header_image

KLEISTWAHR   The Return   LP   (Noiseville)    22.98



After almost twenty years of silence, Gary Mundy's Kleistwahr returned with this super limited Lp of crushing, industrial out-guitar noise destruction. The founding member of Brit noise/skum pioneers Ramleh and the highly influential Broken Flag imprint (as well as a guitarist in Skullflower early on in their existence), Mundy released a number of cassettes under the Kleistwahr name on Broken Flag through the 80's, all of which are next to impossible to find nowadays. After 1990, the project seemed to be finished with, but he's resurrected Kleistwahr almost twenty years later with The Return, a new Lp out on the Outer Bounds sub-label from Noiseville Records, and it's a ferocious slab of agonizing guitar terror, wrecked vocal noize, and electronic filth that fans of Ramleh and newer Skullflower will no doubt drool over.

The first side of the record blurts out mangled shredding over blasts of distorted screaming and noise on opener "The Return", a howling feedback-infested freakout of demonic guitar noise. It sounds like someone performing a Middle Eastern speed-metal solo over chunks of industrial feedback noise, until it shifts into some slower, more psychedelic acid-guitar/feedback drone. The following track "The Loss" is a spacier noisescape of ominous chiming guitars, fluttering electronic buzz, creepy dissonant chords and bestial growling electronics that end up giving way to some spastic improvised guitar shredding later on. On the other side, the haunted dronescape of "The Hunted" morphs into the explosive "Elegy For Nova Scotia", at first building layers of buzzing amps and cathedral organs that flow into muted, softened slabs of grinding distortion and clouds of mechanical hum; the second half of the side amplifies it's over modulated feedback until it becomes an intense inferno of explosive noise, a churning, buzzing din through which emerge some psychedelic keyboards at the end, slowly mixing with deep droning heaviness until it forms into a funereal industrial dirge that ends the record with a dramatic flourish.

Packed in a hand-made jacket and limited to three hundred copies.