Bruit Direct Disques

When it comes to head-scratchers, no one plows into the scalp like Bruit Direct.

For their 24th release, they've ponied up this melange by the duo Femme, who's LP, Chroma', summons forth a soundscape of stellar post trance, electro magma. As dense as it is deft.

The 10 gurgling innards effortlessly spewed out here rank it alongside other Moltenadelic CO-2 snuffers such as Ilitch's 'Periodik Mindtrouble' & Junji Hirose + Yoshihide Otomo's 'Silanganan Ingay.

Lush, foreboding & fantastical, 'Chroma's' pocket universe of seductive dread could spook the sheen right off've Moebius' Airtight Garage & there ain't a damn thing Major Grubert or Jerry Cornelius gonna do about it.

The future doesn't get anymore Untopian than this.- Tom Lax

Double album on clear vinyl with a custom made transparent sleeve + two quadri stickers + plastic insert, all hand made in Japan.'The world of Mamitori is as beguiling as it is unchartered.

Their, just previous to this, live album Mamitori Ulithi Empress Yonaguni San-25/12/20/13'(also on Bruit Direct Disques) fizzled the ears of pine-tops with its staggeringly great execution of Outsider ramble gnashing with No Wave rumble, creating a sound so unique, scribes stuttered on hiccups of comparison. Trying to 'get it right'. If copies still exist, plonk down some cabbage & see what I mean. So when the check writers at Bruit said they were issuing forth a 2xlp of new material, all one could do was wait & wonder. It's the line in the sand many dare not cross.

The double lp format, in it's purest distillation, exists as the medium to convey realizations of the most sprawling & unconventional design. And by God, if Mamitri Yulith Empress Yonagunisan latest deuce, Yulith Lilith', doesn't ding all the right dongs, then ladies & gentlemen, I will cook your goose. The heart of their sound is beyond words, it's more chaos theory, transmuting inside the eye of a hurricane.

Imagine 10,000 blackbirds, perched in the trees above Tompkins Square Park, their shrill natter suffocating the air, while below Arto Lindsay spanges in tap shoes, his voice wavering fugue-like over the birds, while the clicking of his gait keeps a rhythm out of sync-yet completely on point-with the overall scheme.

Or if 70's era Faust had become outlaws, exiled themselves deep inside the Hokkaido landscape & for the rest of eternity tooled around Akkeshi Bay on speedboats, lustily consuming wild ales, sustaining themselves solely on plankton & oysters.

Mamitri Yulith Empress Yonagunisan are Bushido code Circuit Rider & Yulith Lilith'is an unimpeachable masterpiece extolling the marauding valor of a band incapable of succumbing to convention.

Housed inside transparent screen printed sleeves-resembling alien x-rays. It's like the future just opened up. And guess what? It's full of stars. One of my top picks of 2018 by a mile. Not to be missed. - Tom Lax

Tracklisting:
Yulith
Side A:
1. Another
2. Minus
3. Green Eyes
4. Black Zodiac
5. Ice
6. Liquid Runa
7. Megarienc Lilith White

Side B:
8: Gos Lei
9: Alpha Mos Alpha Black
10: Flower Crown LYL
11: Yulith

Lilith
Side A:
1. Ennvy
2. Kakura
3. Uroboros
4. Fana no Kanmuri LYL
5. Mamooh

Side B:
6. Luminous
7. Sea Storme
8. Clear
9. Kuro
10. Fade Blue
11. Dune
12. Uvas

Solo project by one Lise Sutter who has been active in the Geneva/Leipzig axis that includes Couteau Latex and the Staches, an all women band with two bass mixing very early New Order and screechy synthed ESG.

They have the energy. They have the spit. We have seen them play, in disguise, smiling at us as they were pulsing thru their short melodic punk outbursts like watching Malaria or the Bush Tetras or maybe even Prag Vec.

Tracklisting:
1. File The Feeling
2. Strange Afternoon At The Swimming Pool
3. Dust Dries On Its Rests
4. Property To Property
5. Damaged Good
6. Keep An Eye On Your Belongings
7. Value The Death
8. Later Is The Prize
9. The Accident
10. Computer Dreams
11. Rituals
12. Fake Talks On The Phone

File under: Rock, Synth-Punk / RIYL: Bush Tetras, Ludus, Prag Vec, ESG, Malaria

A flaming tribute to the peaks of low budget Italian crime novels and to synthwave as lubed-up as we need, poisoned with synthetic drugs and the rust from circuit boards, Scorpion Violente are the epitome of everything the entrepreneurial divertimento generation hate.

Feeling up their synths with all the vigor of a manic depressive on a downward slope, our two hosts emit their dirty feedback-washed discharge, adding Ich bin and Le Syndicat Electronique to their holiday activity books.

The tempo is even slower than before, with echoes more distant than In Aeternum Vale and Ike Yard dripping from their stabbing loops. Litanies almost crashing into chasms ooze in this cold cyclo-rhythmic blues, sure to make Alan Vega turn in his grave.

Sick, sordid old crooning spat like bile from a wounded animal, fairy tales of ordinary madness, everyday nightmares and steel-reinforced rock ab from Lorraine, drifting in the cold gas-clouds of sulfur-laced heroin.

These dudes are not f**king around, they go all the way, no remorse. Life rules most when it sucks, and maybe it's right there, in the firmament of famine, in the atrium of deserted factories, where the last vestiges of poetry survive. They sure kept us stewing since their first EP, but it was well worth the wait.

Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. The Wound

Side B:
1. The Stalker
2. The Knife

First Lp by sombre australian chanteuse Elizabeth Downey and instrumentalist Dan Hawkins.

9 bruised vignettes that will take you to the scraped bottom of love. Soft, caressing and subtly disturbing, Frightening Lights'songs move like menace through fog.  Singer Elizabeth Downey says she first envisioned the songs as a kind of deathbed confession, their violence is carefully suppressed, modulated perhaps through long penitence.  Shreds of instrumental sound - a funeral organ, an off-kilter accordion, discordant bowing on a borrowed danbo - flit in and out of the peripheries, creating eerie, flickery landscapes around Downey's sleepy murmurs.

Downey formed Frightening Lights with her partner Dan Hawkins in 2007 after a sojourn in Russia, where she went to study fine arts and returned with a fascination for Russian and Polish folk music. Returning home to Melbourne, she found herself as drawn to Slavic influences - including the Russian poet Bulat Okudzhava and Polish singer Slawa Przybylska - as to rock artists like The Triffids, Rowland Howard and Marianne Faithfull. Back in Melbourne, Downey and Hawkins began recording at home on an enormous, two-inch reel-to-reel recording deck, working and reworking their spare material.  Two of the duo's songs appeared on Melbourne compilations- The Warm Cupboard from Albert's Basement label in 2009 and the Swan V Raptor on Dan Lewis'Special Awards Records in 2010.  

The rest evolved gradually into the dream-like textures of this debut full-length. Downey sings and plays guitar on this debut, while Hawkins mans a rack of keyboard instruments - a Farfisa, a Hammond and an eerie Conn organ - as well as bass.  There are no drums on the album, almost no sense of time at all, as melodies float like smoke over blasted territories. Downey's lyrics trace elliptical connections between the novels she reads, the films she sees and the ordinary experiences of daily life. 

The opening 'Pere LaChaise' recalls a hazy interval in Paris, where Downey, sick with pneumonia, wandered nonetheless through the famous cemetery, deathly ill.  'The Return of Genghis Khan' conflates her fascination with the Mongol warlord, a kitten that she once named after him and a romantic spat with her partner into a single, slow moving fever dream. Artist Earl Kuck calls the Frightening Lights "almost Bad Seeds-like with female vox,' and this self-titled debut has, indeed, some of the same eerie, subdued resonance as Cave's recent We Know Who You Are. 

If you like your menace soft, wrapped in lullaby sweetness and still profoundly unsettling, turn on the Frightening Lights.

Side A:
1. Père Lachaise
2. Small Town Stardust
3. All The Girls
4. Humankind

Side B:
1. The Return Of Genghis Khan
2. Strangers
3. Window
4. Looking Back
5. Pretty Things

Thigh Master have been mainstays of Brisbane's thriving underground guitar scene for years now, building up a formidable reputation for both their fierce live shows and their early recorded output: their first two singles Head Of The Witch (2014) and Songs To Wipe Your Mouth To (2015) both sold out their initial runs after charming fans both in Australia and abroad with their urgent and catchy tales of inner-city malaise.

On the live front Thigh Master have already played with Guitar Wolf and The Coathangers in Japan, sold out their own shows in Tokyo, supported the likes of Ty Segall, Ariel Pink, The Clean, Real Estate and Courtney Barnett back in Australia and made countless interstate forays from their Queensland home base.

Now Thigh Master are upping the ante considerably with this release of their killer debut long-player, Early Times - recorded and mixed by Blank Realm guitarist Luke Walsh.

Compelling new single Company is a compulsive burst of yearning and frustration that's the perfect calling card to herald an exciting new chapter for this most intrepid and intriguing of emerging guitar bands. Once more Ford and co. turn this introspection and angst into high art with another infectious offering which is sure to turn heads in all the right places.

'I haven't been excited about guitar pop like this in a while, transporting a presence of Polvo/Archers-style string bend + huge riff from some 8000 miles away, familiar but still vital, and given exuberant, shook-up life.' Still-Single (Doug Mosurock).

Tracklisting:
1. Ditch
2. Rics B.C.
3. Company
4. Room Doom
5. Canned Opening
6. Hippy View
7. Treehouse A.P.
8. Whiplash
9. Brunno Brawl
10. D.D.
11. Baroona
12. Hassa Been
13. Flat City

This work is based on a small inspiration by Kudo Tori, with additional material added from the voicemail recordings made by Hashizaka Ai (and her family) and from a Maher Shalal Hash Baz 30th anniversary show in Shinjuku, to make up three levels of sound.

Hashizaka's sounds are full of the highly entropic sadness of northern Wakayama and Maher at Shinjuku sounds like they were a little angry. Kudo-san says that he picked up a sense of blankness and kindness from these fragments.

Something like the feeling you get at an out of the way bookstore that has a nice collection of books, or at a small cheap bar that features fried organ meat, or a bakery, or taking a long trip, or when you're extremely busy with cooking, cleaning, housework and child care, or other real experiences that make life worth living.