UF071: Slugg - “ggggg”
Slugg moves in disorienting spirals. Sludgy, reptilian electronics, manipulated vocals (including heavy passages of spoken word), and caustic percussion make up tracks that are perfectly-arranged but instantly overpowering. After existing primarily as a multidimensional live entity with relatively little publicly released material, the full-length format showcases Slugg’s intensity and control. There are moments when disarmingly human singing or a momentarily reigned-in beat might create a false facade of peace, but these moments never last. The entire album is an orchestrated attack. Nothing is obvious.
UF070: Nothing Phase - “Gain Two”
Paul Ryan’s beat-driven electronic music under the Nothing Phase alias is at a new level of exploration on Gain Two. Still characterized by its live feel, unrelenting four-on-the-floor kicks, and hardware-only set up, this chapter of Nothing Phase leans more into noise, a chaotic use of the stereo field, and a melodic sensibility that can best be described as “unwell.” The atmospheres are hypnotic and foreboding, and frequencies vibrate like aggressive insects that you only hear after they’ve stung.
📷 by Kory Gasser
UF069: Vedic Dread - “Synthetic Garb of The False God”
Fresh off of last year’s split LP with Star House, Vedic Dread (a.k.a. James Donadio, D/B/A Prostitutes, StabUDown Productions) returns with this full-length excursion into minimalistic electronic slow burn. The tracks are rhythm-heavy, tightly-focused constructions that tend to pull the rug out from under the listener the second they think they’re getting into the zone.
Since time is a man made illusion, it’s been discarded. The layers build like a Jenga tower built on a peyote trip, recalling some of the deep and labyrinth like environments of early 70’s Captain Beefheart but cut from an entirely different cloth and taking the beauty of the unknown to a different depth.
new batch up for pre-order!
UF069: Vedic Dread - “Synthetic Garb of The False God”
UF070: Nothing Phase - “Gain Two”
UF071: Slugg - “ggggg”
art & design by @mathiu.gk
UF067: Obscuress - “Maltha”
Obscuress is the duo of Texas-based musicians Christina Carter (Charalambides) and Spencer Dobbs, achieving new levels of solitary beauty in their consortium. Maltha is the project’s second full length album, and while these six lingering, lonely exhalations of sound sometimes take on the guise of structured songs, they reveal themselves to be more and less than that as Maltha plays out. It’s a quiet overwhelment of minimal guitar interplay, untraceable wisps of ambience, piano drifting in occasionally like light making its way across a room through a window, and Carter’s restrained vocals guiding us from one empty street to the next.
UF067: BYSH - “Please”
BYSH is a collective of improvisers that includes Mai Sugimoto on woodwinds, Andrew Scott Young on bass, Ben Baker Billington on synthesizer, and Bill Harris on drums. The quartet moves interactively through waves of intensity and curiosity over the course of these pieces, with the static and bubbling froth of Billington’s electronics interjecting commentary into side-conversations between bowed harmonics from Young, rushes of rolling percussion from Harris, and Sugimoto’s horns and spare percussion mediating the entire exchange.
UF066: Leaking - “In The Bag”
Scorched Earth ensemble Leaking returns with another dose of slowly-evolving real-time dematerialization on In the Bag. This group excels at the side-long crawl towards ego death, and this album features two such lengthy excursions, both finding Leaking taking their time to scratch their message into the side of the cave walls. Both of these extended journeys start from nothing and build into overpowering walls of fire. “That’s When I Go Up In Smoke” enters like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, with chimes and long tones eventually meeting a groundswell of layered guitar squall and levitating percussion. “Dogbite” begins in an unassuming blues mode, but quickly goes places that are volatile and psychedelic, sneaking in an easy-to-miss Hendrix quote to amplify the blissful derangement.
