http://www.musiquemachine.com/reviews/reviews_template.php?id=2362

Josh Lay – True Mask [Small Doses - 2009]

True Mask is an engaging & atmospheric sonic psychodrama in four parts that takes in elements of brooding & gritty cinematic noise matter, panicked yet atmospheric black art guitar flays, grim & emotional pained black metal growls, and generally troubled grimy ambience & pained/ atmosphere heavy noise matter.

Each of the four tracks here nicely jitters, crawls & nervously yet deliberate slices between: murky to pained psycho-ambient scrawls & shaking hands sonic stares, onto thorax pressing airless noise hovers & grim/sinister slow synth saws. Through to more cluttered & noisy meeting of purring sonic uneasy, choking black guitar spidery splinters & grim harmonic splatters. With the pained & emotional battered blacked metal growls rising & falling through-out all but the last track here in a effective, deeply disturbing, but always atmospheric manner. Yet for all its noise hints & broods it never fully takes off into ture realized noise pummelling’s or caustic sound storms; Lay always just keeping control and form of the tracks grim & brooding red tinged harmonic trails.

With True Mask Lay builds a deeply troubling yet atmospherically sophisticated work that takes elements from noise, black metal, jagged of kilter yet emotional guitar scaping & grim ambience to build something distinctive, very personal & unsettling.

LAY, JOSH  “True Mask”  (Small Doses)  cd  13.98
It all started with Poison Drinker, Josh Lay’s last full length, a noise record that managed to be both noisy and melodic, harsh and pummeling, but also weirdly listenable, and kinda pretty. We’re pretty particular when it comes to noise records, so for that record to kick our asses so hard, something special was definitely going on, which was confirmed with the super limited Worm Terrain cassette. Now we’ve got Lay’s first proper cd full length, and while definitely still noisy, it’s even more removed from traditional ‘noise music’. Sure there are several serious bursts of harsh grinding NOISE, but here, those parts almost sound more black metal, with distorted hellish vox, over swirling sheets of sound. But those moments are actually few and far between,. The first half of the title track is all synthy and sci-fi, droney and abstract, a looped electronic soundscape that eventually does splinter into some blackened noise, but the second track pulls the sound back from the edge, weird angular riffs buried beneath a sea of glitches and trills, that riff is the anchor of the song, chugging away relentlessly beneath a endlessly churning and ever shifting field of glitched out hiss, and some more of those sinister vokills.
But as the record progresses, it gets less and less noisy, and more and more abstract and a tiny bit prettier. Track three is a high end sprawl of looped glistening skree and throbbing rhythmic bass pulses, minimal vokillizing, a swirling sea of streaked trebly blur, and then the final track, which is perhaps still technically noisy, but that noise is blunted, muted, dulled, like some churning blackened sonic sea, a throbbing industrial dronescape, a little Wolf Eyes, but way less abject, and weirdly a little bit warmer sounding, still ominous and buzzy, but again, strangely soothing and almost serene.

http://www.musiquemachine.com/reviews/reviews_template.php?id=2324

Fouke – Self Titled [Small Doses - 2009]

‘Fouke’ is the new Wall noise project from Richard Ramirez (Black Leather Jesus, Werewolf Jerusalem, solo work & 20 or so other projects) and its unusual title is taken from a small town on the Arkansas Texas Border that’s most know for its Bigfoot like monster which was made famous by the 1970’s film Legend of Boggy Creek. This is the projects second release after a tape on Ramirez Deadline Label.

The album is made up of two untitled tracks & runs a total of just over 40 minutes of prime yet quite murky wall noise. The first untitled track is built around this great sort of dense & tight forest like muffled static looped wall of sound; it brings to mind trying to make ones way through a deep, dank & overgrown forest were branches are scratching your face, brambles are pulling & tearing your clothes, and all you see is vegetation and tree trunks. Maybe your either nervously trying to sneaking away from the Fouke monster or your following it to it’s domain deep in the deepest woods. There are  some slight textural movements along the tracks near on 14 minute run, but it pretty much  keeps to the same muffled, claustrophobic & tense wall noise path. The next untitled track kicks in with out warning from the first track in an effective jarring manner; for this track the wall of noise now feels a lot more open, less tight & more rip roar violent I guess.  It’s quite thunderous & almost galloping in its noisy semi rhythmic attack like 1000’s of nails raining down on an old corrugated roof; as the track Progresses you notice subtle new thunderous pitches & greyed roars of sound been added in to deepen & expand the tracks power. At about the halfway mark an intense & fresh deluge of noise power rolls in over you. The track lasts in all just shy of the 30 minute mark; & through it’s punishing & face burning brutal enough I would have enjoyed a few more textural alterations along the tracks path & maybe a few minutes cut off it’s runtime as towards the end it feels like it’s treading water somewhat & lost a little of it’s impact.

So all in all another two tracks of high-end & unforgiving wall noise from one of the inventors of the form. I really enjoy the murky, tense & lost-in-the-woods air that Ramirez adds to this project it’s just a pity the second track is just slightly let down by the lack tonal variation; but on the whole it’s a agreeable enough slice of Wall noise terror & certainly a must for Wall noise addicts.

http://www.musiquemachine.com/reviews/reviews_template.php?id=2338

Lunar Miasma – Blackest Haze [Small Doses - 2009]

Lunar Miasma is the spacey analog synthesisers project of Panos Alexiadis, who the owns Greek label insult records & is one of the members the doomed/punked discharger project Heavenshore -who put out a rather rewarding full length in the form of Asmodai on Utech Records last year.

Blackest Haze is a 3 inc CDR release that features two near on ten minute tracks, which don’t really sound anything like his work with Heavenshore & also have a rather misleading title as neither of the tracks are particularly black, dark or doomy in there tone & unfold. Though I guess you could say the first track starts off a little dark & moody; but it’s nothing too much so & certainly nothing even approaching the implied Black Haze of the title. What you get instead are two track of quite buoyant, spacey &  atmospheric analog synth weaving which finds Alexiadis unfolding simply yet effective harmonic synth lines and patterns that interlock & drift with the odd more glitch & noise texture. It sort of sounds like mid 80’s Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream but with a few more noise nudges & all told it’s enjoyable enough in it’s spacey unfold, through it does rather lack and original or distinctive edge- but maybe this is something that will develop in time as Alexiadis gets his teeth more into the project.

All told a rewarding enough slice of retro analog synth space bound atmospherics; just don’t expect things to be either too dark or that original- certainly a project to watch in the future as there is promise here.

Plus, the Richard Ramirez box set made their record of the month!!!

Well, it’s back up.  I fixed most of the problems and upgraded the shop software in the process.

The good news:

• It’s working
• Postage is simpler. (No more need to add “extra postage” items for non-North American orders!!!)
• Better shopping cart
• Better check out page
• Ultimately it will look and work better

The bad news:

• I lost all of the images I had uploaded. (Shit.)

The best part for you is that you can still get the sale prices, as they’ll stay up for a bit as I focus on getting images on the shop page again. I’d love to see some of those items that are down to one copy go before I have to relocate an image.

Yep.

Consider it down at the moment.  I should have it up and running again this weekend, and better than ever.  In the meantime, drop me an email if you need something. joe[at]small-doses[dot]com

In trying to fix something, I managed to royally screw up the shop page.

I’m working on it.

Ugh.