‘What makes Sex Swing so powerful is that they transcend the limitations of rock music. Their sound is so full of possibilities, violence, sexuality, sacrifice, even religion. If there was a future to look forward to for heavy guitar music, this is it’ The Quietus The locals call it Sop Ruak – eighty thousand square miles of mountains and mystery and unholy medicine. “It really is an endless seam of activity,” Sex Swing frontman Dan Chandler explains of Golden Triangle – both the title of their new album and the region between Myanmar, Thailand and Laos that inspired it. To know this contradictory corner of the world is to understand fully why the cult-beloved noise-rock artisans turned to it when writing their hotly-anticipated third full-length.

The real-life Golden Triangle is a groundswell of both natural wonder and drug production, and who combines beauty and narcotic brutality better than Sex Swing? For a decade now, this collective of revered UK underground musicians, comprising members of Earth, Mugstar, The Keep and Jaaw, have been pulling audiences into drug- like slipstreams with their alchemy of pummelling rhythms, towering guitars, and unrelenting saxophone through which glimmers of light occasionally pierce through. No wonder their Golden Triangle is an album telling distortion-shrouded tales from one of the most storied, enigmatic places on the planet, with enough invention within to fill eighty thousand miles and more. Where does this violent, hypnotic aural travelogue take you within the Sop Ruak?

The eight tracks that make up The Golden Triangle see the band – completed by bassist Jason Stoll, drummer Stuart Bell, guitarist Jodie Cox, synthesist/guitarist Oli Knowles and saxophonist Colin Webster – adventure first to ‘The Confluence of the Ruak and Mekong Rivers,’ full of shimmering orchestration and feather-light ambience. Then come stops in ‘Myawaddy’, named after a small town embroiled in bloodshed on the border of Myanmar and Thailand, and ‘Boten, Route 13’ – sparked by stories of a seemingly endless stretch of road from Laos into China. Before long, listeners are plunged into ‘Hpakant’, one of the album’s most invigorating and singular moments, lyrically inspired by a jade mine in Myanmar, where the spoils of forced labour are exchanged for prostitution and methanphetamine.

The result is a mesmerising slow-burn of sax, snaking rhythms and sinister spoken word courtesy of the Scottish-born Bruce McClure, who “took the theme and turned it into a sci-fi story of exploitation and vice,” explains the frontman. It’s a track that, like the rest of Golden Triangle, underlines the evolution Sex Swing have undertaken since forming in 2014. From the raw and primitive sounds of the self-titled debut full-length, followed up by the coruscatingType II in 2020. Sex Swing’s third effort retains those early primitive elements and adds layers of structure and complexity. Golden Triangle initial formation was that of programmed beats and bedroom recordings shared electronically in the height of the pandemic. Those ideas were then completed during intensive writing sessions at a secluded farm in Oxfordshire.

Album credits consist of recording by Stanley Gravett at Holy Mountain Studios in Hackney, mixing by Wayne Adams at Bear Bites Horse, mastering from James Plotkin, and the continued aesthetic collaboration with artist Alex Bunn. Golden Triangle bristles with a rawness familiar to fans of the British sonic punishers, but adds new elements indicative of a group never resting on their laurels or sitting in one place. Why would they, after all? There’s an entire world of mountains and mystery and unholy medicine out there to be explored. The Golden Triangle, it seems, is just the beginning.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Confluence Of The Ruak And Mekong Rivers
2. Kings Romans Casino
3. Pat Jasan
4. Myawaddy
5. Hpakant
6. Boten, Route 13
7. Special Economic Zone
8. Wild Peacock

New York’s WHITE HILLS are the opposite of a comet. They suck up an explosion of energy on the surface of the earth; from spirituality, from adrenaline, from the history of synthesized electronic music, from substance use, from philosophy, from friends and enemies alike, from MOTHER FUCKING ELECTRICITY and they focus it into a blinding beam of energy which they reflect back out into the void and this beam is a message. It is a statement which reads: “FUCK YOU. WE ARE HERE. WE ROCK, THEREFORE WE ARE.” -John Doran, The Quietus. October 2020 brings the release of Splintered Metal Sky, the long-awaited new installment in the ever vast musical cannon of WHITE HILLS. The album takes the listener on a post-punk, psychedelic ride fueled by industrial-strength fuzz and propelled by powerful beats where songs weave in and out of each other to imitate the rhythm of the city the band calls home. Splintered Metal Sky is about oscillation and evolution. It’s metamodern music looking at human existence in relation to technology and the hyper-driven architectural reshaping of a city. The music was largely inspired by the drone and roar of machinery pulsing through New York City, which is in a never-ending state of demolition and reconstruction. Dave and Ego took to the streets, gathering field recordings of sounds from the subway, drills, jackhammers, people in parks, traffic, mayhem and the occasional silence.

These recordings were then manipulated and constructed into rhythmic lines that were used as the basis for songs. The music, mixing noise with disciplined beat, embodies the paradoxical nature of the city: the grimy littered dead end alley just steps away from the sleek luxury skyscraper; the half eaten chicken bone being devoured by a rat on the subway tracks just beneath the glittering facade of the Chrysler building; the endless milling about of the 8 million people who call this slab of land home on their way to and from everywhere and nowhere. Informed by industrial innovators Einstürzende Neubauten and SPK, the avant garde post-punk of Tuxedomoon and the dub-electro of Cabaret Voltaire, the album vibrates with the energy of a sensually feral, raw beast.

TRACK LISTING

1/Midday Memory
2/Now Manhattan
3/a:CoNSTRUCT, B:CoNSTRUCT C:CoNSTRUCT (features Synth And Samples By Jim Coleman And Ambient Guitar By Jim Jarmusch)
4/Digital Trash
5/No Fear
6/Honesty
7/Rats
8/Morning Memory 9/Illusion 

London based HENGE have been frying brains for the last 4 years with their psychedelic doom, coming on like an acid-fried freight train straight to your cerebral core. Think Black Sabbath through an Amphetamine Reptile filter, via Pigs x7. Their first LP, released in January 2016, gained rave reviews and 'Nothing Head' builds on their S/T debut oppressive groove. The album opener, 'Compressor' feels like you are staggering through a Californian desert with the heat beating down on your back, bewildered and lost but knowing full well when you reach your destination that's when things will start to get really weird.

'The Sea' continues the desert stagger until a white light beams down opening up a portal to your subconscious and your bad deeds spring forth. 'Beginners' makes feeling of claustrophobia tingle with a forlorn wail following your every move. The light finally begins to raise again with 'Human Beings' although briefly until darkness descends with 'Teddy Bear'. Desperately trapped but once you let yourself go movement flows freely. This is it. At just over 8 minutes long 'Dracila' is the one that stretches time and builds on everything gone before. 'Nike' ebbs and flows with a worldly understanding and rounding the LP off in an enlightened state.

The cover says it all. There was an ecstasy tablet going around London a couple of years ago, unbeknownst to the band, bearing their name and logo. Reports say the experience was like witnessing HENGE live - claustrophobic but downright beautiful. Bandcamp listed them in the Top Ten UK Noise Rock Bands alongside Terminal Cheesecake, GNOD, US Nails, Casual Nun etc so they must be doing something right.