altar auditory pleasures

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The long running stirrings of Surgeon (Anthony Child) and Regis (Karl O’Connor) under the conjunct British Murder Boys are not for the faint of heart. Their alleged final act came before a Tokyo crowd in 2012, but the goodbye only lasted three years and with their Amsterdam return, a reformulation of their signature industrial sound. The duo, both at their acme with little signs of descent, have together found a hybrid techno that scales high and large, bringing together thumping bass and hissing feedback for a distinctly belligerent and primal club sound. It’s not all obvious, their 2020 cover of Lou Reed’s Real Good Time Together offered a machine-inflected spin on the original, and opened the door for their debut LP Active Agents And House Boys (2024). At the heart is a provocative, sexually-charged and punkish techno that offloads bristling rhythms and defiant energy, one that’s a little more controlled and mathematical in practice. Following on from their show at Bassiani back in November comes this next mix. Bassiani Podcast 250 is an hour-long and live recorded assault: thrashing beats, crazed and bleepy arps, EBM-style shouts, a decadent and rageful call to arms and one of the most important instalments in this long running series. Back-breaking industrial techno from these two heavyweights and originators of the Birmingham sound.

Bassiani invites British Murder Boys [live] / Podcast #250

Full Tracklist: https://bleep.com/bleep-mix-297--sandwell-district

For our latest Bleep Mix instalment, Sandwell District come through with a hefty programming of dark rollers fulfilling that promise of reinvigorated purpose they mentioned before: “Having a good time”. And with a wealth of exclusive unheard material it’s hard to refute the mission statement. Dropping straight into the cavernous environs of an unreleased Regis side Frosty Jack’s, the selection rides a restrained line building tension through a number of Nastia Reigel tracks deployed with utmost precision before upping its stride with Luke Slater’s Planetary Assault Systems and quickly landing first peak from The Wizard himself, with Jeff Mills' slamming ‘93 cut Step to Enchantment (Stringent). Taking in a track from their comrade Surgeon’s forthcoming album, as well as the simmering acid of their own tune Hidden, Sandwell District bring it back round full circle via two further unreleased reworks of heroes Meat Beat Manifesto providing a breakbeat singed rupture to close out the proceedings with the vocal snatches of MBM’s Helter Skelter summing it all up really: “It's in my brain now. This is it!”

Bleep Mix #297 - Sandwell District

There’s beauty in chaos and method to madness, that much is true to the work of this faceless duo from Sweden. SHXCXCHCXSH’s strain of anarchic noise has sparked conversations and head-spinning records ever since the two producers first swapped notes in 2009. For about a decade, Hannes Stenström and Emmanuel Pascal Moreno stayed out of the public eye as a matter of principle, stripping music to its very base, without the weight of prejudice and social context holding it back: ’we prefer to listen to music in the dark, preferably without knowing who made it, when or how’. From the chaos and their loyalty to instinct came the need to find new structures, and so their faceless records united around a theme or musical element. It was a gamble, but their sledgehammer destruction of techno conventions gave some of the most intriguing sounds of the 2010s. Sampling everything from podcasts to YouTube to field recordings, they’re always on the hunt for ‘in-between’, ‘unintentional’ details, a way to composite the strangest and most innovative techno out there. Their staggering releases on Avian pioneered new sounds (and track names), and successfully manufactured the type of music you could hear both at home and in clubs; and 2024 saw them resurrect their Rösten imprint with the release of DO, an infernal four-tracker made for the dancefloor. Bassiani Podcast 257 explores that format further, bringing their stabbing and psychedelic havoc to a crowd facing setting. Immersive and heavy-duty, this one’s an hour-long clip of their snake-pit percussions, mind-bending techno from the enigmatic Norrköping duo.

@shxcxchcxsh

Bassiani invites SHXCXCHCXSH [live] / Podcast #257

The Contort champion takes a bludgeon to the NTS Manchester once a month with an hour offering of wonky electronics and avant-garde sound.  
Find the full tracklist and related episodes on NTS: https://www.nts.live/shows/samuel-kerridge/episodes/samuel-kerridge-24th-may-2025

Samuel Kerridge 240525

REGIS - 'GODFLESH SUPPORT SET' 15:9:2015 @ 'WARSAW'. GREENPOINT, BROOKLYN.

Myth

Artist: Alex Augier
Title: The Fourier Ghost - I / The Fourier Ghost - II
Label: The Collection Artaud (http://thecollectionartaud.com)
Cat #: TCA 14
Format: Vinyl / Digital
Country: DE
Release Date: 01 Nov 2018

- TRACKLIST
A. The Fourier Ghost - I
B. The Fourier Ghost - II

- CREDITS
Written & Produced by Alex Augier (@alexaugier)
Mastering by Yu Miyashita at Underarrow (http://underarrow.com)

Share / Support

Alex Augier - "The Fourier Ghost - I / The Fourier Ghost - II" (Preview) [TCA 14]

The Fourier Ghost (EP)
The Collection Artaud - 2018

A1 The Fourier Ghost I
B1 The Fourier Ghost II

Buy digital and vinyl edition at Bandcamp:
https://thecollectionartaud.bandcamp.com/album/the-fourier-ghost-i-the-fourier-ghost-ii

The Fourier Ghost II

<a href='https://theartistunion.com/tracks/79e443'>Download for free on The Artist Union</a>

Artwork by Nahshi

BDJ TOOL

From the forthcoming '37 Minute Workout Vol.2' DIAG055.

THE PRESENT INTERWEAVES WITH THE PAST: 
NOTES ON RUSSELL HASWELL’S 37 MINUTE WORKOUT VOL. 2

A less frenzied sister act to the original, Russell Haswell’s 37 Minute Workout Vol. 2 explores yet new ground for the artist. Opener ‘The Wild Horses of the Revolution Have Arrived Without a Knight’ bubbles and froths in a wide-open space that’s immediately at odds with the mostly dense and combustible torrents in volume one. The Quietus acutely observed of his 2018 mini-LP, Respondent, that rhythm feels like liberation rather than confinement for Haswell, and here we swim in a seething assemblage of rhythmic objects that ceaselessly curve, warp and reemerge around stretching/contracting moments of silence — and our minds. If Xenakis had written ‘Nomos Alpha’ for drum machine rather than single cello it might have sounded something like this. 

Haswell often jokes that the first volume was the first time a record took less time to make than the actual duration of the recording, and this second volume continues the approach: 37 minutes of realtime improvisation that progressively degrade the non-categorisable, outside-time structures he creates. The sense is that the machines have been running since 2014, and Haswell has chosen to hit record again, segmenting a slice, not just of the music, but of the forces at play in his life. The title of ‘Painful Memories From the Past Need to Be Acknowledged’ suggests such an intervention of the present into the past, while the piece itself affirms as a sparkling mosaic of synthetic interpolation. 

There is beautiful compositional intelligence at work despite the immediacy of the process, an intelligence ruled and mediated by machines serving other machines, which are, in turn, governed by the artist. Technique here is not simply improvisation/randomisation: it is years of immersion, work, love, vision — all consolidated into an intensely personal process, the physical means that brings these musical objects into existence. The record assumes the feeling of a luminous flow or emission of photons caught in varying degrees of density and disorder.

The artist, on submitting the final recordings, wanted it known that he’d recently visited CERN, The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Geneva; he also had dinner with Ted Nelson, whose theories of interwingularity and transclusion seem apt. Embedded within Haswell’s own hyper-text/hyper-audio formations are an array of sonic influences, from Xenakian stochastics to strobing flashbacks of Mills bringing down the legendary Eclipse back in the artist’s ho
metown of Coventry [‘Cov!’]; but there is also the sense that, embedded here, are the effects of new paths forged outside music — the uprooting of home and studio from London to Glasgow, or simply the malignant political and social forces that swirl around us, dragging us all, kicking and screaming, over the cliff of 2019. 

As Plato said in Timaeus, the movement of sounds, even when not conforming to representational standards [something Haswell has always sought to resist], “procure a common pleasure for those who do not know how to reason; and for those who do know, a reasoned joy through the imitation of the divine harmony which they realise in perishable movements.” The structures here stoically assembled — and disassembled — by Haswell leave openings through which the most complex and mysterious factors of the intelligence may penetrate.

DIAG055 Russell Haswell 'The Wild Horses Of The Revolution Have Arrived Without A Knight'

DIAGONAL