Limited edition of 500 split LPs complete with unique individually hand-painted/silk-screened sleeves and glossy full-colour insert. Cousins Of Reggae follow-up their killer Our Mouth CD with a side of post Harry Pussy avant garage scorch that's listed as “History And Prehistory Of Hudson's Bay In Five Parts” and reads like a massively updated rundown of variously torched scum/noise strategies as applied to skateboarding-carrying avant gardists with a penchant for the slackest aleatoric metal. Unbelievable. Mouthus side is just phenomenally dozed, two huge sqouching roars of marshmallow-heavy damage that work hiccupping hillbilly rhythms into the kind of ferocious wall-of-mong previously erected by committed actionists like Hijokaidan, Hasil Adkins and Royal Trux. Too much. Highest possible recommendation.

Very heavy Middle Eastern/Popol Vuh-vibe on this new LP from Religious Knives (Mike and Maya of Double Leopards further bolstered by the presence of Mouthus drummer Nate Nelson). A wash of ritual hand percussion vibrates beneath beautiful monolithic synth patterns from Maya that recall the tranquilised downriver grandeur of parts of the Aguirre soundtrack or the full fathom force of In Den Garten Pharaos as you feel the meat of your mind slowly part beneath the gush of extended time-warping drones. Mike's vocals sound as if they're being squoze through an outdoor tannoy system and his feedback guitar gives the whole piece a black, ominous aspect. Second side is even heavier, with Nate's thud-bobbing drums forcing the group into whole new vectors of damaged lurch. Mixed by Brian Sullivan of Mouthus. Comes packaged with white stuck-on sleeve art and fake liners, both of which give it that all-important ‘private' feel. Limited to only 300 copies and highly recommended.

Much anticipated hook-up between these three trans-Atlantic monsters. One-side each and then a third monster inter-band jam. Leopards side is a classic haunt, with wraiths of hovering drone peaking in eye-rolling vocal confusion, while the Mouthus track is a fabulous punk trouncing of fuzz-impacted guitar and clattering electrified skin. Sunroof! jams are the real highlight though, especially the doofily-named “Cortez Tha Killa” that features Matthew Bower on repeat-riff nirvana while Mick Flower of Vibracathedral Orchestra lets his wrist fly with some of the most insane and righteously piloted post-Young acid delirium of anyone’s career. Too fucking much. Final big-band side presents a beautiful void of spooked eternity, with shadow forms moving in and out of earshot like so much hallucinatory cumulus. Comes in a full-colour gatefold sleeve, already sold-out at source, so move it.

LP from Mouthus that might be their most devolved circumnavigation of rock from to date. The guitars are impossibly impacted, muffled sandpaper huffs that move in tectonic slugs while the drums shrug between boings of tone-pad squelch, electrified steel-band ceremonials and primitively executed power stomps. This kinda profound retro-futurist refusal lines em up with a buncha modernists like Chrome, TG and even live Mars but there’s something in the distant, hiccupping vocals and the generally manhandled atmosphere that sounds like a more drug-degraded take on the kinda hillbilly scorch that Alpo-era Cheater Slicks occasionally delivered on. If you like yr rock gasoline-damaged to the point of almost-intelligible, stick out your cans. Limited edition of 500 copies in art sleeves released on the group’s own private press imprint.

Major new Mouthus album peaks at a whole new level of barbarous sludge with what sounds like a fleet of electric razors burying steel raptors in six feet of concrete while the Angus MacLise Orkestra play pre-Lapsarian Morse codes on a handbuilt steel drum containers and whole choirs of ghosts sing madrigals somewhere just over the horizon. There's a beautifully lapsed, primitive rock feel to much of the atmosphere - the way guitar lines appear like silvery hallucinations fading in and out of corporeal reality from track to track - that reminds me of the weird non-hierarchical instrumental mix of early NZ bombs like Trash, Dead C or Dadamah. Either way, this is another supremely devolved rock set from these crudest of cousins.

New self-released solo album from Brian of Mouthus featuring some acoustic led thunder ballads that sound as if they are played with the last stumps of his fingers through to hurricane force post-Industrial blues jams that cross the malevolent occult power of mid-period Swans with laminal arrangements of fuzz and drone.

Great fuzz-encrusted monolith guitar duel from these two solo basement/psych units, Brian Sullivan of Mouthus’s Eskimo King and Zac Davis of Lambsbread’s Sky Juice persona. This is heavy gravity guitar oblivion the whole way, with what sounds like the first power chord from The Stooges’ “Little Doll” obliterated with a combination of slowly imploding wah-wah gnosis and malformed power-chord epics. Second track sounds like a fleet of motorbikes fitted with tremolo arms. Classic stoned guitar.

Classic Americana underground rock moves from a new Baltimore-based project that features Lexie Mountain on vocals alongside Nate Nelson of Religious Knives/Mouthus, Nick Becker, Jake Freeman and Chiara Giovando. The sound is kinda like Royal Trux at their most FM-radio relevant, with huge blats of melodic moog defining the foreground while Lexie pulls out her best Jennifer Herema/Janis Joplin stylings (with occasional Meredith Monk-styled detours) and the songs work from a raggedy Suicide/Springsteen/Flesheaters/The Band base that would combine classic, iconoclastic melodies with weirdly deformed two-note keyboard drones and a fried hayseed basement style that is supremely beguiling. Can’t think of a recent release that so beautifully walks the line between classic rock and cultic underground confusion.

Huge walls of psych guitar imbalance from a trio who know how to chew an axe: Elisa Ambrogio of Magik Markers, Ben Chasny of Six Organs Of Admittance and Brian Sullivan of Mouthus. Miasmic destructo-rock moves in a derelict post-Dead C style. Pressed on 180 g vinyl and housed in classy wraparound silkscreened sleeve by Alan Sherry of SIWA. The LP also comes with a pressed CD featuring bonus jams from the same session. Edition of 845 copies.

Chaw Mank is Brian Sullivan, guitarist and vocalist with Mouthus in the company of the Sightings duo. Volume 1 presents a muscular spin on established Mouthus stop-motion murk strategies with spools of rusty repeat blown to flesh by some devastating rock damage. Highly recommended.

Limited edition tour collage/mash-up from the duo of Brian Sullivan and Nate Nelson. This one is even more out of focus and malformed than the corpus of their back catalogue, with vague thunder clouds and fucked-up electro percussion floating the ghost of Alan Vega through sheet metal memories of the TG 24 cassette box.

Self-released album from this Mouthus/Double Leopards supergroup featuring botha Mouthus and Mike and Maya from Leopards. Sound is as beautifully Euro-fixated as the recent Religious Knives stuff, with soft oceans of glazed 1970s synth patterns washing across the backs of yr eyelids like the Cosmic Couriers play the brain scores of Terry Riley and Klaus Schulze. A beautifully pink stone and highly recommended for fans of soft dopey muzz.

Privately-released LP on the Mouthus imprint by the new duo of Brian Sullivan (Mouthus) and Pete Swanson (Yellow Swans et al): Beer Damage has some of the all-devouring bull-dozing ferocity of Mouthus proper but it’s all wrapped up in a grid-locked, endlessly accruing drone style that sounds like a particularly wheezy Alastair Galbraith power-bowing a series of barbed wire sculptures while Martin Rev triggers pugilistic beats in the background. Or imagine Cyborg-era Klaus Schulze re-visioning his music to take in broken hi-fi equipment, domestic appliances and warped backwards tape F/X in the Prick Decay basement. This is dense, hypnotic, primitively-rendered drone music with an obsessive tape-juddering aspect that is uniquely brain-mangling and that touches on a bunch of confusing totems, from the delicate/spectral miniatures of Go Hirano to the twonked loop work of Deux Filles and the Industrial gravity of Henry & Hazel Slaughter.  

Mike and Maya Bernstein (Double Leopards/Religious Knives et al) live at the San Juan noise fest, with a wash of sandpaper-toned judder giving way to what almost sounds like one of John Fahey's concrete ragas for locomotive, helicopters, angel vox and eerie wide-open space. B-side features a set from renowned Puerto Rican noise outfit Cornucopia. Comes in the gorgeous new Heavy Tapes (run by Mike and Maya of Double Leopards, Religious Knives et al) packaging with letterpressed custom fabricated cardstock tape covers which wrap around and tuck into themselves and black ink on white cardstock artwork by Maya. Just about the most beautiful run of tapes you're ever likely to fondle.

Live album from the American Psychotropic trio of Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/Hototogisu/Zaimph), Pete Nolan (Magik Markers/Vanishing Voice/Virgin Eye) and Steve Gunn (Moongang). Recorded at Goodbye Blue Monday January 27th 2006, this one ditches the more rural/raga bent of their earlier recordings (tho still scarred with that devotional/Popol Vuh feel) for a deep smoke of eye-lolling choral vocals, heavy psychedelic guitar solo and a murk of drone. Very beautiful and possibly their best set to date.

7” vinyl from Mike Bernstein and Maya Miller of Double Leopards’ Heavy Tapes imprint bundles two ecstatic DIY drone shots from Religious Knives beamed straight from a windowless bunker. This whole current European/devotional/cult synth edge that the duo have developed is beautifully electric and extremely personal and these two tracks – chronologically their first experiments in this style - make for some of their best reconciliations with song form to date. Mike and Maya play bells, guitar, percussion, synth, and vocals. Limited edition, comes in screened hard card fold-around sleeves. Highly recommended.

Brand new trio moves from a new group that sees Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Total/Sunroof et al) joined by Justin Broadrick of Godflesh on guitar, bass and rhythm machine and Samantha Davies (Voltigeurs) on guitar: Valley Of Fear play martial drone rock with a weird/haunted a-temporal aspect that sounds like choirs of disembodied voices coming straight out of the void. The addition of the rhythm machine actually seems to free-up the music even more, with drifting walls of guitars that sound as if they are slowly being pulled apart, moving backwards and forwards in time, combining the kind of nod-out rhythms of Silence-era titans like International Harvester with the Industrial metal of Zeni Geva and a dramatic orchestral aspect that is truly epic. In a way it’s as balanced a pairing as you could imagine between Godflesh’s martial Industrial rock and Matthew Bower’s vision of endlessly levitating overtone damaged psychedelic drone. Edition of 500 copies and highly recommended. 

All-new recordings from the duo of Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Total et al) and Samantha Davies: Possession represents a further progression of the Voltigeurs sound, re-thinking droning European metal as a form of violent symphonic noise, with triumphal melodies sunk deep, deep in fields of barbarous fuzz. Bower’s guitar has always sounded more like buckling currents of electricity than six steel strings but here he really pushes it to the extreme with walls of curdling feedback and whiplashed amplifier violence with only the haziest hints of martial melody. Indeed, it really sounds like nothing else, fully delivering on Bower’s vision of the hum of vast Industrial plants or vibrating metropolises heard from a hundred miles away or the gravitational roar of planets in dead, dark space. Bower’s thought keeps evolving and this is a radical re-statement of symphonic guitar brutality. Highly recommended. 

Staggering new double disc set in a hand-numbered run of 500 copies from Matthew Bower’s (Skullflower/Total/Hototogisu et al) reverse incarnation of his Sunroof project: this is an incredible set that might just be the apex of Bower’s vision of overloaded endless vertical ascensions but this time cut with a propulsive beat/pulse/two chord aspect that would marry the production style of Nanjo Asahito and Kevin Shields to the monomania of Les Rallizes Denudes or even the looping dub-damaged style of Metal Box-era Public Image. Each track jump cuts to the next, functioning as endlessly accruing magnifications or exaggerations of what came before, with walls of inchoate fuzz exploding into organic mutant tones and throbbing miasmic beats that come over as Aphex Twin-plays-Suicide-plays-Mainliner. With 4 Black Suns... Bower runs a mainline into the ecstasy potential of obsessively repetitive overtone thick orchestral drone but with a black barbed wire aspect that is uniquely eviscerating. One of the hands-down highlights of Bower’s epic back catalogue to date, very highly recommended!

Split release between Matthew Bower’s Skullflower and Norway’s Utarm: Bower is at the absolute peak of his powers right now and Skullflower deliver three tracks of epic black symphonic noise that come over like a disembowelled fantasy of European metal w/screaming Valkyrie tones and massive dissolves of pure electricity that have a incredible sensual/erotic appeal. Bower describes Utarm as “very much in the vein of a less-mechanical, more (?) goth Ramleh” and that’s pretty much spot on, with a combination of dark vocal hysteria and organic metal/noise.