2018: A Year In Fuzz

Dead Vibrations - Chemical Hug

Dreamweapon - Mashinne

Since forming back in 2008, Finnish garage-rockers Black Lizard have been busy leading the charge in the ever-fruitful Scandinavian underground with their relentless gig schedule and a constant stream of releases. They’ve collaborated with the likes of Anton Newcombe and Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3/Spectrum) and toured Europe several times, appearing at a number of festivals including Great Escape as well as sharing the stage with everyone from Brian Jonestown Massacre, DIIV, The Men, The Horrors, Allah-Las and Veronica Falls. On February 23rd Black Lizard will be releasing their third album, Celebration Of A New Dawn, on London imprint Fuzz Club Records. Recorded in the basement of a rundown 50s movie theatre turned recording studio, the new album is a sublime excursion into Sixties-indebted, washed-out garage-pop. ‘Celebration Of…’ is Black Lizards best album yet; bright, vivid and lysergic, the record manages to be unapologetically nostalgic yet carve out its own glorious, introspective pastiche - repackaging the Nuggets-esque garage/psych-pop and early-90s shoegaze swoons for 21st-century wastoids.

Celebration Of A New Dawn

Black Lizard - Sinking Ship

Nest Egg

Nest Egg - Denied Doctrine

Medistation is a brand new alt-rock/noise pop project from The Orange Revival’s Eric Strand. Rumbling out of Stockholm on a cloud of feedback and reverb, the debut recordings from the project - a self-titled five-track 12" EP. On the EP, Medistation sound like the best band that Creation never signed – channelling the sluggish razor-sharp guitars and commanding vocals of the Mary Chain with glimmers of ethereal noise-pop that falls somewhere between the gospel-psychedelia of Spiritualized and Primal Scream before Gillespie discovered acid-house and amphetamines at the turn of the nineties.  Guest appearances by Jake Garcia ( The Black Angels / The Ripe) and Cobian Modeste (The Buttertones). Available on 12" vinyl from fuzz club.com

Medistation

Medistation - Pool Of Blood

All Tomorrow's Shadows

The Third Sound - Photographs (feat. Anton Newcombe)

Great Vowel Shift

Sherpa The Tiger - Peninsula

Parallel Universes

Routine Death - Charm Tooth

Tooth Ache is taken from RF Shannon's sophomore album, Trickster Blues, due for release May 4th on Fuzz Club in Europe and Cosmic Dreamer in the US. Pre-order the vinyl at fuzzclub.com

RF Shannon - Tooth Ache

Lumerians - Silver Trash

Crimen - Six Weeks

Salvation Prayer

You Said Strange - Brain

RMFTM & 10,000 Russos

RMFTM & 10,000 Russos - A Song To Get Rid Of Crooked Crosses

Rumbling out of the humid, mountainous plains of Tucson, Arizona is The Myrrors, something of a singular entity in the exploratory psychedelic underground. For over a decade their self-professed “Sonoran trance music” has been inducing states of bewildered paralysis on audiences across the world - when the band are left to their own devices even the most adamant mind will struggle to break free from their enchanting, utterly-mesmeric spell.

With three highly-praised albums behind them and a fourth out soon on Beyond Beyond Is Beyond, London-label Fuzz Club are set to release a new live album from the band as part of their Fuzz Club Session series, which has previously boasted the likes of Night Beats, Heaters, Holy Wave, The Entrance Band and many more. Being long-time favourites of the label – Fuzz Club having released their debut album ‘Burning Circles In The Sky’ – it was only a matter of time until The Myrrors' sprawling, sun-weathered drone found a home in the Fuzz Club Session collection.
The Myrrors' session is comprised of three bewitching tracks that evoke warm images of the sandy plains of the Sonoran desert that they call home, underpinned by a worldly influence of traditional Eastern folk. Complete with meandering violins, shamanic vocals and slow-burning (yet oh-so-expansive) instrumentation, the live recording of the Fuzz Club Session allows the tracks to take on an even more hypnotic form. Though it may have been recorded in The Pool Studio in South East London, if you close your eyes you might just find yourself transported back in time to a ramshackle opium den surrounded by vacant minds and the lingering smell of incense.

The LP is comprised of one track from their 2015 opus Arena Negra ('Juanito Laguna...'), one from a special 45 released back in 2016 ('Semillas Sembradas') and a brand new cut from their forthcoming album, Borderlands, to be released later this year ('Note From The Underground'). The Myrrors’ Fuzz Club Session is due for release July 27th on vinyl with accompanying videos that were filmed on the day.

Fuzz Club Session

The Myrrors - Juanito Laguna Duerme Con Los Grillos

For Berlin duo Medicine Boy, their melancholic noise pop is less about all-out-noise than it is about exploring the spaces in-between. Grinding organs and soft desolate piano sink beneath waves of guitar that are at times gentle and drifting, at others feral and unforgiving. All the while, Lucy and Andre’s voices remain entwined and intimate – sometimes discordant, yet always heavenly. The result is a truly remarkable sound that sits somewhere between PJ Harvey, Mazzy Star and TJ&MC, yet exists in a sombre world of its own. Laying out their mantra, the band explain: “The joy of working with noise is that you can take something that appears to be quite sweet and simple and expose the sordid parts of it. Or celebrate the sublime in it. Ideally a bit of both.” 

Originally hailing from Cape Town, South Africa, André Leo and Lucy Kruger founded the project back in 2014, self-releasing their debut EP to international appraise. By the time their debut full-length, Kinda Like Electricity, was released into the world their ever-growing fanbase had extended far beyond the confines of Africa, solidified further with two tours around Europe and the UK in 2015 and 2016. Now residing in Berlin, Medicine Boy are gearing up for the release of their incredible second album Lower on October 5th, due for release via London-based label Fuzz Club.

Uncertainty, fragility and the unknown all sit at the heart of this record. Even when Medicine Boy are at their most delicate and beautiful, things constantly feel like they’re teetering on the edge, ready to collapse at any given moment. And, like the calm before the storm, often it does - veering unexpectedly into a whirlwind of buzzsaw guitars, primal percussion and snarling vocals. That same gloomy ethereality constantly floating close to the surface. The band explain that this antagonistic relationship more than likely explains the aquatic theme through the album – ‘Bottom Of The Blue’ and ‘Water Girl’ being two stand-out tracks: “I don’t quite know why but the theme of water is all over this record. Something about the tranquillity and uncertainty, perhaps. The violence just beneath the surface. The potential for a sudden shift in tide.” 

With the relocation to Berlin and Fuzz Club signing, Lower marks an exciting new chapter in Medicine Boy’s story. From the beginning, this attempt to deconstruct our relationship with noise has been at the heart of the band but on this new effort, we see the band sounding better than ever, exploring that relationship even further and proving beyond any reasonable doubt why the band have been picking up such a buzz. As the band themselves put it: “Lower is a myriad of introspection and interpretation. There are wider themes, stranger worlds and deeper wells than before. It is some kind of attempt to draw comfort (however twisted) and companionship (however tainted) from chaos and confusion. It's our attempt to find beauty in the underworld.”

Lower

Medicine Boy - Bottom Of The Blue

Fill The Void

The Underground Youth - Fill The Void

Following a recalibration and consolidation with their recent electronics-inflected album, 2018’s U.E.F., The Oscillation is back with their sixth and most ambitious album to date, Wasted Space. A meditation on the nature of existence in the face of what can be insurmountable odds, Wasted Space finds The Oscillation painting from the darker shades of the kaleidoscopic scale.

“The origins of Wasted Space go back to Monographic in 2016,” muses Demian Castellanos - the mastermind behind The Oscillation. “That was a very bleak and heavy record and I really needed to move out of that mindset. Making U.E.F freed me up to write a coherent collection of narrative songs and compositions. Wasted Space is a partial continuation of a journey started with U.E.F., but one that re-incorporates more song-based ideas again.”

What’s immediately apparent is that Wasted Space sets it stall well away from the prosaic third-eye tropes that have become orthodoxy. Album opener ‘Entity’ establishes the pace with a focus on the dancefloor as much as on the navigation of existence. Fusing muscular grooves with an industrial wall of sound, these are bold steps into wholly new territories.

“There’s an irony at play here,” considers Castellanos. “It’s a twisted party song, albeit a party for one.” But what a party it is. The mutant disco is bolstered by the rhythmic call-and-response of ‘Drop’, a track that eschews conventional methods of dance sensibility for more instinctive and primal urges. This is music that calls out to the suitably attuned. “We’re reaching out on an innate level,” says Castellanos. “It’s a form of wordless communication that transcends the limitations of verbal language and thought processes.”

Wasted Space’s more somatic moments are tempered and balanced by episodes of contemplation and reflection. Fuelled by dreamy, orchestral sweeps and mournful, sustained notes, ‘The Human Shell’ is a deceptive yet redemptive piece that at first glance appears to be resigned to the futility of existence. But look once again and there you’ll find hope. “People will be able to relate to this song,” states Castellanos. “There's a lot of love and empathy in there and it reaches out to say that we’re not alone, that we don’t have to exist independently of each other.”

Bringing Wasted Space to an emphatic conclusion is the epic instrumental ‘Luminous Being’. Ambitious in scope and delivery, it methodically and unequivocally slow releases repressed emotions to throw the wider world into sharper focus. Hedonistic yet reflective, Wasted Space is an album that moves purposely along a high wire as it finds the perfect balance between dealing with life and escaping it. The Oscillation’s finest album yet, Wasted Space is the area to which you’ll return to again and again.

Wasted Space is due for release September 21st.