AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED MAKES BANDCAMP’S NOSE BLEED

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Mar 242012
 

In 2005, Relapse Records released a double-CD album by Agoraphobic Nosebleed titled Bestial Machinery. It collected all of the band’s recorded material before their Relapse debut, Honkey Reduction, including tracks from the Agoraphobic Nosebleed splits with Cattlepress, Laceration, and Enemy Soil, plus out of print material and previously unreleased tracks.

Now, if you’re unfamiliar with ANb, it is the mutated offspring of the infernally talented Scott Hull (Pig Destroyer) and a drum machine from Hell. The rest of the line-up (mainly vocalists) has varied over time, and I don’t think the current group was around when the material on Bestial Machinery was recorded. And what’s on Bestial Machinery is a rampaging cybernetic grindfreak on steroids, just as violent and otherworldly as Florian Bertmer’s magnificent album cover.

The main reason I’m posting about an album that’s now about seven years old is that I just discovered that it’s available for download on Bandcamp. I’m not sure how long it’s been there, but I think the addition is pretty recent.

Also, I’m posting about it because the album consists of . . . wait for it . . . 136 tracks!!! Now, a bunch of the songs are less than 10 seconds long, and the vast majority clock in under a minute, but still.

I can’t resist embedding all 136 tracks here at NCS, because that’s what having the album on Bandcamp permits me to do. The player is after the jump. Go listen and get fucked hard in the head. Should you choose to buy the album, you may do so HERE. Continue reading »

PIG DESTROYER TO PLAY TWO SHOWS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jun 052011
 

I’m absolutely fawning in my admiration of Pig Destroyer. Fawning, I tell you. Their music is the aural equivalent of a fetal alien ripping its way out of your chest, except in this case it feels damn good to have that toothsome little bastard explode your body cavity in a spray of crimson gore. Plus, the members of the band are just so damned interesting. They lead more-or-less normal suburban lives and work at more-or-less normal day jobs (check this fascinating feature to see what I mean by “more or less normal”) and they play insane music pretty much to please themselves.

They’re all very talented musicians, perhaps most especially Scott Hull, who MetalSucks justifiably named to the No. 6 spot on its nearly finished list of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists. In their eloquent words (with which I fully agree): “The guy is just a riff factory, churning out a seemingly endless parade of ear-fuckery. . . . Various forms of punk, speed, and death metal all converge in the tips of Hull’s fingers, spilling out as pretty much the best grindcore and powerviolence currently being created anywhere on the planet.”

So, with that backdrop, you can imagine how excited I was to see that Pig Destroyer is scheduled to play a show at El Corazon in Seattle on September 10. Seeing that (as I was updating our NW Metal Calendar section today), I thought, “Holy fuck, these guys never tour. I wonder if maybe this is part of an actual, national Pig Destroyer tour?” So, I did some web surfing. Unfortunately for those of you who don’t live in the Pacific Northwest of these United States, it doesn’t look like this is part of a tour.

BUT . . . I did find that Pig Destroyer is in the vicinity because they’re appearing at MUSICFEST NW — a five-day festival (similar to SXSW) that will run September 7-11 in Portland, Oregon. Musically, this festival is all over the map, with metal being only a tiny part of the genres represented. But it turns out there are some other well-known metal acts scheduled to appear at the festival. (more after the jump, including a Pig Destroyer song, just for the fuck of it.) Continue reading »

THIS COMP KILLS FASCISTS (AND MAY KILL YOU TOO)

 Metal News  2 Responses »
Jun 222010
 

Scott Hull is a fascinating dude. He’s the guitarist and producer for the blazingly awesome Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed. He’s an incredibly knowledgeable observer of the most remote corners of the underground metal scene. He’s smart as a whip and very articulate. He works as an IT specialist when he isn’t creating furious, brain-scrambling music. He’s a father and he lives in a nice suburban home in the D.C. area.

If you’ve got more time to burn after you finish this post, you oughta read the feature on Hull, Pig Destroyer, and the grind scene that was published, of all places, in The Washington Post‘s Sunday magazine last August. It’s fascinating to read a non-metalhead reporter’s peak inside the world of a band like Pig Destroyer, trying to describe the experience for the kind of people who read The Washington Post (i.e., people unlike you and me) (“As the band ripped into the first song, I had the sensation of standing under a bridge as it was being torn apart.”)  It’s long, but worth reading through to the very end. Check it out here.

In 2008, Hull pulled together a collection of music from multiple underground bands and brilliantly named it This Comp Kills Fascists. It featured material from acts like Insect Warfare, Magrudergrind, Weekend Nachos, and Kill the Client, as well as the first new music in more than a decade from legendary grind militia Brutal Truth. It served as something of a launching pad for the careers of all those bands and more. It included 51 tracks of music from 14 collectives.

Now, Hull has done it again, with This Comp Kills Fascists 2 — except more so. The new compilation is set for a June 28 release on Relapse Records and is available for pre-order at this location. It’s an international grab-bag of brain-coring grindcore, powerviolence, hardcore, and metal from bands you’ve probably never heard of — 19 of them to be precise, playing 74 tracks of music. That video at the top of this post is a trailer for the album, and after the jump, we’ve got more news about the project — and a widget that will allow you to stream the whole ear-bleeding thing right here. Continue reading »