Ergastolo — Ergastolo

Here’s a self-titled debut album from this new Italian wall noise project, which focuses on creating bass grinding and static searing HNW. The digital album consists of four fifteen-minute tracks, with a total runtime of one hour.

Wood Matress — Foul Synapse

Foul Synapse is intensely rapid, galloping, and baying slab of walled noise from this Illinois project. It’s a single track at around the thirty-one-minute mark, and boy, is it an unrelenting ride, with some nice shifts really upping the intensity of the whole thing.

We Bury the Dead — We Bury the Dead (Blu Ray)

We Bury the Dead is a 2024 survival horror movie from writer/ director Zak Hilditch (1922, These Final Hours and Rattlesnake), starring Daisy Ridley (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Murder on the Orient Express and Young Woman of the Sea), Mark Coles Smith (Mystery Road: Origin, Last Cab to Darwin and Pawno), Brenton Thwaites (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Gods of Egypt and Oculus) and Matt Whelan (Workmates, Narcos and The Tavern).

Chimehours — Underneath the Earth

Underneath the Earth is the debut album from Chimehours, a hauntological project from Beck Goldsmith and John Dix. Those with a penchant for Folk Horror and all its trappings are probably going to find a lot to enjoy here. The band mix dark folk vibes with a love of 70s British Occult and horror cinema to create something that is tender and beautiful but underpinned with a sinister edge that references other dark folk masters like Comus, Darkher or even the early days of The Unthanks when they were still called Rachael Unthank and the Winterset. It’s an exquisitely beautiful record that would not sound out of place as the soundtrack to one of McKenzie Crook’s beautifully magical TV series. For example, this would sound great as the soundtrack to the Crook’s recent foray into the Occult, Small Prophets.

Mancunian low-budget Movie Mogul

Cliff Twemlow On Severin

One of last year’s real big surprises in the world of Blu-ray box sets was Bloody Legend: The Complete Twemlow Collection, as it was a wholly entertaining, fascinating, and at times heart-warming set. The Severin released boxset brought together the work of one of the UK’s unlikeliest movie moguls- Cliff Twemlow, a Mancunian bouncer/ body builder, who went on to write/star in/produce a series of low-budget/ largely SOV films in the early 80s to early 90s- these moved between action, thriller, sci-fi, and horror. His most notable/notorious film was 1983’s G.B.H., which landed on the video nasty list, though he was connected to other ten feature films, many of which got their first real full/proper release on the boxset. Opening up the set was the excellent 2023 documentary Mancunian Man: The Legendary Life of Cliff Twemlow, which really pulls you into the set. I caught up with Severn’s David Gregory and Jake West, director of Mancunian Man, to discuss the boxset and all things cliff.

Repetitious History - A Quick Trip Into The World Of The Fall

The Fall

MES( Mark E Smith- The Falls main creator) possessed the ability to cram phrases into impossible spaces - “I’m hunting and I’m trying to find” delivered as “hut’na tryna find”; the eight-syllable “mere pseud mag editor’s father” hastily squeezed into a manipulation of time and space, heralded by the prior line “twice each at least”, the latter naturally repeated thrice.