Back catalogue: Industrial/Noise

Review: Ever-changing Slovenian collective Laibach seems to have mellowed with age, with the band's inherent desire to court controversy (see their 2015 performances in North Korea for a relatively recently example) currently curtailed. Love Is Still Alive, which marks their first new music since the release of last year's well-received album Wir Sind das Volk, is actually an "extension" of the music they wrote to soundtrack the 2019 film 'Iron Sky -The Coming Race'. It is, they say, a "trip through space music genres of recent decades" (albeit with bonus nods to country, pop and so on) that loosely tells the story of a spaceship full of post-apocalyptic survivors making their way across the solar system. It's a lot of fun, all told, with the band expertly showcasing the breadth of their musical knowledge as well as skip-fulls of imagination.

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: Einsturzende Neubauten's description by label Potomoak - as a band that constantly evolves - is accurate enough. Over forty years on from their debut album Kollaps in 1981, Rampen appears as the latest and most unruly incarnation of their sound yet. Here, Blixa Bargeld, N. U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit, Rudolph Moser and Felix Gebhard present their least predictable and conventional sides: APM is described as alien pop music; the songs therein have been specially crafted not only for our universe but for every adjacent parallel universe to ours, with every slight multiversal variation in humanity's collective tastes held firmly in mind. The album fully lives up to its billing as anti-pop as alien pop, its challenging twists and turns fully sating the difficult whims of society's outcasts and cosmic punks.

Review: Taking both acts on their core traits, Full Of Hell primarily deal in death-grind fusion with some blackened aspects and a powerviolence twist, with their tracks rarely crossing the two-minute threshold and their average album length clocking in at approximately 20 minutes and some change. Primitive Man on the other hand, are the type of abyss dwellers that deal in lengthy sonic dirges, often running for well over an hour at a time. What happens when you combine two unmatched forces of modern extremity into one nightmare-fuelled hellscape of sonic torture? You get a truly oppressive display of grinding, trudging sludge-soaked doom with walls of caustic harsh noise which drone on for lengthy uncomfortable sections. Ugly, slow, unwelcoming and vile, 'Suffocating Hallucination' does its utmost to earn its nihilistic title, and offers little in the way of hope on its successful pilgrimage into the abyss.

Review: In The Nursery has always been a hard-to-pigeonhole proposition - a dark-wave, industrial and neo-classical outfit whose distinctive sound tends towards the cinematic but frequently blurs boundaries. Never was this more obvious than on the Sheffield-based outfit's 1990 album L'Esperit, which has now returned in expanded form, packaged in a rather natty metal tin. As with much of their work, it feels like a stirring, emotive soundtrack to a movie yet to be made, albeit one with some moody, heady and distinctive songs mixed in. This edition includes all 11 of the original tracks in remastered form, plus all four cuts from the 'Compulsion' EP, and six more gems recorded during the sessions for the album.

Review: Although arguably best known for her angular, industrial-influenced techno output, Siliva Jimenez Alvarez AKA Jasss has proved adept at delivering oddball electronica, modular-rich ambient and the kind of scuzzy industrial pop of which Trent Reznor would undoubtedly prove. A World of Service, her sophomore album and first for Ostgut Ton, builds on the latter side of her sound while expanding into new musical territory such as autotune-sporting future R&B ('Luis'), buzzing downtempo darkness (the immersive and intoxicating, percussion-rich 'Busto'), leftfield 21st century synth-pop (the curious but excellent 'A World Of Service') and even a dash of jangling, radio-friendly cheeriness ('In Your Mouth'). An impossible album to pigeonhole, but one that's consistently excellent and genuinely worthy of further inspection.

Review: When it comes to creating musical soundtracks to contemporary urban decay, Gary Mundy has more experience than most. He's been releasing music as Kleistwahr since 1983 (though he did give the project a break between 1987 and 2009) and is a genuine master of creating heady, post-industrial soundscapes. 'Common Values', his 14th Kleistwahr album, is another masterclass in texture, mood and slowly shifting melody. There are moments of bittersweet, melancholic brilliance (see the immersive, reverb-laden ambience of 'Heaven Maybe Never') and pulsing, creeping minimalism (the brilliant, bleak and mournful 'Towards New Land'), but also fuzzy, guitar-laden soundscapes ('In a Blood Covered Land', 'All of Death To Lie' and the squally 'Common Values') and enveloping audio worlds subtly influenced by shoegaze ('Time To Realise').

Review: Drew McDowall is as complex and enigmatic an artist as Coil, who he worked closely with for many years. He's followed his own path as well as being tangled up in the world of Jhonn Balance and Sleazy, and now this box set on Dais offers an authoritative overview of four relatively recent LPs and additional exclusive material stretching over six CDs. 2015's Collapse, 2017's Unnatural Channel, 2018's The Third Helix and 2020's Agalma are joined by a disc of rare, alternative and extended versions and a disc of live performances. From oddly angled ambience to lithe, snaking electronica, there's a lot of different sides to McDowall's curious musical mind, and this extensive collection is a perfect way to navigate just part of it.

Review: Ministry were a very different band in 1982, when Al Jourgensen started out as a synth pop provocateur straining at the leash to take things darker. He has repeatedly sworn off their debut album With Sympathy as a sanitised version of the sound he was pursuing, and this collection of live recordings from the year before it was released show a sharper edge to tracks like 'Revenge' and 'Effegy'. It's still absolutely synth-pop of the era, when the music was only one step removed from post-punk anyway, but most importantly the sound is clear and bright, showing the first iteration of the band at their best and playing close to home.

Review: It's fascinating diving into the earliest realms of Ministry, before they were even signed to record their debut synth pop album With Sympathy. Al Jorgensen swore off that first release as a misstep before they become chief architects of industrial metal, and this compilation supports his case when you hear the sound of the band at their first gigs in 1981-1983. It's a lot more confrontational than the polished, arguably brilliant, sound they were encouraged to release as they emerged from the underground. From the electro-punk thrust of 'Falling' to the raw version of 'Cold Life', they feel entirely edgier as a proposition compared to most synth-pop bands of the era. With additional gems like rare mixes of 'Everyday (Is Halloween)', this is an essential compilation for anyone interested in the roots of Ministry.

Review: The latest Nurse With Wound release takes a deep dive into Stephen Stapleton's arhives and returns with a radically expanded version of 1990 set The Ladies Home Tickler, a typically eccentric and out-there blast of sonic surrealism crafted from tape loops, spoken word samples, weird noises, fractured electronics, and shards of bass, synth and guitar. In this edition, the original album's two lengthy tracks ('Duelling Banjos' and 'Registered Nurse') come accompanied by six previously unreleased cuts recorded during the same sessions, but previously unreleased. While one of these is an alternative take on 'Registered Nurse', the rest are increasingly wild and pleasingly freeform soundscapes in Stepleton's distinctive style. An essential purchase for dedicated NWW fans.

Review: Some four years after the death of Jhonn Balance in 2009, This Immortal Coil's album The Dark Age Of Love arrived as something of a tribute to the work of British band Coil over two previous decades. The album brought together a ragtag team of musicians and was well-received by critics, as well as by Peter Christopherson who himself died in 2010. That promoted another crew of musicians to assemble to record a new album which was eventually titled The World Ended A Long Time Ago. Featured on it are the likes of Shannon Wright, David Chalmin, Matt Elliott aka Third Eye Foundation, Christine Ott, Aho Ssan, Gaspar Claus, Aidan Baker and more.

Review: When it was first released in 2007, "Part 2: The Endless Not / TG Now" was Throbbing Gristle's first studio album since 1982. The pioneering industrial band had been drawn together again in 2004 to mark the passing of friend John Balance with a rare performance, and spent the next two years sporadically recording new material. The set was produced slightly differently to the all-analogue early works, with greater use of sampling and digital instrumentation. Yet despite the new toys and techniques, the music remained as antagonistic, forthright, intense and otherworldly as it had been two decades before. In other words, it's a proper Throbbing Gristle album, made by the original members to their original ethos, with a slightly different production approach. For that reason it remains a must-have for all fans of industrial music past and present.

Review: Given that he started experimenting with tape loops and electronics way back in 1965, Asmus Tietchens may well be one of the longest-serving avant-garde artists in the World. He has released a ridiculous number of albums over the years, with 'Ptomaine' originally appearing as a triple-vinyl affair in which each track was separated by a locked groove. The album has finally been reissued on CD but split into a number of different releases. This is the second and it's an undoubtedly adventurous affair - a suite of three movements (each split into multiple tracks) based around a combination of unusual, sometimes backwards, tape loops, discordant drones, unsettling soundscapes, decaying industrial beat-scapes and bizarre but inspired sound collages.

Review: Klamm is the new label dedicated to the artistic output of Saele Valese. After "Ivic", a collection of old and new materials published on Alva Noto's label (NOTON) at the beginning of the year, Saele Valese releases now his first real album "A White, White Day". Written and recorded between 2018 and 2021 the material of this work was sliced, glued and recreated several times, just like a filmmaker in the editing process, before finding its final form. Inspired indeed by the most poetic cinema, 'A White, White Day' represents, in the form of a non-linear and enigmatic narrative, a personal and psychological reflection on time, memory and dreams. Mastered by Rashad Becker.

Review: First released as a very limited 2 x 10-inch vinyl package in 2017, Luxor Necropolitics is widely considered to be one of Domimic Fernow's most accessible albums as Vatican Shadow. It was produced in collaboration with Teflon Tel Aviv member Joshua Eustis and, as this first ever CD edition proves, boasts more relatively straightforward moments than we're used to from the American experimentalist. Of course, his usual influences and sonic traits are still present - an obsession with geopolitics and the Middle East in particular, shards of melancholic melody, dark and dystopian techno grooves - but this time packaged into accessible, often rhythm-driven chunks rather than abstract ambient excursions and sample-heavy sound collages.