Golpe Mortal / Veleno Spina – Modern Barometz Vol. 1 // Veleno Spina – Manage Your Anger

Both Golpe Mortal and Veleno Spina trade in rhythms that you could call vaguely teutonic if “vague” didn’t seem like such an utterly inappropriate word for the relentless industrial jackhammer beats and sequencer pulses that characterise both artists’ work. Both artists’ tracks hover in the border zone between EBM and techno, a fantasy soundtrack to a lost low budget experimental sci-fi horror film set in an imagined Cold War Berlin warehouse party, with Golpe Mortal’s leaning more on the sequencer patterns on EP opener Engulfed in Truth and the Liaisons Dangereusesque Abuse Your Freedom, while Veleno Spina’s side of the EP is more brutally industrial, an engulfing percussive clatter of machinery running through the closing Ooze.

That combination of a relentless, heavy kick with the metallic, mechanic clatter of percussion also characterises Veleno Spina’s own EP, Manage Your Anger, released earlier in the year. The acidic synth squelches of early 1990s rave filtered through the minimal, monochrome claustrophobia of 1980s industrial mean that Veleno Spina (and Golpe Mortal in his own subtly different way) sits tentatively balanced on a pivot between utopia and dystopia.

Aiha Higurashi – A

Flying solo, away from her band Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her, Aiha Higurashi’s songwriting remains just as distinctively hers as ever on this new album, even as she takes the occasional detour from sparse, deceptively simple indie rock and spreads her electronic wings on tracks like Child, Song A and Wonk. The air of mournful weariness and ambivalence that Higurashi always seems to carry with her runs through much of the album. “I used to hate you,” she repeats on the opening Seven Seas, her past fury insistently colouring present need as the song hops its fragile way through different melodies, always ready to swing one way or another, a clattering drum pattern both holding down a consistent thread whose very constancy also helps emphasise the sharp turns the song is taking over it. A similar sense of some storm threatening to derail any moment runs through Heat, with a spare arrangement of just thundering drums and minimal guitar driving the song forward and a thunderclap of heavy rock noise striking and rolling for eight seconds before lifting as suddenly as it arrived. The most obvious pop moment is Shining All Over, which is present in two versions, the first as a duet with guest vocalist Gotch, best known as the singer of Asian Kung-Fu Generation, and then again solo to close the album. The album’s indecision over which version to lay its bets on is in many ways part of the dance it makes from the beginning, ricocheting back and forth between love and hate, loneliness and splendid isolation, and in the end, bittersweet, Aiha pared down to A and strictly solo.