilistic noise.

Throw this slab of puerile misanthropy on if your week has been as bad as mine. Enjoy!

There's an interesting oral history of the band up on the NY Press website; the interview that Ratcharge did with an ex-bassist is also worth reading.

Bands and musicians who have sent me stuff recently: Have patience, your stuff will be reviewed eventually.

The Dictaphone-Muzak EP (2011)

The Dictaphone brings you another piece of tightly-controlled misery on this late-2011 EP. Whereas the material on this year's Let's Not settles into a miserably mopy series of loping basslines and burble-growled incoherent lyrical nonsense, this is a bouncy, noisy, energetically contorted series of no-wave squall and harsh guitar. "Sleep Maps" even has one of those annoying fade-outs where it sounds like the guitarist left his guitar leaning against the amp and walked outta the room.

"Died Horny" is a delightful mix of maniacally repeated synth notes and guitar fuzz thrown together and put on repeat. I've had a headache for the last five days such that it feels like I left my brain sitting in a chair whenever I stand up, and this whole album sort of sounds like that. Y'dig? If not I don't care cause my head hurts too much to think right now. Goodbye.

Get loose. You can buy it from Schmalzgrub Audiokassetten.

The Feeling of Love-So Chocolate CS (2012)

The fact that a man is making out with a cat on the cover of this cassette tells you a lot about Metz's The Feeling of Love. Well, not that much, in fact, although it hints at the perversity lurking beneath the harsh red-and-black cover.

The Feeling of Love's sound has three components: shrill, scrollsaw guitar; arrhythmic, off-kilter drumming; and a singer who howls in what sounds to me like the male version of the woman from AIDS Wolf. Being a Frenchman, The Feeling of Love's singer is a lot snottier, in a punk sorta way.

This album might be a bit too long-noiserock terrorism is, after all, a delicate proposition for most audiences-but I dig it. "Because He's the Singer" is just an almost-tuneful guitar line that the singer bounces, howls, mewls, and talks around. Most of the time he seems to be discussing Jon Spencer Blues Explosion(?). "Jordan's Rules" sounds like it's gonna be the cathartic release after the first two miserably drudging tunes, but the opening guitar riff just keeps riffing: sorta like Plastic Crimewave Sound, there's no release to found here. The singer lectures/rants/stalks over this guitar in French.

"Hand Clap Girls" unravels the blooz punk roots of The Feeling: go figure, electronic handclaps feature heavily. The music is moronically simple in the same way that the best songs on The Stooges' first album was:intentionally boring, it sucks you into a hypnotized fixation. Hell, it almost makes ya bounce! Really, though, the gold gots ta go to "I'm Nothing but a Drunk Pussy": it's a blues stomp filtered through people who've listened to the No New York comp a few too many times. The whole thing blows up in a hissing, staticy mess halfway through: it's the brilliant core of the album. Hell, I liked it so much it's on the most recent installment of Alone and Forsaken.

Listen to the tape and then buy it here. Read an interview with the frontman, Guillaume, Marietta, qua.Follow The Feeling of Love and their shenanigans on facebook. Brought to you care of Schmalzgrub Audiokassetten label.

Lebenden Toten-Cataleptic Noise Contamination CS (2008)

The Fourth of July is one of the few annual occasions upon which I will post things political on Drug Punk-for my problems with the genre of anarchopunk, read this. I'm not fetishizing apolitical apathy, but rather tacitly acknowledging the inherent silliness of protest music. Anyway, enough blabbling; last year it was Tragedy's best record ever, this year it's a 2008 tour cassette from Portland's finest.

The tracks on here are nothing radically different from previous and future LT releases: savagely distorted dbeat misery, with contorted, frantic drumming and guitar that sounds like electrodes sparking just before they hit yr neuron receptors. Noise punk has been trendy lately, but Lebenden Toten is the only band that can hold their own against the originators of the genre like Disorder, Confuse, Gism et. al.: the band is incredibly tight (playing this fast is an art form unto itself), and there's nothing superfluous in any of the songs. Chanel's lyrics cover a variety of topics, but can be summed up pithily: late capitalist society is a cancerous body too atrophied to kill itself, and instead keeps itself going on the productive energies of us all. We built it, why don't we destroy it?

So throw this on, and melt yr brain on fireworks or distortiontildeafness, it's yr choice. I'm reblogging this from Robert's most excellent blog, Terminal Escape.

Tachycardie-Be Nice to Music EP (2012)

I don't think I've explained how much I hate southern California on Drug Punk, yet. That's kinda a different spiel than I wanna hold forth on here, but it's relevant insofar as listening to Tachycardie makes me wanna throw very sharp rocks into all the private pools that dot the (non-)neighborhood around my apartment. All those filthy rich bastards soakin' up the sun while the rest of us grind...
...anyways, Tachycardie blasts through seven tracks of twisted, constipated noise in the Big Black tradition on this EP. The wrecking-ball drums are mixed to the front, the guitars are a squalling mess in the background, and the singer's words get lost beneath the sonic muck as you empathize totally and completely with the noxious misery that would lead people to produce such contorted, misanthropic muck.

Really, they're a lot friendlier, sonically speaking, than Drug Punk favorites such as Billy Bao, Bloody Minded, and Brain Bombs, but they perfectly suit the misanthropic mire I'm in right now, so whatever, go shoot yr boss and then throw this record on. So there.
On Cocktail Pueblo Rex. If you read French.

The Dictaphone-Let's Not LP (2012)

People often equate depression with self-destructive and/or suicidal behavior. This is erroneous. The truly gut-wrenching thing about depression is that, becalmed in a sea of melancholy, one loses the energy to do anything, even/especially self-destructive death revelry. One just...is.

Enter Tours, France's The Dictaphone. Whereas the Brainbombs play depressed noise that musters up the energy to go on a killing spree, the Dictaphone is mired in an apathetic nightmare whose main feature is a grinding, softly shrieking monotony. Like a rainy day of the mind that never goes away, it just chugs on, in circles.

Most of the songs, especially the opener, "Modern S," and my personal favorite, "Fake dancing," are built around massively, numbingly, intentionally repetitive bass and drum spiralling. It's like someone tried to put together a dance beat with a drum machine and metronome, and went out for a drink, leaving the equipment on and the tape running. Then some drunk wandered in and started burbling something pseudo-lingual over the resulting repetition. Oh, "Safe substitute" is the bee's knees, as well. Imagine that opening drum beat of "All Tomorrow's Parties", but it never really goes anywhere-it just keeps plodding along, sort of like the voices in yr head.

This is fantastic music for staring at grey walls, laying in bed thinking of reasons not to start the day, and for sitting on the sidewalk curb, bombed out of your mind on Klonopin. It's real fuckin' good.

Listen to "Let's Not" here. This is brought to you courtesy of Cocktail Pueblo Records. The Dictaphone shares at least one member with the Jagwar Pirates, by the way.

Seven Minutes of Decay-Newly Industrialized EP (2012)

It's a bit too close to spring for me to be spinning this piece of minimalist brutality on the reg, but come autumn, I think that it'll be getting heavy rotation[on iTunes].

Part of what is, as far as I can tell, a collective going by Ratordog, Seven Minutes of Decency goes in for ultra low-fi, squalling noise. It's a violent re-working of Pere Ubu's classic "Sentimental Journey", with the aid of 30 years' worth of advances in music technology. Screeching feedback, crumbling pottery, smashed glass, someone fingerbanging a windchime: I hear all these noises and a helluva lot more in the fourteen tracks, none of which clock in at over 59 seconds (let alone one minute!).

If this week is looking to be as hellish for you as the winter of 2011-12 was for me, then this is right up your alley. For terminal misanthropes and music-haters everywhere.

Get it here.

Amstetten Bedroom Punk-vxcfsxa

I don't know if this is a joke. I don't know if most people would like this (well, that's a lie. Most people would hate it). I don't know if you wanna read this.

I do know that this is the sort of stupid, pseudo-surf-noise I like to listen to when I get home at the end of the night, and am stuck in a limbo between stimulants and downers. I do know that those of you who like your surfiness mixed in with some pulsing noise, but are a bit too stoned to get into Brainbombs' groove, will dig this.

Atrociousnoiseholocaust.

That is all. Stay tuned for a Pink Reason interview, Hermanestra, Acid Kicks live, et. al. reviews. Y'know y'want it.

Peopling-s/t EP (2011)

I've been meaning to review this thing for weeks, ever since it showed up in the mail, and I apologize to the guy behind Peopling for my sluggardly ways.

Anyways....Peopling is a one-man operation outta Brooklyn. This 6-song ep is somewhere between Dominick Fernow/Prurient-style savagery and fucked up, bedroom synth punk. Usually Peopling verges closer to the former, but on the opener, "come home eccentric," there's a trashed synth beat lilting along with the warbled voiceovers. "Regprog" is simple, hulking, lunking, clunking power electronics; sorta like what Fernow might make on a softer day.
I think that "summer such and such" is the best song on here: strummed acoustic guitars leaven the usual squalling hiss, and there's some cool found-sound type burbling in the background....

I really don't listen to much power electronics these days, but this EP was versatile enough to hold my interest. Unlike most power electronics albums, it's appropriate for smokin' weed on the beach as well as nodding out in a heroin haze.

CHeck dude out, and BUY THE EP, here.