Apr 292017
 


Schammasch – photo by Andrea Stoppa

 

Happy Saturday. I’m continuing an effort to catch up on things I spotted over the last week but didn’t have time to write about. For this Part 2, I decided to include mostly news items, and leave a lot of the remaining new music I’d like to recommend for Part 3. Not sure when I’ll get Part 3 done, maybe in time to post later today but most likely for tomorrow.

The first three items here are announcements of new albums, with artwork. The last three are new tape and CD releases that provide reminders about very good releases that originally appeared last year or early this year. And sandwiched in the middle is a bit of recommended new music.

SCHAMMASCH

Here at NCS we’re big fans of the Swiss band Schammasch. And so it was exciting to see the band’s announcement this morning that they plan to release a new trilogy of records as the follow-up to last year’s Triangle trilogy. The new series will be entitled The Maldoror Chants, and the first album — The Maldoror Chants: Hermaphrodite — will be released on the 9th of June. Here’s the cover art, along with the band’s description of the new trilogy: Continue reading »

Oct 272016
 

bolzer-i-am-iii

 

I’ve been racking up the airline miles lately. I got back to Seattle late last night after a whirlwind trip to New York for my day job, one in which I probably spent as much time in airport security lines and on airplanes as I did in New York. Beautiful time of year to be there, though.

You may also have noticed that we’ve had a flood of premieres this week. Four more are coming today. Between traveling and writing all those premieres, I haven’t had time to pull together round-ups, and man, this has been a week when multiple round-ups would have been justified. With so much to choose from, I’ve impulsively picked these three bands. The plan is to put together more round-ups for tomorrow and Saturday in an effort to catch up.

BÖLZER

A few days ago the mighty Swiss juggernaut Bölzer released another song from their new album Hero, which will be released on November 25 through Iron Bonehead Productions. The first song that appeared, “I Am III”, was more than 10 minutes long — a dramatic, majestic, dark, brooding, esoteric, and triumphant piece in which the band moved in some dynamic new directions. The latest track, “Spiritual Athleticism“, is a more compact affair and perhaps more in line with what we were expecting based on Bölzer‘s previous releases. Continue reading »