The Closing Night of UNSOUND London will see Café Oto decked out with a devastating quad PA system showcasing a range of experimental musicians working with noise, drones and mutations of metal.
STEFAN NEMETH (ex Radian) heads a new project called INNODE (Mego), blending percussion and electronics to explore tensions between harsh sounds, silence and rhythm. Poland’s BNNT use self-made instruments and drums to “sound bomb”, while STARA RZEKA (Old River) fuse black metal, Slavic folk and electronics to create something that sounds entirely fresh. Birmingham artist NICHOLAS BULLEN was a founder of Napalm Death in the 1980s - his recent acclaimed debut album on Type is very different, featuring an electro-acoustic sound he has perfected over the decades.
Nicholas Bullen photo by Stuart Green
INNODE
Innode enters the world with an audacious debut of rhythm and sound, space and silence and an astonishing blend of the acoustic and the electronic. Spearheaded by Stefan Németh (co-founder of Radian, Lokai) in close collaboration with Steven Hess (Locrian, Pan.American, Cleared) and Bernhard Breuer (Elektro Guzzi, Tumido), Gridshifter is an intense, astonishing sonic experience which navigates the line between formal structures and experimental interplay. Conceived as a series of crossbred experiments where, on one side, a human rhythm triggers electronic signals whilst on the other electronic textures sculpt a platform for physical human engagement. The stark dynamics and Human/Non Human interaction manifests itself as a thrilling expose of 21st Century rhythm and noise.
BNNT
BNNT started as a Konrad Smoleński’s sound performance solo project in 2008. In the same year drummer Daniel Szwed, from Woody Alien and Mothra, joined and BNNT became a duo. In 2012 they released their debut album _ _ on Qulturap (CD) and Pink Punk (Vinyl).
In addition to stage performances, BNNT also practise “sound bombing” where they cross cities in a modified truck equipped with a sound system and power generator for unexpected short sound happenings.
www.bnnt.pl
BNNT // LIVE from Konrad Smolenski on Vimeo.
STARA RZEKA
Stara Rzeka (Old River) is a one-man band of Kuba Ziołek (Alameda Trio, Ed Wood, Innercity Ensemble, Hokei, T'ien Lai, Kapital). Fascinated by union of nature and technology on one hand, on the other - caring for pure, deanthropomorphisized, raw natural reality. Stara Rzeka is also the name of a small village in the heart of Poland's beautiful Bory Tucholskie.
"This extraordinary album was written on an acoustic guitar but has obviously moved on significantly between conception and execution. While the album opens with the chiming of a 12 string, it slowly morphs into elektronische musik before sliding blissfully under layers of super heated sludge guitar and noise. By the time the ecstatic synths are met by necrotic black metal vocals, nothing about this album will surprise you, which is good thing, given that it shifts through sparse BM moves that remind one of Norwegian second wavers, Thorns and through the arboreal drones of early Growing before ending on a celestial cover of Nico's 'My Only Child' with speaker destroying drone metal. Stara Rzeka (Polish for Old River) is a side project of Kuba Ziolek of Ed Wood and Innercity Ensemble and this album has me hitting repeat more than any other released this year so far." John Doran, The Quietus
NICHOLAS BULLEN
To this day, Nicholas Bullen is best known as a founding member of arguably grindcore’s most important act Napalm Death. Although he decided to call it a day before the band slipped into the mainstream circuit, his sonic fingerprints were all over their influential debut Scum, and he’s been breaking boundaries ever since. A key figure in Birmingham’s experimental scene, Bullen was also a founder member of Scorn and has been involved in a variety of projects since.
Over thirty years later we get to Component Fixations, an album that Bullen has been contemplating, working and reworking for some time. It is after all his solo debut proper, and as such is a work that absolutely represents him as an artist both visually and aurally. Taking influence from the early electronic artists of the 1960s Bullen has fused this passion with his own musically explorative past, resulting in an album of beguiling tape-manipulations, drones and noise. Component Fixations is far more than a simple exercise in academic sound, and Bullen has injected his long-form pieces with a rare mortal sense of corruption and failure. Every single sound on the album was taken from field recordings captured in the confines of Bullen’s house and garden, and this only serves to confirm the unshakable humanity of the record.
