With their new album, Digital Darkness, Somatic Responses lay down the raw anger and metallic, broken, saw-edged decay of seized-up industrial breakdown. Their use of jagged, spastic beats, quickfire stabs of rusty chainsaw buzz, and acid-oil-tinged spikiness recalls the social price that was paid when the coal-mining industry in the South Wales valleys was devastated in the last century.

Brainwashed opened its doors on April 16, 1996, to host the websites for Meat Beat Manifesto and Greater Than One .  It was built using discographies of Christopher Miller and wrapped in content and news and images from the artist as well as links to record companies and other resources fans might be interested in.  The point of these websites was to provide a true central place for information on the web for a few musical artists, whereas a record label's website disregarded activity outside the record label and fan websites on places like Geocities had little in terms of information about the artists and their history.

Soon, Brainwashed had accumulated websites for bands Cabaret Voltaire , Coil , Current 93 , Death In June , The Legendary Pink Dots , Nurse With Wound , Organum , and Throbbing Gristle , because these websites existed but were  hosted at colleges and universities, where the webmasters of these websites were graduating and moving on, either losing their space or simply not updating the websites any longer. The premise remained: provide as much information as possible for these artists including compltete discographies, image archives, and the latest news available.

In 1997, Brainwashed expanded to begin hosting websites for newer artists like Bowery Electric , Labradford , Tortoise , and Trans Am , and record labels including Kranky , Thrill Jockey, and World Serpent.

In 1998 we launched Brainwashed Recordings , basically to make recordings in small numbers as presents for the hardcore fans.  All profits were to go back into the operating costs of Brainwashed but, as any industry professional will agree, there's really very little profits (if any) to be made on limited 7" singles and CD compilations!

In 1998, The Brain was begun: it was a weekly electronic magazine to post news about the bands and labels hosted at Brainwashed, along with provide some interesting feedback accumulated over the week, reviews of CDs, movies, books, and videos, a "link of the week," and what we're listening to.  Soon, we were including sound samples with all reviews, something that no other noncommercial weekly Internet music publication was doing.

Over the next few years we accumulated more artists and labels and built The Brain into a virtually peerless publication, with contributing writers from all over the world, not just the existing Brainwashed staff and webmasters of the sites hosted.

In 1999, we laucnhed Brainwashed Radio , a 24 hour/7 day per week streaming radio station featuring music from all of the artists and labels hosted at brainwashed.

In 2000, with the increased evils surfacing in the media, we decided we would cease all support of major labels: they engaged in illegal (price-fixing and payola) and greedy (in-house publishing contracts and shifty bookkeeping) activities and we felt that we provided no true alternative if we were to review the same materials that all the major publications did.  In the following years, they have further alienated their audiences and waged war against their consumers and artists and employees and promotional outlets and retailers that we continue the ban.  It's no surprise their sales numbers have fallen over the years. 

Also in 2000, Killer Pimp was launched as a separate identity from Brainwashed Recordings. This is a small label which hopes that with aggressive campaigns we can introduce some new music to the community.

In 2003, we launched The Eye , a weekly video feature with interviews and live footage of some of today's most exciting artists.  Some of the features have been collected onto DVDs for fundraising purposes.

In December of 2004, we launched the Podcast Edition of Brainwashed Radio, where every week, Jon Whitney hosts an hour-long show featuring music from the artists and labels hosted at Brainwashed.

In August of 2005, we retired The Brain to reinvent Brainwashed.com, where content is provided daily, as news can't wait for once per week.  The new system is searchable with archives of all old reviews and content from the old way of doing things. 

In 2006, we celebrated our 10th year of online existence with the first Brainwaves Festival : a three day music fest featuring friends and family of Brainwashed.

In 2008 we are throwing another Brainwaves Festival. Brainwaves 2008 lineup now stands as: Threshold HouseBoys Choir , JG Thirlwell's Manorexia , Meat Beat Manifesto , Matmos , Stars of the Lid , Little Annie , Silver Apples , Windy Weber (of Windy & Carl ) & Thomas Meluch (of Benoit Pioulard ), Major Stars , Reformed Faction ( Mark and Robin of Zoviet France, Rapoon , Dead Voices On Air), Andrew Liles and Jonathan Coleclough , Nmperign feat. Jason Lescalleet , Marissa Nadler , Glenn Jones , His Name Is Alive , Gary Wilson , Rivulets , Strategy , Nudge , Boduf Songs , To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie , Lichens + DJ Steven Stapleton & a special Greater Than One video presentation.

 

Sign up for our mailing list here to get the latest updates on Brainwashed Recordings releases before anybody else and the updated news on the Brainwashed 10th festival (tentatively being titled BWX).

Thank you for your interest and support.

Jon Whitney
Prinicipal, Brainwashed

There are the usual features that Masami Akita employs in his work: mastering at a face-melting volume, piercing high pitched noises, sand-blasting roars of sound, and, particularly in recent years, the obligatory Save the *insert animal here* artwork. On this last point Akita is normally very heavy handed and just slaps a picture of the animal on the cover or some less than subtle point about vivisection (but then is there anything subtle about a man who has spent his life trying to deafen the world) but on Dolphin Sonar he has made a far more concerted effort at a protest album. All of the sound here can be described as manmade violence or Akita's representation of marine life as envisaged by the dolphin; his anger is directed at where the two ideas meet.

There has been no shortage of metal-tinged instrumental bands these last few years but few can pull it off like Boston's heaviest band. The Touch Records style cover can be quite deceptive: what lurks inside is equal part rock monster and rock ogre; it starts with a bang and finishes with a louder bang.

With Mathew Sweet's third release for Kranky, he secures himself as the arch-mage of death soaked acoustica. Again employing mostly his guitar and breathy vocal, while momentarily reaching for further instrumentation, this album is less hidden-away sounding than previous Boduf Songs recordings. It is, however, still imbued with inimitable sense of intimateness, darkness, and magic.

Eschewing any species of frills or frippery, the simple card and paper-fastener packaging encasing this latest entry from Machinefabriek in Staalplaat's Mort Aux Vaches series resolutely reflects the aesthetic of Dutch musician Rutger Zuydervelt. Although sparse is the operative word here, Zuydervelt's lean compositions and quiet tiny sounds, carefully sculpted around deep spaces, are nevertheless harmonically and richly complex, ranging from fragile gossamer tones to deeply sweeping friezes. Moreover, the music is warmly inviting and enticing, indeed inviting and enticing one to explore a strange and slightly surreal world.

Apparently they do make them like this anymore. A mere 38 years after it was begun; Fotheringay's second album is released. Another chance to hear the voice of Sandy Denny, famously described as like 'a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes.'

It’s refreshing to hear an album of sonic abstraction that falls into neither of the following categories:  minimalist drone, harsh noise, or crossover into other electronic realms.  Not that there is anything wrong with those at all, I enjoy many works that fall into those aforementioned categories.  But works like this collaboration between the Illusion of Safety member and long time sound artist and master for hire Dimuzio are fascinating in that they are focused only on the nuanced textures of sound.

From the band's name, I was expecting something more along the lines of pretentious 1970s prog rock, but this most definitely is not the case.  While a rather short album, the three expansive tracks that comprise it encompass a vast variety of sounds and styles that create an ethnographic, soundtrack experience unlike many others.

Sublime Frequencies presents a CD reissue of a limited edition vinyl by this Tuareg rock group featuring the enigmatic guitar hero Bibi Ahmed. The group brings to its hybrid of roots rock, Afrobeat and plugged-in fuzz rock a political urgency, the music having its origin as a political weapon used to communicate from Libyan refugee camps within the Republic of Niger in the 1980s and '90s.

Most attendees at a Suicide concert these days would claim to respect the "work" of the streetwise electronic innovators—provided that said "work" consists of their confrontational eponymous debut and, possibly, their glorious Ric Ocasek helmed sophomore album.  I, on the other hand, am a Suicide fan, one who eagerly pounces on the members' infrequent solo albums with the same vigor as I did the reissues of their underrated third and fourth records.  Simply receiving a copy of this release in the mail was a perverse joy unto itself.

I relish the opportunity to expose our readership to new independent music on a regular basis. For this writer, it is the ultimate high to help lift from obscurity a worthy band that lacks the marketing muscle of a major label machine, and, like a crusty hygiene-deficient junkie, I am instinctively trying to score the next great fix, regularly on the lookout for such opportunities. That dutiful yet addictive sentimentality is precisely how I got conned into trying this band, lured by the unfulfilled promise of moderately morose music akin to those early Factory Records artists that LTM Recordings has such a veiny hard-on for.

Girls Against Boys frontman Scott McCloud's half-whispered, cigarette burnt vocals on this, his telling solo debut, channel the scuzzy street-level vibe of that seminal Touch & Go band, leavened by the sagacious musings of an unblushing, unpretentious gutter poet. For this fan, these wizened, largely acoustic ditties frequently spark thoughts along the lines of "Gee, these sure would make some great GVSB songs."

Out of my latest order of three releases from Faraway Press, the current CD from this infrequent Mirror collaborator and often overlooked co-conspirator of Faraway Press (alongside Andrew Chalk) has been by far the most rewarding. On this, her second solo release, she has consciously let go of the single-piece-per-side mold and created a decidedly not-drone album.

It angers me that Some Bizzare Stevø has treated one of the best releases of the 1980s with such utter negligence, issuing versions like this with embarassing mistakes on tracklisting, indexing errors, chintzy packaging, and dreadful artwork recreation. I encourage nobody to buy this shitty reissue and I hearby challenge Stevø to recall these copies at once and put out a fucking proper release of this classic once and for all.

Although his reputation as the “screaming philosopher” precedes him, this vastly insufficient nickname does nothing to convey the power and skill of Tomokawa’s singing and songwriting. While the gasping, almost convulsive delivery of some of his lines does of course lend credence to this moniker, everyone seems to overlook his earthy, troubadour voice that carries most of the songs. Backed by a band who seem comfortable playing in a traditional Spanish style (with an Eastern European twist), this album shows Tomokawa at an ever higher peak than usual.

Charlie Looker has issued every rock band in existence a very serious challenge: write music as inventive and natural as the stuff on Secular Works or get the hell off the stage. I'm certain that this album spells the end for nearly every math-rock band in existence.

Techno godfather Juan Atkins' finest productions lie more than a decade behind him, his post-millennial output utterly unmemorable by contrast. When Timbaland and Missy Elliott appropriated wholesale and slightly repurposed Cybotron's "Clear" a few years back for the "Lose Control" single, the succeeding and lingering stench of musical necrophilia made the Detroit legend's faded glory all the more uncomfortably evident. Moderately diverse and unsurprisingly enjoyable given the contributors, this remix collection dusts off yet another Atkins oldie for another nine rounds.

The brainchild of Uppsala, Sweden's M. Zetterberg, exemplifies the typical expansiveness, vastness of scale, and sheer coldness of most Scandinavian dark ambient/industrial output. Zetterberg, although in many ways staying within the somewhat narrow confines of the genre, also strays out of it occasionally, sometimes springing a surprise or two along the way. While Core won’t win any marks for originality, it is at the very least above average and steps outside of convention on one or two occasions to make it untypical of many entries in the field.

This week’s release from the prolific duo is actually the reissue of a 2006 CDR-only release of live material that truly demonstrates how proficient the band is in a live setting, with a four song set that could easily be mistaken for a tightly constructed studio album, and two additional live pieces that differ somewhat in feel, but are still of the same high quality.