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BELADONNA

                                   September 3, 1992  

Last Wednesday night I sat down in front of a NeXt machine,
with a walkman tuned to Beladonna on KFJC (89.7 FM, here
around the south end of the SF bay), and this is what
happened:
    
_X10_, "the beast": some classic
industrial.
    
New from _Schnitt Acht_.  Okay.
Suprisingly far in the direction of
mellow, though not quite all the
way.
    
_Stereotaxic Device_: Eerie
gothicesque ambient.  A bit
Fripper(eno?)tronic.
    
Brand new stuff from _Out, Out_: A
bit hard to classify.  Sort of
acid-housey. Indust dance, w/some
edge... a tad overproduced? Trite
sexual lyrics like "each time it
gets better..."
    
     Jon Druckman vouches for the coolness of the guy who is
     _Out, Out_, says he went to college with him.
     Hasn't heard a lot of his music, though. 
    
_Borghesia_. The song is: "Rumors
Space". A Boris Karloff voice,
slightly demented, a slow melody
(with bongo sounds in the
background?).  "They found found him
dead/with a smashed head."  Dirgy.
    
Live _Christian Death_: "Iron Mask":
Some sort of modern rock retread.
Sounds okay, maybe an improvement on
the original mix, but who cares?
    
New from _Hunting Lodge_: Tap tap
clunk of drum sticks, flying saucer
effects, windstorms, distant
screams.  Muffled pounding on the
door.  A pleasant cacophony.
                          
    Old from Hunting Lodge, but off the newly re-issued "Will+" CD
    from Dark Vinyl.  It's a CD reissue of their first LP with some
    extra tracks added (including the above one).
                            -- Mason Jones, Charnel House
                          
_Einstuerzende Neubauten_: Breaking
glass, hints of dead TV screen
static, cutting in and out,
switching between the two,
incomprehensible babble like a
bubbling fishtank, a sudden
interruption, silence, and a hushed
voice in German.  Later: "Ich bin
war Hamlet."  The German voices
alternate with noises, fading in and
out quickly.  Atonal and arhytmic.
Interesting, though a bit
overdone...  "Kind of a performace  
thing", Beladonna says, but I'm
hearing it, not seeing it.

"the one and only" _Delerium_ --
Droning, slow, ambient industrial.

_Dive_ off the "Object 5"
Compilation.  "ddDDivvee." slow
motion, slowed down, distored voice.
A single deep tone, repeated
endlessly, sounding like some cheesy
submarine movie music, only deeper,
stranger.  Some other faint
string-like sounds join in.  An
indistinguishable, repetitious voice
comes in, still deep in the
background.  The foreground is just
that throbbing monotonous "Dive!"
sound, though the tonality shifts
slowly, other noises, other little
bits of music fade in and out, some
structure appears in the pattern of
reprisals...  Good stuff, though you
gotta be in the mood.
                     
_Grotus_: Some most annoying staticy
sounds, with wailing Indian voices,
calms down into another repetitious
thundering basenote, but with less
distortion, and a more conventional
connection to the background
melodies and rhtyms (far back there,
a sound like bongos?) shifting
tonalities in the base note, other
faster rhythms come in, and then the
vocals "push down at the root,
slipping from somewhere"...

_Force Incorporated_: some midnight
techno, a bit harsher than rave
music, though (Ooh! that high
"beeeeep!" it kicks off with could
kill you).  Kind of annoying, but it
works.

"Down!" "Down!" "Down!"  Really
good, harder edged
technoindustrialhousewhatever.  I
*think* this is: _Bazz_: "House of
Pak".

_My Dying Bride_ Song:"Silent Dance"     
Drawn out, almost traditional            Chanel ("rancid") Wheeler says most of
Dramatic movie music... Call it          their stuff is really more grindcore  
okay, at least.                          with strings added.                   
                                                 
New stuff from _In The Nursery_:
Nice vocals, probably french, a
woman singing in a hushed voice.
Dirge like music also seems
movieish, but it plays it straight,
it's not a satire like the _My Dying
Bride_ cut was.

_Cyclops Joint_, of off the Manifest
Destiny (vol II) compilation: Nice
germanesque grumbling, scifi sounds
like the star trek elevator, "I
heard him--", "Insane", "Slit his
wrists", "She came an angel/sucking
on his fist".  The voice quavers
from left track to right.  Could
this be *live* drums here?!  "Not I.
Not I!"

"Memories of Sound" by _ClockDVA_:
"Performance perfect is perfect
performance" A female voice over a
PA in a nightmare factory of the
future, murky sounds like huge tubes
of plastic banging into each other,
and resonating as the cranes carry
them throughout the night.  Long
drifting resonant notes, oboe like?
Brilliant.  A really sinister little
ambient, but not without it's
soothing qualities.  Album:
_Man-Amplified_.

New _Lycia_, from Projekt:
Monotonous base strumming, sawing
through the base of the tree of
life.. Or just twigging the
branches?  More synthetic organ
notes, slow, melodic compared to the
strumming.  An unusually short
piece.

_Terminal Power Company_, "the
hunger the heat": Traditional funky
dance rhythm.  Weird for Belladona.
What is this?  Lyrics "Caught in a
trap/No way back/Their firing the
gate/ My ordered state/ the midnight
life/ the rising sun/the hunger the
hate/ out they come/ the hunger in
here/ that keeps me alive/ the hate
in here/ that lets me survive"

Four in a row by _SkinnyPuppy_, "Pupmeister":

(1) Just another industrial track.

(2) Now this one is cool.  Sort of
like movie sneaking around music,
"the pink panther", but *not* cute.
Some neat voices just making noises,
just part of the melody.
    
     Jon says: "probably "fritter (stella's home)" or "the
     mourn" or "draining faces."

(3) "The Choke": At first it's just
another industrial track. "you cover
my head", "are you in my head, or
only in my body" then it cuts in:
"too late/the stench/inside/inside",
"lies/arise", "decide/which side"...
more like free association than
poetry.  But "...smile/your social
style" that's not a bad rhyme there.

(4) Dirgy ambient. Minimal.  Little
to distinguish it.

_Switchblade Symphony_, "Chain":
Nice female vocals, comprehensible
in places "You are wicked..."
 
_Diatribe_, "Therapy": "you're
young, you don't know" Deep drums.
Like sinister native music from a
bad tarzan movie.  Pretty cool.  But
then it's just the usual hoarse
screaming, could be NIN or
anything...  But it's still good.
"You can never show your face out on
the streets again.", "....in every
worst case scenario.", "Lies. You
can never do it without any
violence/Sex. You can put aside the
damage because it's permanent."

And Beladdona finishes up with
_Nurse with wound_: The humming of
an electric motor.  Sounds like
pneumatic valves closing.  Then just
the hum, for longer than you expect.
Suddenly: *meep* *meep* *meep* over
and over again, then a high pitched
buzzing noise, and the trite,
over-used 60s movie computer sound
effect.  Beep beep boop type stuff.
Or is it just a xylophone? And then
it all crashes.  Except the *meeps*.
Other noises come in, and all the
oscillations actually become
_music_.  Interesting, but an oddly
distant intellectual piece, no
visceral snarl to it at all...

(Added some corrections from Al
Crawford, Univ of Edinburgh, And
Mason Jones, of Charnel House.  And
Jon Druckman, of the Ultraviolet 
Catastrophe.)

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