Drumm’s latest is quite an unusual and expectation-subverting one, given that his previous releases for the label have largely been genre-defining noise masterpieces. Trouble is definitely not that, nor does it bear much in common with any of Kevin's other major efforts.  Billed as "54-minute excursion into the netherworld of the audio spectrum," the piece is an extremely quiet and amorphous experiment in queasily dissonant harmonies that teeters dangerously close to being complete silence.
Franz Kafka died of starvation on June 3rd, 1924, his throat cinched by laryngeal tuberculosis. The intravenous delivery of food to sick patients wouldn’t be invented for another 35 years and the swelling in Kafka’s throat caused by the infection made swallowing even water difficult. Forbidden from speaking by his doctor at the sanatorium in Kierling, Austria, Kafka would often communicate with his friends and visitors by writing small notes on scraps of paper. Some such scraps were less notes and more fragments or disconnected ideas, phrases impossible to understand without context. It’s something Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, recalls in the opening pages of the booklet that accompanies Joseph Clayton Mills’s The Patient. "Usually these notes were mere hints; his friends guessed the rest," he writes. Mills, accompanied by Olivia Block, Noé Cuéllar (Coppice), Steven Hess (Pan•American, Haptic, Innode), and Jason Stein take a shot at interpreting those fragments on this record, using Mills’s textual score to trace a line around Kafka’s final abraded thoughts.
Following quickly on from last year’s …Sun, Broken…, Mugstar have extended the formula that blew me away on that previous album and have made an impossibly shimmering, psychedelic and, most importantly, rocking album. Lime may not rewrite the history of rock music but it does act like the fruit it is named after, it cuts through the senses in a most pleasant fashion.
Heavy on percussion, the group have honed their rhythmic edge into a surgical knife. Stark, effective bass lines (sometimes just two notes) complete the rhythmic picture, adding a muscle to the rigid bones of the drumming. There is a vaguely ritualistic feeling to the music, for example on "Starts/Ends," where the percussion dances around itself to create a cathartic and engaging sound. Gavin Duffy’s immediate bass playing drags the music from this weirdly transcendent place back to the dance floor.
Few artists can boast debut albums as stunning as this one, making its reissue after nearly three decades of unavailability something of a major event.  Originally recorded in 1983, the Soul Possession sessions assembled a murderer's row of talented collaborators such as Crass and UK dub heavyweight Adrian Sherwood to back young Annie Anxiety's animated and unseemly tales from the dark side.  Rightfully considered an underground classic, this album captures a rare "super group" in which everyone involved was at the top of their game, giving birth to something truly disturbing and visionary.
This digital-only EP released as an appetizer for the latest MBM full-length is a deliciously weird mixture of the sounds and ideas that make Meat Beat records so wonderful and unpredictable.
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