#brainfeeder

Death Goals - A Garden of Dead Flowers

Prosthetic Records 2023

28 minutes

Chaotic Hardcore / Queercore

UK

The opening track of A Garden of Dead Souls grasps at you, cloying at your ears, its fingertips alight with need, desperate to peel away the skein between you and it. And after it succeeds the album is a churn in your spine, an emotional rain of needles, Death Goals need you to know how personal this is, where this comes from, the album is filled with this urgency. It comes as guitars whine as sirens, it stymies you across breakbeat and breakdown, as throat dry scream and discordant call and response.

It’s a serious hardcore record that feels all the more blisteringly raw for being a two piece with shared vocal duties. It’s a kind of bubbling fury and positionality that feels like a rallying cry and a burning flag - a statement of furious intent for the queer brit who cant stand the way this country fucking is.

deathgoals.bandcamp.com/album/a-garden-of-dead-flowers

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Avenade - Our Raging God Unknown to Us

Avenade 2023

65 minutes

Noise Rock / Doomgaze

USA

“Our Raging God…” is a rumbling cacophony. its video footage of storm clouds being sped up and slowed down by an unseen force. sometimes its radio transmissions from a world of grey skies and sanguine temperaments.

Matt Hawkins makes an album where you can feel every vibration on the microphone, touch all the static on the line. All that noise, all that chaos acts as gilded frame to the melodious and sorrow rich lulls that can suddenly lurch up tempo to harsh and driving rises. Across the album he drifts between these modes and explores their variations and layers, dancing through shoegaze, doom metal, indie, post-hardcore, math rock, and the lightest dalliance with blackgaze. He brings in half a dozen collaborators with a dozen different roles to add to the rich texture of the album. It all becomes knot-tight within the vast scatter-sound laid around it.

This is an album where chaos and background radiation tie a spectrum of noise into a pinprick point, a Hilma Af Klimt painting of aural explorations. A juddering electrical signal snaking down raw cables of esoteric design. this album rules.

avenade.bandcamp.com/album/our-raging-god-unknown-to-us

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Hakushi Hasegawa - Mahōgakkō

Brainfeeder 2024

34 minutes

Glitch Pop / Alt Electronic

Japan

Walk out the door. the colours blur, everything in your near field is vibrating and losing form. The sun is shining, everything bathed in pale pink. The parade fills every road. You are in love. All the concrete blisters into multifarious iridescent petals.

Mahōgakkō is a whirlwind, moving in whip-snap tempo, tearing, flinging, crushing, and soaring around and through the listener. It truly feels like a positional piece to listen to on headphones, almost unbalancing. Hasegawa maneuverers the album between light and airy spaces then into crushing labyrinthine celebrations of glitchy broken beats, and back again, tempering it all with her seemingly distant voice and moments of almost starkly lo-fi feeling instrumentation.

hakushihasegawa.bandcamp.com/album/mah-gakk

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Agriculture - Living is Easy

The Flenser 2024

16 minutes

Ecstatic Black Metal / Post-Black Metal

In the Haela Hunt-Hendrix essay ‘Transcendental Black Metal’ she lays out a heuristic for understanding black metal and the history of extreme music in general, the Haptic Void, a space of sonic totality that extreme heavy music operates under the pull of. A space that she assets is fundamentally a lie. An empty promise of total sonic collapse. She lays out that only in approaching and denying the void can a new formation of extreme music be founded, for her this is the titular Transcendental Black Metal. I think few, if any, bands have more perfectly found this equilibrium than Agriculture. With Living is Easy they skirt, crest, and skim off the event horizon of the Haptic Void, and do it with a lightness and emotionality that is astounding for a record that runs a grand total of 16 minutes.

This EP feels like thrashing in the dark, as tearing through foliage by moonlight, it is bacchanal then quietude. It’s barely controlled chaos giving way with ease to reflection. It’s an almost impossibly hard balancing act for a Black Metal band to accomplish and this EP delivers it perfectly. It’s breakdowns and blast beats feel fervoured and perverse, a million miles away from that primordial Norwegian nihilism.