Music and Riots

NEW ARRIVAL _________________
▪️PORTRAYAL OF GUILT..Beginning of the End
(Total Black Vinyl Edition)

Portrayal of Guilt made an immediate impact in underground circles with their debut Let Pain Be Your Guide by mixing nihilistic hardcore, black metal, classic screamo, and imaginative textures. We Are Always Alone and CHRISTF*CKER LPs followed in 2021, the band’s breakout body blows that corroded the band’s commitment to genre, nodding at industrial music, post-metal, sludge and even post-hardcore, all while cementing the band’s tendencies toward experimentalism.

Clocking in at around 32 minutes across eleven new tracks, …Beginning of the End was recorded and mixed by Phillip Odom between March-June 2025 with mastering handled by Will Yip. …Beginning of the End embraces both the groove and avant garde, revisiting the raw, teeth-gnashing intensity of their previous work while toying with nu-metal, alternative rock, trip hop, dark ambient and other disparate influences. The latest effort feels like a band that has traversed every shadowy corner of heavy music, distilling their decade of innovation and knowledge into a singular show of force, recalling moments of greatness found on releases from Deftones, Massive Attack, Dystopia, Deathspell Omega, Celtic Frost and Cursed among many others.  

NEW ARRIVAL ______________
✖️ KNUMEARS
▪️Directions
(Limited Edition on Black Ice Vinyl)

Knumears understand that no band exists in a vacuum. They are an embodiment of a sonic tradition, one that’s been molded and shaped for decades and can only be carried by those who truly love it. Call it screamo, skramz, post-hardcore or whatever else-it’s a sound that’s somehow endured through years of changing musical tides and is now impacting a whole new generation of underground musicians. Now Knumears’ debut album, Directions, is equal parts love letter and cartography project, one that explores the deep history of a convoluted scene while creating an exciting blueprint for a new one.

Directions is an exceptionally urgent sounding album- even for a visceral genre like screamo. Knumears’ traffic in a sound that’s hyper-immediate yet notoriously difficult to define: it evolved from the primordial ooze of late ‘80s hardcore, earning the “post” signifier in the most literal way, then shifted in the ‘90s into something even more emotionally wrought and musically chaotic with bands like Heroin, Pg. 99, and Orchid. The sound evolved further with another boom in the late 2000s/early 2010s as Loma Prieta, Touche Amore, and more boiled the music into something more direct and even at times catchy in its own caustic way. Now Knumears and their contemporaries find themselves at the forefront of a modern screamo landscape.

AN INTERVIEW WITH RIVAL CONSOLES ///

Rather than simply mastering the elemental forces of the dancefloor, Ryan Lee West - the London-based producer behind Rival Consoles - has spent the last 16 years carving out a space of his own, somewhere between the expansive architecture of electronic and the intimate poignancies that can blossom from both digital and analog touch. His ninth and latest full-length album via Erased Tapes, Landscape from Memory, emerges from a period of creative stagnation which saw West looking for unfamiliar sources of inspiration outside of his typical Hackney studio. The final result, one of his most vivid and multi-layered to date, is full of striking contrasts: euphoric outbursts like "Catherine" and "Jupiter" meet with the fragmented, impressionistic deconstructions heard on "Tape Loop" and "Nocturne", all woven together with West’s signature sensitivity and textural nuance.

Above all, Landscape from Memory stays true to West’s ever-growing commitment to inserting emotion into his synth-centered compositions, forging the restless and the reflective into one singular, invigorating travelogue of sound. We spoke with West about unlearning old habits, the tactile nature of sound, how memory can shape melody and the shifting relationship between image and music in his work.

Interview in full on our website (link in bio)

Rival Consoles performs tomorrow (May 1st) at Casa da Musica (Porto)

Words: .exe
Photo: Eva Vermandel

NEW ARRIVAL ________________
THE WIRE
ISSUE 507 - SUNN O )))

In The Wire's brand new issue: Special Savage Pencil cover available in black or white editions.

Sunn O))): The robed pair get lost in the woods of the Pacific Northwest for their new album.

Delphine Dora: The French multi-instrumentalist fuses made up language and spiritual texts in her metaphysical music.

Jair-Rohm Parker Wells: The bassist and composer channels the vibrations of ECM into his low end explorations.

The Sleeves: Guitarists Tara Cunningham and Jack Cooper take a scalpel to indie pop.

Brion Gysin: Collaborator Ramuntcho Matta reflects on the artist’s freshly reissued Dreamachine album.

Invisible Jukebox: Irmin Schmidt: Will the Can founder doo right by The Wire’s mystery record selection?

Regan Bowering: Under the drumskin.

Holy Sun Opera House: Sounding the corridors of the unconscious.

Global Ear: Battle of the bells in Moretonhampstead, Devon.

Unlimited Editions: Outernational sounds by way of Brighton’s Hive Mind label.

The Inner Sleeve: MIC on Black Sheep Wall’s I’m Going To Kill Myself

Against The Grain: Deborah Nash on the transportive power of the jukebox

Epiphanies: Young Adam Bohman’s pocket money opens up a world of improvised music

NEW ARRIVAL _____________
▪️LAUREL HALO
▪️Midnight Zone OST
▪️(Black Vinyl)

Laurel Halo returns with an album of original soundtrack music, composed for the film Midnight Zone by visual artist Julian Charrière.

Following the path of a drifting Fresnel lighthouse lens as it descends through the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone (a remote abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean, rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining), the film traces a descent into one of Earth’s last untouched ecosystems. It reveals the deep not as void, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance.

Echoing this tension, Halo’s compositions evoke a sensory freefall, where gravity falters and light and sound flicker in uncertain rhythms. Midnight Zone is a sonic drift through the space between what we seek to extract, fail to understand, and must protect, evoking the life that exists beyond our physical airbound capacity.