Downwards Electronic & Dance 18 Items

LA’s Taylor E. Burch ov DVA Damas and Tropic of Cancer drops a cache of nuggets for Downwards, posing a killer mix of droll post-punk vocals and stripped dub/R&B/art-pop somewhere between Lolina, Gwen Stefani and The Slits. Mad original, bass-heavy ohrwurm fire!

Over a decade since her debut 10” with DVA Damas, and following a superb stint on Pessimist’s Stigma project in ’21, ‘The Best of Taylor E. Burch’ (though none of this matereial has even been released before) reveals her prowling swag from unexpected angles across nine distinctively succinct bullets bolstered by Elon Katz’s vocal production. Laid-back but tightly coiled, they slant from the clear echoes of Inga Copeland/Lolina on its intro, to cattier art-pop minimalism on ‘I’ve Never Felt Better In My Life’, her vocals layered and sparingly pronged with compelling effects around her wiry guitars and flashes of the gnash and bump that made her work with main vehicle DVA Damas (beside Joe Cocherell) so vital.

The lilting, purring punky dubs of ‘I Wanna Be Your Girl’ and ‘Time Differences’ illuminate a softer side delivered with a wry swagger, from the eyrie, clipped dembow Tears For Fears cover ‘Head over Heels’ to potent highlight ‘F*ck You Up’, while ‘We’re All The X’ and ‘’Time Is On My Side’ make us think of a slanted Juliana Hatfield, and we can’t help but recall that ace Fay record (‘Din’, Time No Place, 2012) in the brittle but heavy af ‘Na Na Na Na Na (Reprise).’

One of the most enjoyable, rinsable tapes of the year, full marks, plus.

Downwards’ deep bonds with NYC catalyse the immense debut LP by Jim Siegel’s Vivid Oblivion, a reveberating post-industrial salvo produced by adopted Brooklynite Karl O’Connor (Regis), and co-mixed by Anthony Child (Surgeon) and Simon Shreeve, who also mastered it. It’s a super deep, highly atmospheric beast somewhere between Valentina Magaletti’s most expressive percussion work, Bark Psychosis, and classic, moody 4AD, which is coincidentally referenced via the artwork, made by Chris Bigg - legendary graphic designer and longtime assistant to Vaughan Oliver.

Invoking the density, vertiginous scale, and dark grimy nooks of NYC, ‘The Graphic Cabinet’ was realised by Jim Siegel - hardcore legend and occasional/regular drummer with everyone from Raspberry Bulbs to Damo Suzuki and Boredoms, made in close collaboration with Karl O’Connor aka Regis during 2021.

Stemming from intently deep listening sessions immersed in LPs by Viennese aktionist Hermann Nitsch and the myriad eras of Killing Joke, while also absorbing the atmospheres of classic Tarkovsky flicks, the album began life as gonzo field recordings of Siegel smashing the f*ck out of his drum kit, zither, scrap metal and gongs in an array of abandoned warehouse spaces. The recordings formed the basis of Karl’s compound productions, which add depth charge bass and sonorous metallic atmospheres to the mix, along with birdsong and gibbon hoots, plus guitar textures by Nick Forté (Raspberry Bulbs, Rorschach) for a dread-lusting jag deep in the belly of the Big Apple.

With a palpable tang of rust and blood in the air and grime under the fingernails, the seven tracks evoke a resoundingly brutalist portrait of space and place. Siegel’s nervy percussive discipline is framed in alternating barometric and light settings from cut to cut, variously snaking from the poltergeist clang and haunted resonance of ‘Converging and Dissolving’ to slamming motorik thrum in ‘Oblivion’ via imaginative descent into cyberpunk simulacra of the city as jungle-at-night in ‘Remnant Corridor’, replete with animalistic atmospheres that recall Organum.

While the raw attack and devilish swerve of the rhythms are utterly fundamental to the record, Karl’s atmospheric content and the animist mixing magick of Anthony Child and Simon Shreeve most potently give flesh to its bones. Patently evident on the stepping pulse and searching zither that keens into detuned orchestration on ‘Immediate Possession’, the zoned-out klang of ‘Stand Aside’ or in the flooded warehouse chaos of ‘Test For Traps’. The attention to spatial, textural and proprioceptive detail is tightened throughout, peaking with ‘Bargemaster’, a dense slab of tension that sounds like Jon Mueller’s Silo recordings fed through The Caretaker’s fogged machinery.

It’s one of the most impressive records on Downwards for a long while, bound to gnaw and spark the nerves of experimental rock and post-industrial’s greats, anything from The New Blockaders to Faust, Flying Saucer Attack and into iconic Blackest Ever Black releases in the modern era.

Einstürzende Neubauten producer Boris Wilsdorf, Karl O’Connor aka Regis and MY DISCO’s Liam Andrews assemble as Eros, bottling no-wave/industrial lightning with a tight set of pulverized, widescreen torched-songs that rasp, grate and throb somewhere between This Heat, The Cure, Cabaret Voltaire, Alva Noto x Pan Sonic. An industrial fantasy of flesh and steel, ‘A Southern Code’ is the stunning continuation of the trio’s work at Wilsdorf’s pivotal Anderesbaustelle studio on Regis’ watershed album, ‘Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss’. Rejoined by another key muse, Anni Hogan, and Einstürzende Neubauten’s Jochen Arbeit, they effectively galvanised a new band, Eros, during long days and nights in the studio across 2020 and into 2021. The sound they make is fiercely lean, shaped by Wilsdorf’s manacled mixing and anchored in the frankly sexy as f#ck swerve of Regis vocals and his snake- hipped rhythm section. The first songs issued from those sessions form a lustrous new high point of contemporary industrial and dance music, one porous to Kurdish dabke as much as archetypal goth, pulsing with a metallic bloodlust and spatialized by Wilsdorf’s genre-forming tekkerz in a way that seriously rewards with proper amplification. Judged on its immediate merits, it’s the sort of record that could have feasibly come out at any point between the ‘80s and now, but closer inspection reveals a discreet framework of sculpted subbass and sleekly rolling traction that betrays the modernity of minimalist D&B physics and up-to-the-second sound design that places ‘A Southern Code’ in a timeless echelon. Registering the venomous drums and over-the-shoulder whispers of its title track, plus the incendiary middle eastern horns of ‘The Crawling Man’ - a real parallel dimension take on The Cure’s ‘The Top’ - to the post-apocalyptic lounge lizard styles of ‘In This Place’, and the unheimlich creep to ‘Nature Unborn (From Sun to Sun)’, the band’s first album plants a vital stake in the ground for industrial musick at the crest of a new decade.

My Disco’s industrial goth gristle and bones congeal in petrified form on a return to Downwards, benefiting from visceral mixing by legendary Einstürzende Neubauten engineer, Boris Wilsdorf. With a sound that intersects elements of Pan Sonic, Fugazi, Raime, Regis, The Human League’s ‘Dignity Of Labour’ and Big Black, ‘Alter Schwede’ comes v v highly recommended to anyone with interests anywhere along that spectrum.

Back in the Downwards clammy clutch, Melbourne’s tightest trio compile material recorded during midwinter sessions at Einstürzende Neubauten’s infamous AndereBaustelle studio in Berlin. The eight new components of ‘Alter Schwede’ offer a compelling instrumental psychodrama of klangorous percussion and seething industrial urges harnessed to the trio’s critically stylised minimalism. Set in acres of resounding negative space rendered by Boris Willsdorf at the AndereBaustelle studio that’s been hailed a vital x-variant in heavy recordings by everyone from Neubauten to Pan Sonic and Keiji Haino, the record continues the band’s strong tradition of working with seminal engineers, such as Steve Albini (they’re also named after a Big Black song) at Electrical Paradise on ‘Paradise’ (2007) and ‘Little Joy’ (2010), to best bring out the gnawed-bone texture, spectral sinew and gothic romantic sturm und drang of their music. Liam Andrews (bass, electronics, vox), Ben Andrews (guitar), and Rohan Rebeiro (drums, percussion) mark nearly 20 years of releases with some of their most uncompromising, and,
by turns, captivating, work on ‘Alter Schwede’.

Between the elemental howl of ‘The Shore’ and grand, cinematic epilogue of ‘Third Place’ they stake out a distinctive space in the contemporary industrial field. The back-combed tape loops of ‘Irreversible’ hint at the feel of Gaspar Noe’s film of the same name, while the mix of spoken word german and collapsing workshop structures of ’StVO’ uncannily recall Jani Christou’s ‘Mysterion Prolog Und Sprechertext’ to these ears, while their cogs finally knit into some semblance of industrial grind on ‘Meshes’. They make most crucial use of the studio-as-instrument in the cavernous klang of ‘Toil’, with the clenched pulse and awning harpy moans of ‘Folterkammer’, with the deathly stasis and distant chain rattles of ‘BaustellenLüftung’ offering space to reflect on the bleak state of things.

Simon Shreeve’s doomiest moniker Mønic follows those killer Burial and Regis reworks from a few years back and adds to his Downwards stripes with a necessary vinyl edition packing both volumes of his recent ‘Trawler Tapes’ series originally issued digitally with his Osiris Music UK label, highly recommended to disciples of Kevin Drumm’s ‘Imperial Distortion’, The Conet Project, Thomas Köner or SAW II. Made on the English south coast and first issued into the strange high summer of 2020 lockdown, the ‘Trawler Tapes’ depicts Mønic more strung out and glowering than we’ve ever heard. In its unfathomably deep sunk, reverberating drones and keeling atmospheric pressure, it’s truly a musick that evokes a sense of absence, even tragedy and loss, drawing upon various aspects of dark ambient isolationism and thru to more sublime, meditative zones for a sort of dissociative expression of soul that lives up to comparisons with modern greats, from Thomas Köner to Kevin Drumm. Where much of Shreeve’s work since D&B/dubstep unit Kryptic Minds thru to his CUB collabs with Regis have been concerned with physicality, his Mønic project inverts that urge for a musick ov liminality. However there’s a fine connection between those polls in Mønic’s use of the full frequency spectrum here, from deeply layered subs to its fine-grained high register timbres, with cavernous space in between. In both volume 1’s ‘h-net’ set and volume 2’s ’t-net’ parts, he oscillates a suggestive shadowplay, drifting from Davey Jones’ locker tones to more static, indoor subtleties redolent of Kevin Drumm’s ‘Imperial Distortion’ classic, and thru to midwinter tundra scapes and what feels like lingering Lynchian afterimages, ultimately shoring up with scant glimpses of percussion in ’t-net 4’.

Hingeing around the processed cello of visionary dronesmith and psych se’er Alexander Tucker - fresh from the excellent Microcorps project - his fellow north east London residents Steehouder and Murray bring Prophet 5 synth and sampled electronic textures to the table for an uneasy examination of the unrest below the surface of blighty in the early 2020s. The nine pieces come to evoke and explore a sort of deep topographical reading of their native landscape, transmuting inspiration from Walthamstow’s hinterland overlap of residential, woodland, and industry, with a palette of damp, mildewy tones and depressive atmospheres that get under the skin by a clammy process of osmosis. Murray’s smudged samples fuse ‘ardkore and illbient signatures into a surrealist backdrop, so disembodied voices become ghosts of the past, and backwashed percussion transforms into jangling industrial chains or coal-fired machinery. Distorted through a modular rig, Tucker’s cello drones don’t lose their inherent baroque grandeur, but take on cybernetic armor plating, materializing in-and-out of Steehouder’s brassy analog chords. Simultaneously pulled by retrogressive, atavistic, pagan spirits and and the tarnished allure of progression, the album oscillates from dankly soothing sensations and gritty abrasion on ’Terminal Starfall’ to the gristly, keening distortion and percussive porridge of finale ‘Cold Walls’; transitioning between the curdled glory of ‘October Mission’ to the stereoscopic eye-wobble and shivering vox of ‘Attachment Areas’, before leaching into the cinematic beauty of ‘Deepening Ground’, and turning lorry alarms into tart ambient residue on ‘Dedicated Tear’, leaving ears ice-burned with the sheer electronics of ‘Skeleton Scars’. Nonexistent have made a soundtrack not to the end of the world, or a bolted-on power-ambient aesthetic flex for the always-online Netflix gen, but a shared reflection on history and present turmoil that’s far too cerebral and elemental for binging. Stirring together disparate ingredients, the trio have concocted an antidote to British malaise at a point where it’s never been worse.

Downwards descend on Mute’s legendary producer/engineer Paul Kendall, serving as the label’s in-house producer thru the 1980s and ‘90s, working with Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Nitzer Ebb and Wire - for a new album of surgically precise and invasively curious post-industrial thrills and murky intrigue that comes highly recommended if yr into anything from Mika Vainio to Masami Akita, Recoil to Bruce Gilbert. Kendall’s oeuvre has paralleled the alternative history of post-punk and industrial music for over 40 years; after crossing paths with Karl O’Connor (aka Regis) in 2018, Kendall now takes his solo bow, proper, on Downwards with the fiercely uncompromising and absorbing results of experiments executed during the pits of lockdown in 2020. They arguably resemble a form of disembodied industrial techno searching for a fleshly new host to inhabit, all amorphous and bristling malforms untethered from percussion and sent to rabidly gnaw the senses via various strategies of blizzarding attack, textural attrition, and structural abstraction which can be heard as a side effect of Paul’s ongoing hearing loss from too many loud studio sessions. It’s not hard to clock why Regis was smitten with the material as the pair clearly share a lust for gristly scuzz and tempered, concentrated emotion. However Kendall’s music is more obtuse and comes from a warped perspective inspired by his fascinations with macro photography (magnifying minutiae), with his famously keen ear for detail leading the album into stranger spaces between the wires and noises. Effectively hashing the limen of perception, he invokes a spectra of ghostly, hallucinatory tones by combining recordings of his voice and a Leaf Audio “Microphonic Soundbox”, an experimental wooden instrument with metal springs, rods, sand paper and a kalimba, and then funnels them through processors and FX.

Hogan’s involvement with new wave, new romanticism, post punk and all-things-avant makes her a uniquely placed character through the last four decades on the scene - her recording/performing biography intersects with everyone from Soft Cell, The The and The Human League through to Simon Fisher Turner, Barry Adamson, The Style Council and more recently with Karl O’Connor aka Regis’ Downwards universe. For ‘Without the Moon’ (a title borrowed from Cathi Unsworth’s book of the same name), Hogan pulls out some of the most satisfying collaborations from her archive, featuring a couple of tracks originally released in 1985 on Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision label, as well as recordings that are here issued for the very first time. It’s properly all-over-the-place brilliance, ranging from Nick Cave’s incredible 1983 piano blues slo-mo grind ‘Vixo’ all the way thru to the Paul Kendall (Nitzer Ebb/Depeche Mode) engineered ‘Come Take My Hand’ produced and featuring Barry Adamson and sounding like some vintage Les Disques du Crépuscule poolside obscurity. Opening with ideas mapped out while staying at Lydia Lunch’s gaff in summer ’83, the record lassos 30 years of Hogan’s personal highlights, harking to a time circa 1984 when she regularly caught The Birthday Party playing Leeds or London, often crossing paths with Cave, and right thru to 1989’s ‘Come Take My Hand’. While ‘Delirious Eyes’ is a gorgeous slow dervish of swaying middle eastern scales featuring Gini Ball’s elusive smoke trail vocals, it’s best heard in context of the sequencing, which soon erupts with Marc Almond’s vocals on the arsonist thrill of ‘Burning Boats’ and JG Thirlwell’s signature clangour, while ’Scattered Carelessly’ was written in 2008 and gives the sweetest canvas for Hogan’s keys complemented by a whispering Jarboe ov Swans, and ‘Black Nocturne’ stars a perfectly tempered guitar shimmer by Kid Congo Powers, a longtime accomplice, whom Hogan first heard playing guitar on The Cramps’ records that she played in DJ sets at the time. Illuminated by Hogan’s favoured solo piano, ranging from flickering candlelight to hammering theatrics, and even including a rare appearance of her vocals on the could-have-been-a-popsong closer, the six songs on ‘Without The Moon’ speak to an incredibly rich artistic life spent immured at the core of her practice. Song to song, she outlines an extraordinary oeuvre that ties together and leaps between eras, drawing on decades of experience as a performer, composer, collaborator and ardent listener to portray a full spectra of styles she’s been involved in shaping for decades. Stunning.

Downwards look to Melbourne, Australia’s incredibly fecund experimental scene for this almighty split LP; facing off Bonnie Mercer’s colossal sub-bass drone hallucinations with scorched-earth drug dirges by the YLP duo. If yr into Sunn O))), Earth, The Birthday Party, Spacemen 3, Sun City Girls, Gallon Drunk - this one’s for you. Both sides of ‘Old Moon, New Moon / The Image of 36’ sustain their influences from doom drone, gothic blues rock and post-punk for the already fraught 2020s. Each act renders a certain, ravishing sort of romance from end-of-earth bleakness, sketching out feedback-drenched vistas and sunburned, byzantine visions augmented by drum machines and electronics to blistering effect. Internationally renowned guitarist Bonnie Mercer offers a rare solo suite for her part. Moving beyond her decades of work with bands including Grey Daturas and Breathing Shrine, Mercer generates a transcendent collapse of desert rock forms that will reward listeners with the sandblasted riff textures of ‘Half Moon’, the skull scraping psyche noise lushness of ‘Linda’s Goodman’s Love Signs’, and a deathly crawl to dawn in ‘The Latest Disappointment.’ If you’ve ever seen Sunn O))) play live, Mercer makes use of the same sort of precision tooled grot that turns our insides out - all subharmonic drone and subby gnarrr that’s a properly transformative listening experience at the right volume.

Downwards’ rum gang of industrial misfits mutate My Disco’s ‘Environment’ album in slow, brutal and hypnotic styles ranging from Karl O’Connor’s smudged gamelan rework as Cub, to a 16 minute stunner by Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement (Prurient & Low Jack). ‘Environment Remixes’ serves to tie up a 10 year loop since Karl O’Connor (Regis) first became rapt with My Disco’s 2010 single ‘Young/You’, which lead to him remixing the Aussie band’s song ‘My Decade’ in 2016, and eventually issue the reverberating clang of their ‘Environment’ LP on his Downwards label in 2019. For the remix suite, they’ve picked a gang of manacled producers to reanimate the album’s cranky mania and classic industrial spirit with suitably bruising results. The swingeing, stygian flow of Karl O’Connor’s Cub remix of ‘Equatorial Rainforest’ returns a big highlight, possibly the project’s very slowest and loaded square between the eyes of early ‘90s Coil and 23 Skidoo, while Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s 16 minute take on LP centrepiece ‘Act’ follows that humid line to a frighteningly strong scene of cicadas and crackling neon sleaze sloshed with martial kettle-drum rolls recalling Con Schnitzler’s ‘Conditions of The Gas Giant’, before slipping into the lushest ambient techno mode. Following the rush of his recent records, Sam Kerridge renders the doomy beckon of ‘Rival Colour’ more tentatively, stalked with spare drums and lugubrious bass, and Bristol’s Giant Swan follow a hunch for lurching halfstep on their reduction of ‘An Intimate Conflict’, for Oliver Ho to amp the phosphorus guitar burn of ‘1987’ as Slow White Fall with the sort of noisy conviction that also makes his new album such a zinger.

Industrial changeling Oliver Ho returns to his Slow White Fall alias for a howling and paganistic suite of industrial music in an English medieval Gothic mode channelling Dead Can Dance via Killing Joke, Scott Walker and Godflesh. Slow White Fall is the latest of Ho’s revolving monikers (Broken English Club, Raudive, Zov Zov), and here used to signify a shift into hairier, muscular Industrial music that treads heavily but carefully to the right side of fantasy dramatic, wrought with a finely crafted crudeness and atmospheric finesse that speaks to his decades of crookedly functional electronic production expertise and an enduring fascination with the darkside. Think ritual music for a bacchanal at John Dee’s gaff, or the soundtrack to a plague rave held in 1347.

Finally, Regis lets his rhythmic noise opus out into the world, a bruising and hauntingly absorbing album - his first since 2001 - dispatched on his pivotal label; Downwards. On a masterful twenty-year followup to ‘Penetration’, Karl O’Connor yields a definitive solo LP that distills his passions for sonic brutalism and bastardised Chicago tracks with syncopated UK swagger and reverberating warehouse ballistics. Its lip-bitingly gripping effect is testament to a resounding reputation as one of Industrial music’s most influential producers, and sees the artist bring his own influences - from Test Department to Jeff Mills - into line with his potent palette of narcotised tones.

Sam Kerridge teams up with DVA Damas’ Taylor Burch in ‘The Other’, a narrative-structured collaboration set to an absorbing contrast of seething electronics and technoid impulses riddled by droll vocals in billowing negative space. Opening his sound up to mutual spirits, and allowing more space and time for his sounds to take hold, ‘The Other’ locates a newfound sense of maturity and sensuality in Kerridge’s music. His arrangements here feel more layered and ductile, finely consolidating the gloomy slow pressure of his earliest work for Horizontal Ground with the uptick in pace and rabid energy found on 2017/2018’s ‘The Silence Between Us’ and ‘The I Is Nothing’. The adaptation is necessary as the music now accounts for half of an AV live project with Daisy Dickinson and also needs to accommodate Taylor Burch’s low key vocal delivery. In the process Kerridge is pushed to rethink and more subtly reframe his sound after seven years squashing and pummelling listeners into submission.

Techno mutant Oliver Ho invokes divine noise via distorted guitars, synths and drums with hypnotic industrial psych-drone project Slow White Fall for Regis’ Downwards label. The 30 minute ‘Total’ EP is a naturally extension of Ho’s increasingly noisy forays into industrial musick found in his Broken English Club and Zov Zov outings of recent years. Gnashing right at the biting point, the EP’s five tracks are variously soused in distortion to degrees recalling The VU, Swans, and Bourbonese Qualk, bringing Ho as far as he’s travelled from techno proper and closest to his formative industrial and rock influences. This is Ho at his most stare-down intense and timelessly, narcotically effective.

Regis’ Downwards label presents an album of heavy hearted industrial songs from Ora Iso, making a kind of windswept, slowed-down and gothic pop variant that’s essential listening if yr into HTRK, Tropic of Cancer or Clay Rendering. Ora Iso are an NYC-hailing band revolving around Indonesian-Australian, Kathleen Malay and New Yorker, Jason Kudo. Building on the rubbly ground of their Bathcat debut for Ba Da Bing!, the duo’s mutual sense of entropy and ennui results in a classically scorched sound in Image Certifies, one laced with scornful sarcasm and a general dissatisfaction with the world, and yet somehow bolstered by the slightest promise of hope.

Sam Kerridge launches a major rethink of his style with the high-velocity tempos and razor-toothed bite of The Silence Between Us.Toiling somewhere between Ueno Masaaki’s Vortices for Raster-Noton, the pitching pelt of La Peste for Hangars Liquides, and the machine convulsions of Somatic Responses, he goes balls-to-the-wall with the breakneck momentum of Possession/Control, harnessing reverse-edited kicks, helter-skelter EBM bass and spectrographic noise ghouls in a surge of searing rave energy.Flipside, those knotty, strobing pulses keen thru empty stomach inversions and bursts of tangled EBM synths on Ascension, which is effectively a snappier edit of the A-side, whilst Radical Possibilities of Pleasure sounds like a field recording from a french hardtek invaded by dildo dibble in choppers and riot gear railing lasers against any unlucky dancers.

New Kid on the DN/Downwards label roster on Clear white vinyl, printed sleeve.

The Roughness!