Listening Notes - October 17, 2025
I’m excited to introduce Listening Notes, honest opinions on international releases newly added to The Nocturnal Library. This time including new additions to The Nocturnal Library from Grubenwehr Freiburg.
Re-Drum / EMERGE / Svart1 / Lefterna - Split
An excellent four way split C90 mixing solo tracks, a collaborative live recording and studio collaborations by Re-Drum, EMERGE, Svart1 and Lefterna together for a really great listening journey. This material is superb dark Industrial Noise with a high degree of immersion, quality sound play, excellent performances and a unique sound. The A side has a surreal stream like crumbling rocks blended with warbled dirty distorted sound matter like quality to it with a hazy mix of dark ambience being mixed in the left channel whilst gristle, garbled mixed sound sources chime in mystery in the right channel. At times there are melodic pulses and some kind of rhythm but the progression of the pieces is quite unpredictable, organic and not repetitive. The B-side is a superb eerie abandoned factory landscape dystopia with the sounds conjuring up cold winds, ruins of machinery and blackened buildings and a general sense of unease without the atmosphere ever feeling forced through intentional shocking loud noises. This is brooding darkness and an excellent long form listen throughout the whole tape. Great for a nocturnal listen.
Smiljana Nikolic - Are You Still There?
Let’s start with the positive aspects of this C40 tape. I do appreciate the experimentation by Smiljana Nikolic with both acoustic and electric instruments and electronics aiming to create abstract, brooding and mysterious textures but the execution of the compositions is mostly too sparse and atonal for my taste, leaning a lot towards more academic like contemporary music. The pieces mostly move forward without many surprises and therefore feel lengthy and not that enjoyable to me. The short pure Noise track and the live recording are quite interesting and more listenable so they do make this tape a bit more worth listening. Other than those this is sadly a bit of a disappointment.
Thorn Bug / Astro - The Other World And This World
Full article to come…
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