Articles
2008 Ten Favourite Labels
Ten Questions Celer
Ten Questions Deadbeat

Albums
Anzio Green
Ariel Abshire
Osman Arabi
Arastoo & AEMAE
Asymmetrical Head
Benoît Pioulard
Bohren & der Club of Gore
Matt Borghi
Celer
Cubenx
Anders Dahl
Davis & Roux
Deadbeat
Feu Follet
Formication
Generic
Stefan Goldmann
Gultskra Artikler / Lanterns
Hauschka
Hexes & Ohs
Koen Holtkamp
I Am Robot And Proud
Illusion of Safety
Integral
Koen Park
Akira Kosemura
Koushik
Library Tapes
Lineland
Mamiffer
Melodium
Moon
Oppressed By The Line
Pillars and Tongues
Rumpistol
Kamran Sadeghi
Sans Serif
Signal Deluxe
Skogen
Saul Stokes
Matthew Sweet
Tapage
Thursday / Envy
Windy & Carl

Compilations / Mixes
An Taobh Tuathail II
Chaos Restored 2
DFPRMX
Kuniyuki
Message Subatomic World
Pero es olor en el cuarto...

EPs
Canyons!
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Cubenx
Dokuro
Fraction
Lee Holman
Ikonika
King Midas Sound
Michael Lambright
Library Tapes
Lilienweiss
MRK1
:papercutz
Spencer Parker
Poratz
Spartak + John Chantler
Andy Vaz

Generic: Torture
FracturedSpaces

Osman Arabi: Burning Sigils
FracturedSpaces

No, Generic's Torture and its six “Torture Garden” variations don't mimic the brutal grindcore miniatures John Zorn's Naked City issued on Torture Garden (Shimmy Disc, 1989; re-released on Tzadik, 1996). You'll hear no blood-curdling screaming by Yamatsuka Eye or cranium-shattering thrash of the kind generated by Zorn's band. No, UK-based Adam Sykes is hunting different game on his Generic release, FracturedSpaces' second: in place of pummeling hardcore, Torture opts for the slow inward crawl. If you can imagine the unscratchable and insanity-inducing itch that would develop if insects, having entered through your ears as you were sleeping, were to then continue their inner penetration, then you've got a pretty good idea of the ambient style Sykes is targeting. Generated from “foley tracks” and sound effects (used for both film and television), as well as guitars, bass, and found sounds, Torture evokes the image of chained, emaciated bodies dragging themselves along damp chamber floors, and fills its fifty-three minutes with the rhythmic rumble of grinding machinery echoing down underground corridors and anguished voices moaning like the wind. Not so much “dark ambient,” then, but rather the gloomier variant “torture ambient.” Incidentally, Torture makes a perfect complement to John Watermann's Calcutta Gas Chamber, the coloured vinyl release Die Stadt issued early last year.

Osman Arabi's Burning Sigils is nothing like Sykes' release. For one, Burning Sigils is a single, thirty-eight-minute piece of brooding “ethno-ambient” character whose exotic textures and rhythms evoke Aarabi's homeland (the material was recorded in El Mina, a coastal city on the Mediterranean Sea in Northern Lebanon, and in Tripoli, situated five kilometres to the east of El Mina and eighty-five north of Beirut). A languid, drum-and-bells tribal pattern anchors the work from the outset and a serpentine theme enters at the six-minute mark which likewise repeats thenceforth. Wind formations blow continually across the ancient rhythms, just as they do across the area's heat-ridden deserts. Though Arabi attempts to avoid repetition by occasionally dropping out the tribal pattern and theme, by introducing the distorted snarl of an electric guitar halfway through, and by gradually intensifying the rhythm pattern, the piece ultimately feels excessively repetitive and thus overlong and probably would be more effective had it been edited down and issued as a twenty-minute EP.

November 2008