[engl] It's all over town. In 2021 it's time again for a new The Monsters (official) album and thus also for a new Sounds of Subterrania Special Edition. It's time to rewrite the history of the record cover. 2021 is about nothing more and nothing less than giving back Punk the Do It Yourself. Are you ready for the greatest adventure of your life? Are you ready to face the most difficult task of your record collecting life and to turn a phrase into a creed, stitch by stitch? Your set consists "You're Class, I'm Trash" as an English and a Swiss version, canvas, 5,500 cm of thread and a needle. Everything is wrapped in an XL poster with a velvet sleeve and peppered with the irrefutable certainty that you will have to fight this battle alone. It's up to you to bring the artwork to perfection and to prove what only a true fan is capable of. The sets (Janosh, Swan-Lee or the Beat-Man himself) are strictly limited and only available directly from Sounds of Subterrania.

[engl] “Man, talk about deja vu all over again: I just saw Outburst last week and it was amazing to witness people go apeshit for them, some literally not born yet when I caught them last in 1989. This vibe continues upon listening to Big Cheese’s debut 7” on Quality Control HQ. The record is basically a love letter to the NYHC sound during the late 1980s: I hear a Killing Time/Leeway mosh part here, an Altercation/Warzone divebomb there, of course the aforementioned greats in Outburst, and how the hell does a northern UK lad sing a la Jeff Perlin from Breakdown?! These are all good points in my book as sometimes the implementation of retro styles can be a colorless, slavish reproduction of the past with no heart at it’s core. This is not the case here as the obvious affection for a particular time and place manifests itself in well executed grooves that both reflect and transcend their influences. Kudos to old friend Don Fury for a nice, crisp production and to Big Cheese for getting it right and flying the flag for an atavistic ethos that’s near and dear to my heart.” Freddy Alva, Wardance Records, New York and Author of Urban Styles: Graffiti in New York Hardcore Big Cheese fly the flag for the New Wave of British Hardcore and hail from various parts of ‘The North’ of the UK. Members are also currently in bands such as Higher Power, Blind Authority and Rapture, and have previously played in Violent Reaction and Shrapnel.

[engl] Game returns after their 2019 full-length No One Wins with the Legerdemain EP. Piercing the listener with nonstop aural carnage, the EP would be an apt soundtrack to the armageddon. Part Venom, part Death Side, all live and loud, Legerdemain offers no restful moments. An instrumental masterclass with blistering drumming from Jonah Falco, weird and wonderful guitar melodies conjured up by Cal Baird, and a rumbling and decapitating buzzsaw bass by Nicky Rat, the release's finishing move is an ever-changing vocal tone by Ola H. Legerdemain can be a rewarding, or punishing, aural journey depending on your perspective. The new release, which was recorded and mixed by Jonah and mastered by extreme music legend Arthur Rizk finds Game leaning heavily into their metal influences, with sounds of early 80s UK steel given extra ferocity through the lens of Japanese hardcore punk from the same era. Having toured multiple times in Europe and North America, Game, which features members of Fucked Up, Arms Race and Violent Reaction, is equally comfortable playing to punks, metalheads and everyone in between. ‘Legerdemain’ is a magician’s term meaning sleight of hand, a key skill of deception. The term is used as a metaphor for our current post-truth society where governments, technocracies, and financial institutions use smoke and mirrors to create a farcical and bewildering existence where one cannot know if something is real or not in order to cover up social injustice and mechanisms that drive inequality. As Legerdemain progresses, one is being continually dragged along towards an apocalyptic ending on "Release", which reflects on this current predicament as a nuclear explosion approaches with nothing left to do except give into the madness. There is a constant cycle of rising again, fighting against wrong doing, exhaustion, and endings. The lyrics in Polish, English and a sprinkle of French, represent the multinational members of the band, who feel culturally in a no man’s land, which in fact is everyone’s experience in 2021. Legerdemain tries to answer this anomie with urgent metal punk that is hauntingly relevant.

[engl] Second Album from Brad Marino (The Connection, New Trocaderos, Rydells).

[engl] Powerpop Pearls!

[engl] Powerpop Pearls!

[engl] Porto Geese is an alternative rock band with elements from noise rock, alternative indie, death- and industrial rock and you can also hear the occasional glimpse of post-punk and shoegaze driven by catchy twangy synth melodies clad in walls of noise guitar.

[engl] Recorded live at the Blow Out Festival at Victoria / Nasjonal Jazzscene in Oslo, August 21st 2020, by Sindre Bergsvik Øvstegård. A brilliant live performance at one of Norway's finest venues, performed in fornt of a corona restricted audience. The duo's patience and attention to all the small details in the sounds they instruments produce gave a seated crowd strongly needed meditative treatment.

[engl] Nantais by adoption, the Australian Will Guthrie is a discreet star of the international scene of free, experimental and improvised music; over the past fifteen years, he has developed an open and personal approach to drums and percussion, skillfully blurring the lines between his brilliant jazz upbringing, his passion for traditional musics, and his inexhaustible interest in experimental and noise creation, with a pronounced taste for a physical and raw approach to sound. With thousands of performances and some fifty albums to his credit, the Australian regularly dispenses his vibratory art solo or alongside the best of improvisation; From Oren Ambarchi to Roscoe Mitchell via Jérôme Noetinger, Anthony Pateras, David Maranha, Ava Mendoza, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Keith Rowe or even Mark Fell. In recent months Guthrie has performed with Tunisian singer Ghassen Chiba, toured as part of “All Around”, a performance with Danish dancer choreographer Mette Ingvarsten and founded the Ensemble Nist-Nah, a gamelan orchestra, in the company of eight other percussionists, out of which Black Truffle published an album, with a second on the way. He also found the time to put in shape a second volume of “People Pleaser”, a discographic act between an autographical assessment, the parenthesis and the musical UFO. A singular exercise in Guthrie's discography, “People Pleaser”, a series initiated in 2017, sees the Australian partially put down his drumsticks and wear a producer cap for a result offering a resolutely singular perspective of / on his work with a very personal dimension. On the first volume, with a cover signed Stephen O'Malley sets the tone by diverting the chamaré Warhol influenced visual of the album “Unit Structures” by Cecil Taylor. The portrait of the free jazz pianist has been replaced by passport photos of Guthrie. The result is a diversion into a fairly “Pop” aesthetic whose musical content works in a fairly similar way. Four years later, the cover art's undertones are slightly darker and Guthrie hasn't aged a bit on his new passport photo. The twelve tracks of this second “People Pleaser” combine and arrange field recordings, heady loops, twists, musical quotes stuck on bedside records, recorded moments captured during travels, ghosty voices from low-fi lands, a police interview tape and imagined exotic sounds ... Guthrie could walk us for hours on his hard drive like looking at a photo album but he chose to build pieces based on this very personal sound material, much like a mixtape, with special care given to how sounds articulate, overlap and collide. He thus invites his heroes and his friends to join him in skilfully chiseled and finely edited imaginary jams. The first to take pleasure in this “People Pleaser” is undoubtedly its author as some of his finds are enjoyably playful; we are there embarked in an addictive sound patchwork at high speed where a Balinese Squarepusher is propelled via a defective cathode ray tube in a temple where the happy marriage of the saxophone and the gong is celebrated before this too short respite is interrupted by a sustained hip hop rhythm. The multiplicity and variety of sources give the whole a very pop format and the way in which Guthrie combines sounds, textures, rhythms and vocal elements quickly takes on a narrative dimension and poses this exercise between hip hop and a very personal plunderphonic, evoking as much J Dilla or RZA as the irreverent inventiveness of People Like Us or Wobbly. Will Guthrie has never been in as good company as on a solo album, he also lists on the cover the list of friends, heroes, members of his family and countries who inspired him and to whom he pays homage / collage on this new disc; An aesthetic exercise apart in his discography, both infinitely personal and self-centered and resolutely turned towards what animates him, the aptly named “People Pleaser” reveals the music DNA of the Australian and can be listened to on repeat.

[engl] Member of the rhythm section of La Colonie de Vacances, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy — the singularly sharp drummer of Pneu, Papaye or Binidu, and sound sculptor in Tachycardie (a shamanic project of polymorphic drones) — joins forces with Guillaume Brot, guitarist of Llamame La Muerte and Tu Brüles Mon Esprit for a project that’s light years from a guitar / drums two piece planet. United Color of Black Metal shows us “all the color” in abstract and experimental forms and offers to hear an intriguing “Petite Musique of Noises” which evokes the work of the heroes of the electroacoustic / noise of the dawn of the 90s as well as the sabotages of the electronic twists of the turn of the century. Both UCBM machinists set in motion a noisy menagerie — frequencies and trajectories voluntarily escape their intervention. It gives to their fragile constructions an additional freedom and some dynamics. Heterogeneous sound objects confront each other in a minimalism that tames the unpredictable; these moving sounds seem to be left to their own devices, intersect, flee, and sometimes confuse their courses in precious moments — it’s sensitivity and narrative power generate a real poetic dimension. This cerebral music refuses to start a beef. It draws using a palette of imperfect and damaged concrete sounds: magnetic pulsations, eroded tones, dirty oscillations, tinkling of wood and metal, residual breath and rustling of all kinds. Articulated in six parts, from I to III and from V to VII, Synchronicités connects arrhythmia distillations, busted gamelan and concrete epiphanies in pieces rarely exceeding five minutes. You’ll hear the first crackling of the transistor — and when the slightest caress will rumble, your ear will be trapped, captivated and attracted into a new sequence of an “ear cinema” knocked up under the lean-to of your backyard. If there is anything black about United Color of Black Metal — apart from the shadow in which Brot and Geoffroy indulge — it is undoubtedly the humor. Neither multicolored, nor really black and even less metal, at most furtively metallic, this project is above all resolutely elusive. Synchronicités offers in a polished sobriety a serious, loose and challenging music displaying a persistent smirk. These pieces recall the compositions like Illusion of Safety of Dan Burke as much as the sound trademarks of the German labels AMusik and Sonig. Allow me introduce the second LP of United Color of Black Metal — an easy-listening record for deaf & tough guys.

[engl] WEEED is an American biocosmic rock n roll band from Portland, Oregon, formed in 2009. The band consists of Gabriel Seaver (guitar, bass, vocals, keyboards), Mitchy Fosnaugh (guitar, vocals, flute), John Goodhue (drums), Evan Franz (drums), and Ian Hartley (percussion). They are known for their cathartic, rhythm heavy live shows and for blending progressive compositions with improvisation and trance. Do You Fall? will be their seventh full length release. Music trance, letting go, relinquishment, releasing, catharsis... these themes are represented in the title. Falling can be seen as a foundational experience of being human and learning to walk on this Earth. It is associated with grief and loss, as well as new love. This theme of falling is deeply tied to the context in which this music came to be. Sometimes songs may serve as the catalyst and the medicine for emotional transformation.

[engl] WEEED is an American biocosmic rock n roll band from Portland, Oregon, formed in 2009. The band consists of Gabriel Seaver (guitar, bass, vocals, keyboards), Mitchy Fosnaugh (guitar, vocals, flute), John Goodhue (drums), Evan Franz (drums), and Ian Hartley (percussion). They are known for their cathartic, rhythm heavy live shows and for blending progressive compositions with improvisation and trance. Do You Fall? will be their seventh full length release. Music trance, letting go, relinquishment, releasing, catharsis... these themes are represented in the title. Falling can be seen as a foundational experience of being human and learning to walk on this Earth. It is associated with grief and loss, as well as new love. This theme of falling is deeply tied to the context in which this music came to be. Sometimes songs may serve as the catalyst and the medicine for emotional transformation.

[engl] "one of the very first bands of the first wave of american punk rock, along with the screamers, the avengers, the weirdos… this record compiles all studio songs, the first demo as well as their three singles ! b-side features extra live recordings : 7 songs that never got recorded in studio featuring the california all-time classic punk rock record single «i hate the rich » includes liner notes from the band very own chip kinman : ""we wrote songs. wrote them on guitars and played them really, really loud…"" "

[engl] from los angeles, california, the weirdos formed in 1976. they are one of the most iconic american bands of punk's first wave. influenced by the ramones, new york dolls and iggy pop's stooges, they helped define los angeles early punk sound and attitude originally released 30 years ago, this compilation is now available again on vinyl !!! this records features 14 tracks originally released on early demos and singles. including lyrics and credit sheet !!

[engl] this hardcore punk classic is 40 years old !  in 1981, vancouver based d.o.a. released a monumental album who would change the punk rock scene for ever. hardcore 81 is a key stone, considered to be one of the first north american hardcore albums !  includes 12 pages booklet with liner notes, flyers and pictures from the era of hardcore 81 !!!

[engl] Since we last heard from Washington's favorite punker party wreckers, they've have undergone a personnel change and quietly released a couple of limited cassettes but, most importantly, they have finally solidified themselves as a focused force of destruction hell bent on destroying any preconceived notions of what "hardcore" is supposed to be. Rest assured the deep disdain and power are still present but they've zeroed in on a path and stomp boldly forward. They've turned up the noise and the confusion a notch or 5 too without sacrificing any of the rage either. Damn, this one is mean. Life is mean. Life is NASTI.

[engl] Fred and Toody Cole (Dead Moon, Pierced Arrows) and drummer Louis Samora's ultimate punk masterpiece - In A Desperate Red. This is the last record by the Portland punk legends before moving on to a very brief country period and then Fred and Toody moving on to Dead Moon. In fact, two songs from the first Dead Moon LP hail from the same session as this LP. IN A DESPERATE RED combines garage rock, new wave and art punk...just picture a more punk version of Dead Moon if you can. 6 years of work went into remixing and remastering this version - with Fred Cole twisting knobs and obsessing over it's every detail and then Greg Shadoan and Tim Stollenwerk finishing the job. One of Fred Cole's greatest records and impossible to find for many years - at last this LP is available as it was meant to be heard. Play it loud....

[engl] Completely fucking mental raw D-Beat played by some of Berlin's noisiest humans. Following up their pulverizing 2019 EP, URIN have turned up the mania, tweaked it out even further and afforded absolutely no room for silence whatsoever. After all SILENCE IS DEATH! "Afekt" is sure to leave you scratching what is left of your blown out dome. 500 copies on translucent neon yellow 72gr vinyl housed in a neon yellow risograph matchbook sleeve by wemakeit ! Recorded by Sergio Gonzalez at Casa Rat Trap, Bogota. Mixed by Urin, Berlin. Mastered at Noise Room, Tokyo. Art by Stachu Szumski and Yana Abrasheva.

[engl] It could be argued that this is one of the greatest rock n’ roll records of all time! Straight from Zambia, we have My Ancestors, a tough rock and roll masterpiece like no other. Overdriven fuzz guitars, pop melodies and even a Black Sabbath-esque song. Must be heard to be believed. Originally released in 1976, My Ancestors is an essential album from Zambia’s Zamrock scene. Brimming with lo-fi fuzzed-out guitar, the album travels the darker undercurrents of 70s rock and roll, warping and heightening the influences of Jimi, the Stones, the Beatles, Deep Purple, and James Brown. 27 year old Chrissy “Zebby” Tembo provided drums and vocals while Paul Ngozi of the illustrious Ngozi Family was responsible for the aggressive guitar leads. An absolute stunner we’re glad to see in print again!!!

[engl] HEAVY COLOMBIAN CUMBIA FRONTED BY A SIX YEAR OLD SINGER. We are proud to release this LP compilation of the great AURITA CASTILLO, the young queen of Cumbia from the legendary Chambacú neighborhood. Little is known about Aurita other than her cutting some killer records for Discos Fuentes in Medellin in the 1960s. Her recordings with an uncredited backing back are some of the heaviest and most perfect cumbias of the era - ripping electric and acoustic guitars, snapping thundering drums, dark clarinet melodies and Aurita’s amazing voice commanding the show. This is the first reissue of these songs outside of Latin America, and a long overdue celebration of the very talented Aurita Castillo and her band. This is not a novelty record - this is a heavy cumbia record with great vocals that happen to come from a very young and very tough lady. Aurita’s repertoire included versions of famous Colombian songs by Pedro Nel Isaza, Pedro Jairo Garces (Los Golden Boys) and other composers / session musicians, in addition to popular twist and novelty songs, but this compilation is primarily her deep cumbias and porros, mostly in a minor key, with a few surprises. It is hard to believe such a young singer could be this powerful, emotive and confident, but here we are. Musically, the band is top tier and rides a perfect line of tight and loose, fleshing out each arrangement with subtle harmonies, flourishes and exclamations, without ever delving into boring saxophone solos or pointless showboating. Highly recommended for fans of A Orillas Del Magdalena and Remolino de Oro, The Original Sound of Cumbia, as well as Skatalites and other instrumentally-beautiful Caribbean and Latin American ensembles, Balkan brass music, etc. Remastered by Tim Stollenwerk and pressed on heavy 160 gram vinyl.