photo by KHOM visual

Gnod‘s sleeve note for Mirror says it all – “Self-Revelation is a cruel process. The real picture, the real “you” never emerges. Looking for it is as bewildering as trying to know how you really look. Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces” – Shashi Deshpande.

Janus is your friend, if he is not then he is truly an enemy to be feared…

“‘Womb of the Wild’ is the first release by Capra Informis, a new band put together by the unnamed djembe player from Goat.”

An enigma wrapped in a mystery then…

I love the whole anti-celebrity air of mystique that shrouds the Goat collective, proof positive that you do not have to sell your soul to the devil in order to achieve success, real success on their own terms – or perhaps that was an integral part of the Vodun compact, invoked with Bondye?

Capra Informis or Shapeless Goat, bodes well, as the collective expands our consciousness, so too in many guises can they expand their esoteric dominion.

‘Take me Beyond’ is the first single from Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation‘s debut album, ‘Horse Dance’ and was released as a digital single on 30 October.

Every now and again something of this calibre comes along, and somehow manages to slip between the cracks of my listening and appreciative pleasures.

In this instance, I had been aware of the Rocket Recordings announcement some weeks back and being secure in the comfortable knowledge of Rocket’s enviable pedigree, had fully intended to return to the enticingly descriptive introduction.

Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are… Little Pigs, Little Pigs, Let Me Come In… Not By The Hair Of Your Chiny-Chin-Chin? Well Then I’ll Huff And I’ll Puff, And I’ll Blow Your House In…. Here’s Evil Blizzard!

With all the deranged, psychotic subtlety of Johnny’s axe through that Overlook Hotel door, these Preston, “Double Doomers” and misérables miscreants, return with another bout of sonic, ear-splitting noise pollution.

Back with even more record shaped tat, in the guise of latest LP, ‘Everybody Come To Church’…

As if 2014 debut, ‘The Dangers Of Evil Blizzard’, and this years split, ‘Collisions 04‘ EP with Mamuthones on Rocket Recordings, wasn’t enough toxic vinyl reason to dust down your HAZMAT suit – ‘Everybody Come To Church’, is guaranteed have you reaching for the gas mask, the ear defenders and maybe even the sick bag.

My epiphany with Hey Colossus came, as perhaps all musical epiphanies should, in the white hot cauldron of a live encounter.

In my case, that was earlier this year at Eindhoven Psych Lab.

June almost feels like a lifetime ago in some respects, but joy of joys – October brings us the latest Hey Colossus magnum opus, in the shape of ‘Radio Static High’.

By their own admission, Hey Colossus came, “Initially lurching from the UK noise underground in 2003 like a bedraggled audial creature rendered from toxic waste in a VHS horror movie”!

Evolving inexorably forward, “The six-piece London-via-Somerset troupe began 2015 with February’s release of ‘In Black And Gold’ – in which the brawny repetition-driven raunch they built their sound on was furnished and burnished by dub-derived spatial awareness and cinematic drama, making it both a bold reinvention and an uncommonly compulsive avant-rock document”.