Necessary document of this inspired team-up that toured the UK last year, with Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Baer’s tapework, feral sound poetry and performance art married to the outer space improvisations of synth/vocalist Silvia Kastel and guitarist Ninni Morgia. Playing in the tiny historic Morden Tower – home to countless beat and post-beat poetry readings as well as many seminal Industrial performances - the quartet birth a profoundly feral amalgam of body-soundings, de-constructed language, zonked brain-bombing hysteria and weird cosmo jazz that gives way to the kinda refusenik metal meditations of classic No Wave. This is free improvisation well outside the bounds of ‘free improvisation’ with a performance style that has as much to do with Iggy Pop as Henri Chopin. Edition of 100 copies. Recommended. 

Great, trans-continental collaboration between Euro avantists and Control Unit tag-team Silvia Kastel and Ninni Morgia and legendary musical savants Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble, here represented by Gnarols and Lucian Tielens: recorded ‘face-to-face’ in April 2012, this is a fairly wild ride, with Morgia’s electric guitar reinvented as a particularly brutal sonic reducer that works more like a ‘simple’ channel for electricity than anything tonal. Kastel’s electronics have alla the ticker-tape/nightmare appeal of Tolerance w/a heady hobbyist vibe that has an cracked LAFMS telethon feel. Gnarlos and Tielens bring guitar, voice, objects and tapes to the mix and they combine a kind Smegma-style usurpation of traditional small instruments ‘mores’ with a fully zonked Saturn records vibe, you know those weird Sun Ra fade-outs where all that’s left is the sound of some kind of strange string that sounds like a radiator being bowed in a vacuum? Well, there’s plenty of that here, giving it the feel of a Music Improvisation Company in space or a toy-town Arkestra calling planet earth. More claustrophobic and brain-searingly electronic than the mass Lewiis actions but with a nagging/eerie late night appeal that will score points with followers of Yeast Culture, Small Cruel Party et al. And don’t try to maintain that ain’t you. 

Second full-length album from the duo of Ninni Morgia and Silvia Kastel in an edition of only 275 copies: Control Unit wrestle post-Industrial form from cracked electronics, synth, guitar and vocals, with the kind desolate, heavily modulated form of Throbbing Gristle or even Kluster given a couple of fistfuls of thud. Indeed, this record feels like a light year from their last one already, with the kind of blunt repeat chord guitar psych/electronic overload associated with hybrid avantists like Tunnel Canary or Chrome up against eerie female vocals that comes over like Dome’s “Cruel When Complete” denuded of anything but tongue and trauma. Some of the electronics are so brutally and crudely manhandled that you would almost have to look towards something like Michel Waisvisz’s Crackle side on FMP for a parallel for this kind of bleakly a-musical vision. A great combo of No Wave rock, cracked electronics and austere Industrial atmospherics. Recommended.