Trace Amount
Flagrant
Bleakhouse
NYC noise merchant Trace Amount doesn’t make it easy for you. The one man act’s latest release, Flagrant, trades in the power electronics adjacent sound as preceding records, boiled down to its most caustic form, with undiluted antipathy that cuts through the clatter and cacophony by way of sheer meanness. Sometimes it grinds you down via ugly textures and wounded yowling as on “Restricted Area”, where kick drums bounce off concrete walls, and menacingly rusted metal gates swing closed again and again. Sometimes it goes the route of relentless waves of noise, its brief moments of silence coming as a shock before digitally shredded noise floods back into the stereo spectrum, annihilating any sense of reprieve. Even the collab with noise rapper Fatboi Sharif drives its low swinging tempo with enough force to bludgeon, off-axis just enough to create unease around where it might go next. Even at a digestible 7 songs, its not a record you’ll want to throw on lightly, but there’s no shortage of perversely enjoyable hostility for your inner sicko to cling to when the mood strikes.
The Kings Of Black Magic
self-titled
Bleak House
The latest project from Brant Showers of ∆AIMON and SØLVE doesn’t stand too far astride the Wisconsin producer’s existing body of work, but there’s a bit more to The Kings Of Black Magic than a name which doesn’t require unicode wizardry. If both the baroque name and the design on its first EP isn’t enough of a clue, there’s a healthy shmear of giallo psychedelia to be found in the corners of these six pieces. Alongside the combo of magisterial, downtempo gloom we’ve come to expect from Showers since Amen was released, but feedback and vocal layering adds some acid-tinged warmth to the proceedings: think music to be played during the ritualistic climax of a Dario Argento or Panos Cosmatos flick, or something akin to Ulver’s revisiting of garage and psych rock. That isn’t to say that there’s anything loose or ramshackle here; indeed, the chord progressions at the heart of “Last Days” and “Burn You The Fuck Alive” have a processional, elegiac quality which sound more like the Beethoven’s sober funeral march than any Goblin or Giallo Disco excess. A cover of DJ Shadow’s immortal “Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt” is a bit of an unexpected closer, but after a few plays becomes fitting – a well-tempered but still menacing slow burn built from a lifetime’s worth of samples and semantic networking.
