Umor Rex US Vinyl & CDs

Review: There's more to song titles like 'Song to Noise' and 'A Siren Is A Simple Device' than meets the eye here. The former is a lyrical declaration for the power and beauty of noise, cacophonies as art, walls of sound as things of real intellectual might. The latter paying homage to how much emotion can be felt in the most mundane refrains and vibrations in the air. Setting a precedent for the album as a whole, analogue sound researchers Driftmachine - AKA Andreas Gerth and Florian Zimmer - team up with word and sound artist Andreas Ammer, known for his work with Acid Pauli, to create something that plays with and changes our perceptions of what noise is, what it can be, and what it might be used for. An academic exercise, the results are surprisingly inviting and accessible.

Review: Another exceptional double album deep dive from Umor Rex mainstays Andreas Gerth and Carl Oesterhelt, respectively one-half of Driftmachine, and the artist who debuted with the landmark 11 Pieces for Synthesizer album. As ever, trying to summon adjectives to correctly describe what's here isn't easy, but let's give it a go anyway. Mysterious, dark, haunting, but also ultimately very beautiful - albeit often in a slightly chilling way - it's highly rhythmic patient stuff. A fitting title, it's hard not to picture tribalism, gatherings, premeditated practices and timeless traditions when becoming absorbed by the hypnotic contents here. It's transportive stuff, both in terms of time and place, era and style, a sense of loops and cycles being the real omnipresent thread here. Earthen ambient, strange factory floor downtempo, cinematic synths and more. The kind of record that's only possible when two people haul themselves up in a remote village with an abundance of instruments and see what happens.