ROMsets is the latest musical “outsider” to join Machine Woman’s label, Take Away Jazz Records, making it his debut signing following a string of self-releases. Following on from Sid Quirk, he is the second external artist welcomed to the imprint, as owner Anastasia Vtorova uses her homegrown platform to bring underground talent to the surface – but never too far above.

Oz Echoes peels away another layer of Australia’s ‘80s DIY hive mind. The Oz Waves successor exposes a deeper circuit of micro-run cassettes, community radio archives and irrationally abandoned studio sessions, as Steele Bonus sequences a 10-track compendium of drone pop, psyche-electronics and agitated tape cut-ups.

Using the space age obsession of the Italian libraries as a launch pad, CV Vision (Dennis Schulze) slathers a sonic storyboard with ferocious percussion, psychedelic fuzz and the pastoral electronics of Germany’s Kosmische movement. But this is less Can, more uncanny – and Schulze perfectly renders the cognitive estrangement of a simulated reality through his adventurous production. The monolithic live drums, recorded in a Neukölln garage on a battered Soviet kit are smeared with tape hiss, compressed to death and fired through LFOs, re-materialising on record in impossible scale. Time slips out of joint under the wow and flutter of the reel to reel, drum computers add digital interference to organic rhythms and the unfaltering slew of the 303 lends the hallucinatory thrill of the club sound system to an already psychedelic affair.

…und nun Werbung.

Common Building Inspection Faults. In this video you can hear the sound of termites detected when carrying out pre-purchase building inspections in and around the Brisbane area. Action Property Inspections has been providing expert building inspection advice to home buyers throughout the greater Brisbane area since 1995.

For Action Property Inspections call 4000 1800 642 465, Suite 402, Level 1/241 Adelaide St, Brisbane.

First in the WAR ROOM series – WAR ROOM and O.T.K. to be entirely collected and issued as a CD box set soon.

Alive… without a body… fed by an unspeakable horror from hell! A doctor experimenting with transplant techniques keeps his girlfriend’s head alive when she is decapitated in a car crash, then goes hunting for a new body.

 

Cyberpunk is a 1990 documentary that explores the world that William Gibson invented with his book Neuromancer. The bulk of the documentary consists of interviews with Gibson, Jaron Lanier, Timothy Leary and Michael Synergy. A few industrial bands have their music featured as well.

The original Nature Boy.

George Alexander Aberle, known as Eden Ahbez (April 15, 1908 – March 4, 1995), was an American songwriter and recording artist of the 1940s to 1960s, whose lifestyle in California was influential in the hippie movement. He was known to friends simply as ahbe.

Ahbez composed the song “Nature Boy”, which became a No. 1 hit for eight weeks in 1948 for Nat “King” Cole. Living a bucolic life from at least the 1940s, he traveled in sandals and wore shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He camped out below the first L in the Hollywood Sign above Los Angeles and studied Oriental mysticism. He slept outdoors with his family and ate vegetables, fruits, and nuts. He claimed to live on three dollars per week.

Hamburg’s post-kraut-electro trio Love-Songs and Ulf Schütte (Datashock, Phantom Horse, LittleWhirls) have formed a group named Love-Songs & U. Schütte for the duration of one long-playing record.

This body of work bears the modest title [Spannende Musik] – an attribution which sounds not in the least bit pejorative to those with no skin in the game: “Yes, it really is exciting music!” The adjective pinned to the music may go deeper: “spannend” can also express tension, in this case not to convey a mood or a tense thriller, but in a physical sense.

The purely descriptive titles of the individual tracks, lifted from annotations of music in film sub-titles, lead us further astray than we might have first thought – which brings us back to the actual meaning of tension and what it is capable of evoking on a semantic and aesthetic level, something which contemporary music painfully lacks: a certain unreliability.