Hospital Productions US Vinyl & CDs

Review: Originally out as an eight-pronged cassette release, Alberich's Nato Uniformen has been stripped down to a nineteen-track vinyl release by the incorrigible Hospital Productions, Vatican Shadow's very own playground of doom and gloom. We don't like to overuse the word "conceptual", but with this double LP, it truly applies...and in the best of ways! Both the artwork and the title name fit so perfectly with the overall sense of dread brought out by the music's desolate, grey-scale soundscapes and swirls of power electronics. There's no way that we can go through all of it for you in words, but the best way to describe it is simply as 'sonic warfare'. Stripped beats, cavernous drones and menacing bursts of hardware make this one of the most singular of Hospital's releases in a good while. For fans of Maurizio Bianchi and Sacher-Pelz. Don't miss it.

Review: Alberich and Lussuria are no strangers to the deep, treacherous caves of the Hospital Productions portfolio, and we couldn't think of a pair more suited to the catalogue than these two shadowy characters. Classed as ambient/drone, we think that the duo's sound travels much deeper than that and in fact, we would place this sort of material in the same bracket as noise artists like Robert Turman or Aaron Dilloway. "Continuum" is an unsettling affair, a bundle of drones moving stealthily across a landscape of solitary distortion, and both "Antechamber" and "Anti-Renaissance" do their best to increase the momentum. "Untenable" opens the B-side with a dark cloud of sonics floating in mid-air, whereas "Alabaster" drowns in its own cool, meditative wave of smoke, and "Voice Of The Dagger" enters the abyss with the help of some truly cinematic swarm of unsettling, and beautifully archaic synths.