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Cold Spring

Satøri – The Woods (2023)

  • noise

In 1987 Dave Kirby started Satori after having been active in the noise duo Psychopath for a few years. In 1994 Justin Mitchel of the Cold Spring label joined and after a pause in 2007 Satori became a three piece project. By 2012 Satori was a solo project again, but the new album is announced to be released on Cold Spring within a month.

“The Woods” is another massive wall of noise with highly distorted vocals. The sound reminds quite a bit of Control at times. Some tracks start a bit ambient to give the listener some rest, but pretty soon the dentist drill sound and other noises that make a wall of noise set in. As before the tracks also have a bit of an industrial side with heavy blasts, but it are the chainsaws and the screeching that are mostly noticeable. Somehow the sonic mayhem works quite well for me, but even on my scale “The Woods” makes a pretty tough listen, so it will probably not be an album that I will play a lot.

Links: Satori, Cold Spring

Colossloth – Promethean Meat (2022)

  • noise

This British project has remained below my radar. Yet, he has been around since 2006 and this is the fourth release on Cold Spring. The label ‘blurb’ says:

Rhythmic industrial noise – grinding and churning, drenched in crushing doom-laden guitars – drapes the sacrificial bones of the new album from esoteric electronic alchemist Colossloth.

What I hear mostly on “Promethean Meat” is fairly chaotic noise with a lot of screeches and high frequencies. The guitar noise, sometimes with vocals, reminds me a bit of the Dutch Gnaw Their Tongues. Here and there the chaos tones down a bit towards darker (industrial) tunes and towards the end there is a more ‘ritual’ type of track.

Not entirely my kind of noise. Not too bad either. Perhaps I will also try the older material of this project.

Links: Colossloth, Cold Spring

She Spread Sorrow – Huntress (2021)

I have known this Italian one woman project for a while, but I apparently never came to review anything of hers until now. This latest album will be available through Cold Spring like the earlier four releases.

Alice Kundalini (as goes the artist name) can get pretty loud every now and then “Huntress” is mostly an ambient album. 6 Tracks, 40 minutes of mostly industrial sounding ambient soundscapes with Alice’s whispered voice.

The music is alright, but not entirely my cup of tea. Perhaps this is why “She Spread Sorrow” never made it onto Gangleri.nl.

When you like soundscapish industrial ambient, have a listen to this (and previous) album(s).

Out 1 October.

Links: She Spread Sorrow, Cold Spring

MZ.412 ‎– Svartmyrkr (2018)

Discogs.com

The ever active Hendrik “Nordvargr” Drakh / Björk returns under the moniker I first encountered him in back in the days on Cold Meat Industry. Nowadays Maschinenzimmer releases are made available on Cold Spring.

The previous album “Hekatomb” was a pretty descent ‘comeback’. Putting on “Svartmyrkr” I initially thought it was a new Nordvargr. Pompous industrial with the vocals we know from the other project. “Pompous” is a description for other tracks too, just like on the previous album, some tracks lean towards “martial industrial”. Other tracks have more the “black ambient” style of old, others are more noisy and then there is this moody track…

All in all “Svartmyrhr” is a good, dark and varied album.

Links: MZ.412, Cold Spring

v/a * The Sound Of Progress (dvd 1988/2016)

Around the time that I was reading “Industrial Evolution” and “England’s Hidden Reverse” Cold Spring started to announce the rerelease of an old documentary about that very period of early industrial. Four bands are featured on this DVD: Test Dept, Coil, Foetus and Current 93. The last three are extensively featured in “England’s Hidden Reverse”. It was nice to see persons with the stories and interviews that I read in the book.

The documentary was made by country-mates of mine (from the Netherlands) and there is life footage of Test Dept. in an abandonned building in Amsterdam and Foetus in Paradiso (also Amsterdam). Of Current 93 there is live footage from Hamburg, Germany. There is no live material of Coil.

The 40 minutes feature snippets of interviews and the mentioned live footage. It has all been cut and montaged a bit and sometimes you can see who are talking, sometimes you do not. Of Coil there are interviews shot in the house of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (1955-2010) and John Balance (1962–2004). There are also parts of an interview with Balance and Stephen Thrower (1963-) outside a studio. Then there is footage from inside a studio when the band was recording “Horse Rotorvator”. The other bands are interviewed around the shows that I mentioned earlier (inside or outside the places they played in).

This DVD certainly makes a nice addition to the mentioned books. The interviews are not groundbreaking, but the live material and the Coil studio material are particularly nice.

Link: Cold Spring

Sutcliffe Jugend * Offal (cd 2016)

However my musical masochism grew in the last decade, I am still not a big fan of chaotic, unstructured noise terrorism, especially not when a lot of high frequencies are used. As far as I knew, Sufcliffe Jugend is one of these projects.

Sutcliffe Jugend has been around since 1982. It is one of the early projects that started to make a very extreme form of the upcoming industrial music. Of course, with them having been active for so many years and me having been involved in uncommon music also for quite a few years, I had run into this British project a couple of times. Still, inspite of a growing likeness of noise and even a bit of power electronics, Sutcliffe Jugend remained one of these projects that were a bridge to far for my taste. I did see them at the Wave Gotik Treffen a few years ago though. I do not remember much of the show…

Recently I accidentally heard a few tracks that I actually like (or did I hear the same track a few times?). They are probably part of some playlist or came by when I listened to a ‘similar artist radio’ or something. These tracks show that Sutcliffe Jugend also has tracks which are more of the ‘wall-of-sound’ type noise (that I do like sometimes) with completely insane vocals with normal and high-pitched screaming. Guessing that this could be a new direction, I decided to try the latest album of Cold Spring (but now I see that two other albums are already listed after it on Discogs!)

“Offal” opens with a wall-of-sound type track only not with the typical screamed vocals, but for the rest a track track that I expected from this project, just perhaps a little less extreme. The track is not great, but certainly not bad.
Then we go to “Howl” which turns out to be an impressive and truely brilliant track! The vocals are very atypical. They are a bit TV-preacher like, but also with the more typical screams. There is a slow, industrial rhythm and an increasing wall of sound. Oh how do I like noise with vocals sometimes! This is the type of noise that gets the hair on my arms straight up.
Another great track is “Slice”. A track with a faster rhythm and a bit of ‘orchestral squak’ or how should I describe the sound? After a while the vocals set in. This tracks is good and dirty.
The last track has again a faster rhythm. It start with a monotous kind of talking, but after a while they are again more like the American TV-preacher who after a while starts to swear and scream. The music is simple but effective, rhythmical, noisy and a little bit odd and also this track is great.

Four, long tracks. Two of which are great, one is very good and another is just good. Perhaps I have to dive into the fairly large discography of Sutcliffe Jugend afterall.

Cold Spring Industries, Sutcliffe Jugend

MZ.412 * Hekatomb (cd 2015)

In 1994/5 I was happy to be able to leave behind the black metal scene and role into something more interesting. Cold Meat Industry was one of the labels that I discovered and from which I bought dark ambient and strange industrial. Then there was this act with corpsepaint and whatnot even making a style of music that I -at the time- did not like: noise. Well actually, they called it “black industrial”, setting it aside Brighter Death Now’s “death industrial” as Satanic black metal stood aside death metal.

I never really took a descent listen at MZ.412. I have (heard) some of their albums, but I never tried the entire discography. The more death and dark industrial albums sound better to me than some others. After almost 10 years after the last ‘real’ album, Maschinenzimmer moved to Cold Spring and brings a brand new album. Well, “brand-new”… there are some tracks that sound very familiar even to me.

MZ starts with a little surprise, almost martial industrial tones. Soon we are thrown into the deep and dark pits of rhythmic industrial and low-frequency noise. Some tracks are very good, others are less interesting, but certainly not bad. “Hekatomb” became a reasonable ‘comeback’ for our Scandinavian terror korps.

Links: Nordvargr, Cold Spring

Iron Fist Of The Sun ‎* We Can Yield Our Own Footsteps (cd 2015)

Recently I bought the “Embers” 7″, but it proved to be from 2011, so I did not review it. I have known Iron Fist Of The Sun (or IFOTS on the latest releases) by name for quite a while, but I never really got to listen to this project from the UK until recently.

Deezer has the 2009 album “Behavioural Decline”. It is comparable to the “Embers” 7″, the “We Can Yield…” album currently under review and the “Live At The Garage” live mcd that I got with the album, but perhaps the last one is more intense. The music is roughly comparable to IRM or Skin Area. Pretty extreme noise, but not as extreme as Whitehouse or Merzbow. Here and there the sound leans toward ‘ambient noise’ and one track can even be described as a ‘soundscape’ (or a ‘noisescape’).

Some tracks are certainly dark and moody, but I do not like every track as much as the next. I do like the very extreme vocals, which is also one of the reasons I have to think of IRM.

Overall “We Can Yield Our Own Footsteps” is a fair album with a couple of very good tracks.

Links: Iron Fist Of The Sun, Cold Spring

Trepaneringsritualen * Veil The World (2011/2014)

Cold Spring recently rereleased this early Trepaneringsritualen tape. (The very first release (“Ritualer, Blot & Botgöring“) has been rereleased on cd by the Rusian label Infinite Fog Productions.) “Veil The World” contains the typical Trepaneringsritualen death industrial sound, but what makes these ‘early’ recordings interesting are the times that the distortion is limited and the sound goes into a more ‘minimal wave’ direction. These less typical elements make “Veil The World” not only interesting for archival reasons, but also shows that Cold Spring made a good choice to rerelease this particular tape.

Links: Trepaneringsritualen, Cold Spring Records

v/a * Treatmeant Of The Dead (cd 2014)

The latest Cold Spring sampler is a very very noisy one. The most eye-catching track is one by “Coil / Nine Inch Nails”, but the most ear-cathing is the track of Trepaneringsritualen. For the rest there are project that I already knew (Merzbow, Troum, Burial Hex, Skullflower, Iron Fist Of The Sun and Z’ev) and projects that I did not know, or only heard of (Sol, Tunnels of Ah, Shift, Mesektet, Khost and Sutekh Hexen).
Like I said, the compilation is pretty noisy, also with ear-piercing high frequencies and little structure. Not all my taste, but it is always nice to hear new projects.
Link: Cold Spring Records