Monday, July 13, 2009

Nachtmahr (PRE-SHOW)

LIVE Saturday 7/18
Edge 17 - Factory


For those craving a great industrial show, your about to get your wish. Nachtmahr, hailing from Austria, are about to hit Jacksonville with their brand of hard-hitting electro that's sure to please rivetheads around town and in the nearby area. Nachtmahr is the side project of one Thomas Rainer who is also one half of the electro/darkwave group L'Ame Immortelle (the latter being a band many electro fans should be familiar with). While L'Ame Immortelle had it's share of heavy moments, Thomas got the idea for Nachtmahr while doing a series of dj shows inspired by the material he was spinning. The music is brutal, harsh, peppered with German voiceover samples and will simply destroy any dance floor. There are some instrumentals on the cd I have (Fuer Frei!) and I assume that is the case with some of the newer releases, that I don't have. If I had to compare them to anyone I would say they share common ground with their German brethren Feindflug and possibly elements of Suicide Commando and Hocico. This is the music that so many of us love, but don't get to hear (or see live) very often without a road trip. So don't whine to anyone that there are no industrial bands coming through our area if you miss this show. You have been warned!

- Craig Harvey


Nachtmahr performs live
Saturday July 18th
at FACTORY @ EDGE 17

1187 Edgewood Ave South
Jacksonville, FL 32205
www.edge17.com
www.FactoryJax.com

Nachtmahr (PRE-SHOW)

LIVE Saturday 7/18
Edge 17 - Factory


For those craving a great industrial show, your about to get your wish. Nachtmahr, hailing from Austria, are about to hit Jacksonville with their brand of hard-hitting electro that's sure to please rivetheads around town and in the nearby area. Nachtmahr is the side project of one Thomas Rainer who is also one half of the electro/darkwave group L'Ame Immortelle (the latter being a band many electro fans should be familiar with). While L'Ame Immortelle had it's share of heavy moments, Thomas got the idea for Nachtmahr while doing a series of dj shows inspired by the material he was spinning. The music is brutal, harsh, peppered with German voiceover samples and will simply destroy any dance floor. There are some instrumentals on the cd I have (Fuer Frei!) and I assume that is the case with some of the newer releases, that I don't have. If I had to compare them to anyone I would say they share common ground with their German brethren Feindflug and possibly elements of Suicide Commando and Hocico. This is the music that so many of us love, but don't get to hear (or see live) very often without a road trip. So don't whine to anyone that there are no industrial bands coming through our area if you miss this show. You have been warned!

- Craig Harvey

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Katzenjammer Kabarett

Grand Guignol and Varietes
Projekt


Oh, thank god for this! I was getting so fucking bored of how so many so-called dark cabaret bands were just bleeding the whole shebang dry with bloodless artifice and facile undestanding of the very basic artform; like, “Hey I'll just use this Cabaret 101 piano vamp over and over and over and over and everyone will be shocked by my decadence.” Zzzzzzzzzz. But then comes French quartet Katzenjammer Kabarett (pretentious name that references classic late 19th century comic strip? Yeah, I'll have some of that.), paying some fealty to the cabaret aesthetic but then shaking it up like a cheap snowglobe - cramming in a dizzying array of other influences like postpunk, early British goth, Japanese music, 4AD’s dream experiments, chamber music, disco, Ze Records at its height. And, oh yeah, Siouxsie and the Banshees loom large, particularly in the singer’s lusty, singular vocals. “Grand Guignol” is an invigorating, heady mix, with remarkably assured performances, arrangements and an unerring instinct for fucking with the format.

Art-damaged gothic chamber music, you saved my damn life! What took you so fucking long?

- Matthew Moyer

Blood Money

Blood Brotherhood
Killer Pimp Records


Sometimes even avant-garde classical music doesn't afford the aesthetic freedoms that the truly restless hunger for. To that end, cigar-chompin' composer and academic Ken Ueno has joined up with Tom Worster and Jon Whitney to form Blood Money, a trio that attempts a meditative inversion of the power electronics aesthetic. “Blood Brotherhood” is not a linear or normal song-based record, but it is completely shorn of the tiresome masculine histrionics that permeates much noise music. In its place, with the barest of sonic tools, are songs mostly based around less than a smattering of accidental percussion, a thin lattice of electronic hums, whines and static buzzing, and the tightly simmering vocals of Ueno, delivering through clenched teeth and muted microphone, an otherworldly hybrid of Dionysio D'Arrington, Telepathik Friend, tuvan throat singing, Diamanda Galas and speaking in tongues. Some of the earlier numbers with just the spooky tom of a single drum, mosquito-like keyboard hum and vocals that seem to be attuned to an alien language, unsure of each syllable remind me of a summoning at midnight under the haunted walls of a hundred-years old fortress. Ghost ships pass through a fog-shrouded inlet. Metal snakes shed their skin and consume diamonds. Another time, stretching every syllable to the breaking point, Ueno proclaims a coming release, as the undulating noise pulses drop out, and all that is left is the flickering murmur of a cathedral organ. “Blood Brotherhood” is a bold symbiosis with silence, a joining of irreconcilable opposites for a haunted inner peace.

As an art statement, in conception and execution, “Blood Brotherhood” often hedges close to fucking stunning. Whether you'd want to listen to it repeatedly? Well, let's just say that there are handy pop-psych exams no farther than your internet browser far more qualified to judge that than I.

- Matthew Moyer