Author Archives: John Lithium

Brooddark – Elusive Power (Cryo Chamber)

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Label Description: Brooddark presents his 2nd album on Cryo Chamber, a dark distorted and industrial album
Distorted walls of sound and ever changing textures float on a sea of industrial low end, Dark Heavy and Hypnotizing

Recommended for fans of Warm Distortion, Industrial Ambient and Dark Sci-Fi

Written, Produced, Performed, Mastering – Yaroslav Gavrilyuk
Artwork – Simon Heath

The Electric Poet – Lofi Madness II (Petroglyph Music)

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Label Description: The Electric Poet is back!
A collection of lo-fi tracks that feel like intimate whispers from the soul. Each song is crafted with raw sounds, soft ambient noise, gentle guitar melodies. The music embraces authenticity, capturing genuine emotions and stories, making listeners feel connected. It’s music that gently guides you through introspection, sadness, hope, love and is very beautiful in its rawness.

The Black Dog – Psychick Youth (DS93)

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Label Description: I’ve not thought about Psychick Youth for a long time, the anti cult cult, but the reality is I had a great time and met a lot of good people, many of whom I’m still in touch with. Left in the hands of others who just weren’t there, people jumped on the gravy train and ultimately failed to answer any questions. Failed books and failed documentaries followed, where the main priority seemed to be taking the money and hoping for the best.

The press described it as: “Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, or TOPY, emerged from Britain’s industrial underground as a strange mix of occult network, performance art project and countercultural movement. Closely tied to Psychic TV and Genesis P-Orridge, it blurred the lines between music, ritual, media manipulation and social experiment. The press often struggled to define it, describing TOPY as everything from an anti cult to an anarchic art movement built on sigils, tape culture and radical ideas about identity and consciousness. Its use of ritual imagery, underground publishing and global ‘access points’ helped build an air of mystery that fed years of fascination and controversy. Writers frequently linked the group to figures such as Aleister Crowley and William S. Burroughs, placing it in a lineage of artistic and cultural disruption. Decades later, TOPY is still seen as one of the most provocative and influential movements to emerge from post industrial Britain.”

That’s about as close as most people got, but we were on the inside and were the ones who eventually closed it down. The mission is indeed terminated.

Sigh – Goh-Ka (Peaceville)

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Label Description: THE EPIC NEW STUDIO ALBUM FROM THE LONG-STANDING JAPANESE METAL PIONEERS, INCLUDING GUEST APPEARANCE FROM OPETH’S MIKAEL ÅKERFELDT.

Japanese metal pioneers Sigh formed in 1989/1990. Their genre-classic Black Metal debut ‘Scorn Defeat’ arrived in 1993, and with a subsequent journey through the strange and the psychedelic, incorporating a whole eclectic mix of genre styles & ideas throughout their career, Sigh has remained a vital creative force in the avantgarde field whilst maintaining their old school roots, as witnessed on the 2022 album (and first for Peaceville Records), ‘Shiki’. This was followed by the remaking of their ‘Hangman’s Hymn’ album as part of the band’s 35th anniversary celebrations, in the shape of ‘I Saw the World’s End: Hangman’s Hymn MMXXV’ (2025).

Considered as somewhat of a natural evolution, yet an even more diverse leap over the already compositionally and dynamically accomplished ‘Shiki’ opus, Sigh returns with ‘Goh-ka’; a new highlight of atmosphere, technical mastery, and meticulously arranged epics of metallic grandeur.

Main-man Mirai Kawashima notes this as being as equally personal an album as ‘Shiki’, both musically and lyrically. From a musical perspective, if you were to place the main ingredients of Celtic Frost, Voivod, Black Sabbath, horror movies and Japan into a cauldron and stir it, you will get ‘Goh-ka’. Numerous additional spices such as psychedelic rock, prog rock and classical music are also evident over the album’s close to one-hour duration.

The album title ‘Goh-ka’ has a triple meaning, being: 業火 infernal fire scorching sinners, 劫火 a huge fire that burns down the world at the end of time, and 業果 karma.
The primary theme permeating the album is Kuso-zu; a series of Buddhist paintings or illustrations depicting the nine stages of a human body’s decomposition after death, created to encourage meditation on the impermanence of life, the inevitability of death, and the detachment from physical beauty and worldly attachment. It openly shows the harsh reality that no matter how beautiful you are, you’ll be dead and rot sooner or later. And Kuso-shi is a poem based on these paintings. The artworks on the cover and in the booklet of ‘Goh-ka’ are therefore Kuso-zu themselves.

Joining Mirai Kawashima and Dr Mikannibal along with guitarist Nozomu Wakai, are Frédéric Leclercq (Kreator) on bass, plus renowned US drummer Mike Heller.

Among the additional contributors to the album, Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth notably delivers a special guest guitar solo on the track, ‘Unputenpu’.

‘Goh-ka’ was recorded across multiple studios, and once again mixed and mastered by Lasse Lammert at LSD studios in Germany.