As you may have noticed, the New Album Releases haven’t been posting for the past few weeks. There was a bug in the software, and I finally got around to fixing it.
Hope it has’t caused anyone too much inconvenience.

In other album release news, I have been working on a new “Album Releases” feature which will eventually replace the current one. Much more goodness is being implemented in this sexy, powerful and killer release. This has been a project on the back burner or a long time, and now that I have a bit of time the code is being re-written from the ground up to allow for  future growth of features.
Stay tuned for more news.

Kinetik Festival 5 is shaping up nicely. I am very excited to see quite a few of the bands this year, and the festival is only 45 days away.

The CD track listing has just been released, and you can see the list on the Storming the Base site.

I will again be photographing at this year’s festival, and will post images and links here as well as on my photography page.

Six years ago Saltillo released their debut album. In 2012 they return with another brilliant masterpiece; Monocyte.

It could be the clever combination of  the ‘old english’ sound samples interspersed throughout pounding beats or the wonderful female vocals that surface on select tracks. Or it could be the distinct eerie string melodies mixed with beats, synths and electronics that crafty weave themselves through out the album. Whatever it is, the combination of presented aural elements consistently paints a very dark and moody atmosphere. To me this is certainly not a happy go lucky album. Pretty much every track manages to elaborate further on the dark feel, which flows very smoothly from beginning to end of the album. Incredibly well done.

All in all I’d say this album is a must have in your collection, for nothing else will tickle your soul the way this album does.

Buy Saltillo’s album Monocyte on Storming The Base,  Amazon Mp3 or Amazon CD.

The Oontzcast podcast put on by Christina and Tiffany over at the COMA Music Magazine is about to turn one year old! A big congratulations to the Oontzcast team for sticking with it, and putting on a fantastic show all this time. And I’m hoping to hear many more years out of it.

The Oontzcast podcast is looking for a new intro and background music, so if you’re musically inclined write a one minute track and submit it. You do not have to have a mfa degree but it could be helpful. The winning submission will be used for the next year on the Oontzcast podcast.

More details over at the COMA Music Magazine page.

Artist: Mangadrive
Album: Artifice
Label: Cyberninja.Digital
Review by: Outsider (aka Adrian Onsen)

Industrial Techno at its finest.

There. That’s the short version of the review. Though I need to scratch the itch to express in a little more detail how I feel about this album.
I have heard tracks off prior albums from the Mangadrive collection (including the early free albums) but none had me convinced to write something about it up until this point. Don’t get me wrong, they were great and offered great value (especially the free album Dreamcore is dead).

There were many things that swept me off my feet with this release including the awesome album cover design. The wide range of BPMs, the evolving and progressive melodies, the coherence and consistency of the quality of material, to name a few, were refreshing. Through and through I can’t say there is a ‘bad’ track on this album. Sure I like some more then others, but for different reasons on each track but no track stands out as one I’d skip every time I listen to the album.
The intelligent base lines and unique melodies on this album are carefully sculpted and give the tracks depth and volume which complement the rhythm and beats perfectly.  The album overall is very well crafted with a lot of attention to detail and layered sounds.
Even though the album has obvious elements of both trance/tencho and industrial, the blending of the two genres is performed with such surgical scalpel precision as to make the result difficult to place in one tribe or the other. However that is not what you’ll be concerned with when listening to it. Your main concearn will likely be how not to attract attention from your neighboring cubicle buddies while shaking you various body parts at the office, in time with the beat.
And this is not a short album either, clocking in at around 70min of music with a couple of epically 8-9 minute long tracks this album gives you a lot of listening time for your money.

Give the album a listen (for free) and you’ll see what I mean. The Mangadrive bandcamp page gives the option to listen before you buy.

Artist: Cellmod
Album: Re-Evolved
Label: Sector 9 Studios
Review by: Outsider (aka Adrian Onsen)

Re-Evolved is a remix album of Cellmod’s 2010 release Adevolve. This EP showcases some excellent remixes,  that take Cellmod’s tracks through a variety of tempos, beats and rhythms. There are remixes by Distraub, Ien Oblique, You Shriek, Mangadrive, Dragonfly Lingo, Deviant as well as Cellmod themselves. Overall a solid album, this release has a varied  feel to it that ranges from downtempo to electro, and at times even touching on synthpop and trance.

An easy album to listen to and one that grows on you with subsequent visits. I have been discovering new subtle nuances with most tracks with each time I re-listen to the album. I highly recommend picking up this album and submerging your senses in the battery of genres this remix album has to throw at you.

Buy Cellmod’s Re-Evolved 9 track album as an Mp3 download on their website or get the 4 track sampler for free.

Mechanical Nation recently had a chance to ask Matt Gifford of Encephalon a few questions regarding their just released new album, The Transhuman Condition.

MN – Encephalon may not be a name many people would recognize in the industrial circles. Can you give us a bit of history about how Encephalon came to be?
MG – Encephalon was started in 2005 by Sam Mainer and myself, however we grew up together and have had several industrial /electro/punk related projects since before we were in high school so Encephalon was sort of a natural evolution and culmination of the experiments we had been doing leading up to that point. Alis Alias joined us in, first by contributing art to our Drowner cd cover, and later joining us on stage for vocals and synths, and eventually her vocals made it onto The Transhuman Condition
as well.

MN – The new album is named “The Transhuman Condition”. How did that name come about?
MG – The “Human Condition” which can be thought of as the irreducible part of humanity that is inherent and not connected to gender, race, class, etc and encompasses the experiences of being human in a social, cultural, and personal context. Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
I chose “The Transhuman Condition” to reflect a state of existence that desires change in a world too tied to old world traditions and out of date ideals to evolve at the desired pace. In the internet age where everyone has access to unlimited information its getting harder and harder for the powers that be to pull the wool over our eyes, so I’m very against established traditions and adhering to “the norm” when there are much better solutions/futures/view points available.

MN – What influences (music or otherwise) do you have that shape the sounds we hear from
Encephalon these days.
MG – Musical influences are all over the place, the classics that have and always will inspire me are The Cure, Depeche Mode, Faith No More, Curve, FLA, and Skinny Puppy but I have been listening to a lot of the newer bands (Comaduster, Necrofacility, Dym) coming out in the scene and its really inspiring to see some intelligence and integrity coming back after so much whack hellektro.
Non-musical inspiration comes from scientific sources like medical dictionaries, BBC documentaries, and Carl Sagan books/shows, as well as futurist philosophers like FM-2030 and Raymond Kurzweil. Science fiction atmospheres of movies like Alien, Terminator, and Event Horizon were a huge inspiration for the THC. I’m planning to make our next album continue down a theoretical/fantasy evolutionary path of life on Earth, specifically what would happen back on Earth once the posthumans are out colonizing the galaxy and whatever life that remains gets a hold of the technology that’s left behind. Lets just say HG Wells is giving me some pretty good ideas.

MN- How does Encephalon go about putting together/writing the music that ended up on the latest album “The Transhuman Condition”? ie. do all the members get together in a “jam” style session, or is the music more carefully crafted and manipulated by the members over a period of time?
MG – Each song begins with a sequence that I make and start writing lyrics for, once I think I have a good idea I send it to Sam and he works on it sometimes changing the beats around, adding synths, or doing intense audio editing, glitches, and sound design to the raw material I sent. We usually pass stuff back and forth a few times and what we end up with is always a lot different than my initial demos. Most of the mixes we use are Sam’s but I have done quite a few as well. When I work with Alis its much more relaxed, for “The Killing Horizon” I already had the acoustic guitar and string parts recorded and she came over and we recorded about 20 takes of her improvising various melodies and then I took all the audio and doubled them up and created harmonies from her separate vocal takes so it was a surprise to all of us how it ended up.
MN – How do you feel you have evolved (musically) since the last album Drowner in 2009.
MG – I’m still proud of the songs we put on Drowner, I regret not promoting it whatsoever but I just needed to get it out there so I could be done with those early songs and focus all energy and concept on what would become the THC. Drowner was purely a blast of chaotic energy where as the songs on THC are much more epic and structured and hopefully show a stronger song writing side that has been infused with the club sound we started on before. There are more complex acoustic melodies this time around but I think the depth of the electronic programming and sound design has increased too.
MN – The new album “The Transhuman Condition” has been out for over a month now. How
do you feel the album has been received?
MG – Pretty well thanks to the awesome support of Dependent and Artoffact and all the awesome DJs, bands, fans, and promoters who have kept pushing our music. We have had consistently good reviews in the media/blogs/magazines too which was a little surprising, but maybe it shouldn’t be after all the time we spent on it.
MN – And lastly, what’s next for Encephalon? Are there plans to release more albums? Any tours scheduled for the release of “The Transhuman Condition”?
MG – The most important thing to us is getting another album going that will outdo THC on every level! While we do that we are playing some one off shows and are starting to plan a mini tour of Canada and maybe a few shows in the US for 2012. Alis and I are always working on various mixed media so we hope some type of video will surface soon as well.

Thank you Matt, for taking the time to give us a bit of insight into the inner workings of Encephalon. Looking forward to seeing you live sometime soon.

Pickup your copy of this excellent album from the Artoffact Records through Storming the Base: Encephalon, The Transhuman Condition

I never planned on doing any individual Podcast spotlights, but Episode 203 took the cake for me, and felt it needed to be highlighted.

In this one and a half hour episode, Edwin interviews the legendary Rexx Arkana of FGFC820 and Bruderschaft. Even though it is an unusually long episode, only eight tracks are featured. The rest of the episode (the other half of the show) consists of a very in-depth and entertaining introspective of Rexx’s musical history, background stories, interesting events and future plans.

Thank you Edwin for putting together this amazing episode, and thank you Rexx for sharing a slice of your life with us.

Industrial Strength Nightmares Radio : Episode 203