Skullflower and Sunroof

Skullflower, a loose group of musicians affiliated with guitarist Matthew Bower, performed wildly improvised psychedelic music. When it was still called Total, the project produced the cassette Hard + Low (1986 - Turgid Animal, 2012), already displaying an intimidating mixture of industrial noise, free jazz, dissonant acid-rock and even a 14-minute piano sonata, The Sound Of Music. It was followed by the four-song EP Birthdeath (Broken Flag, 1988) and the six-song mini-album Form Destroyer (1989). Ruins (Shock, 1990) compiles those two records and adds two unreleased tracks.

Meanwhile, Anthony DiFranco (also in Ax and Novatron) had his own project, Ethnic Acid, that released eight cassettes from 1986 to 1988, later summarized on the double-disc Power-Works 1986-88 (Industrial Recollections, 2009).

Anthony DiFranco joined Skullflower for IIIrd Gatekeeper (Headdirt, 1992), contributing to a quantum leap in quality. Several pieces achieve a superb balance of rhythm and sound effects. The macabre android dance Can You Feel It? for panzer bass and chirping guitars is an apt manifesto. Black Rabbit is a pow-wow war dance pierced by sideral guitar distortions. Center Puss is an even more gargantuan hellfeast, with the guitar roaring and regurgitating. Half of the album is one continuous bacchanal timed by tribal drums.
Most pieces sound like invitations to join the party. In a few cases, though, the dance moves to the background and the lead instrument delves into a psychological if brutal art of mood shaping. The guitar's delirious distortion pens the horror show of Larks Tongues. The sustained creepy guitar drones of Saturnalia eventually achieve an almost spiritual intensity. Rotten Sun mixes voices with the funereal bass lines, the carpet bombing of the guitar and the steady martial drumbeats, painting a fresco of life in hell. If Vanadis might be too chaos for the sake of chaos, and therefore loses quite a bit of the other instrumentals' demonic focus, the eleven-minute Godzilla erupts lava and unleashes enough acid to evoke the most painful techniques of torture. The trip closes with the the stoned blues jam Spoiler, that slowly decays into wailing drones.

Obsidian Shaking Codex (RRR, 1993) contains five lengthy pieces. The format itself signaled a change in the making. There is little of the previous album's tribal drumming and little of the wild guitar distortions in Sir Bendalot: just nine minutes of droning chaotic dissonance with horror-industrial overtones. Likewise, Circular Temple is twelve minutes of agonizing guitar distortions with no drums. Crashing Silver Ghost Phallus continues the progression towards a more abstract sound with a concerto for apocalyptic noises, halfway between the soundtrack of an intergalactic journey and a documentary of factory work. The martial drumbeat of the previous album resurfaces in the 15-minute Diamond Bullet, a failed attempt to stage a spoken-word kammerspiel. The 25-minute Smoke Jaguar towers over the rest. It opens with a menacing bass drone that turns into a strong wind of distortions and then grows to become a tornado. It then takes minutes for the tornado to disappear beyond the horizon.

Skullflower also released Xaman (Shock, 1990), the more accessible Last Shot at Heaven (Noiseville, 1993), Carved Into Roses (VHF, 1994), containing six lengthy jams, in particular the ferocious freak-out of The Rose Wallpaper and the prog-rock suite Metallurgical King, and Infinityland (HeadDirt, 1995), containing the 13-minute acid-rock pseudo-ballad The Idiotsburgh Address and the abstract soundscape of False Magic Kingdom, with the classic line-up of Stuart Dennison and Russell Smith (of Terminal Cheesecake's fame). The triple-disc Carved Into Roses / Infinityland / Singles (VHF, 2011) reissued the latter two albums with a compilation of singles: Choady Foster/ Spent Force (1994) White Fang #2/ Glassy Essence (1994), the 14-minute two-part Village Sorting (1995) and The Art Of Skullflower (1996).

Argon (Freek, 1995), a symphony in four movements featuring Stuart Dennison on percussion, John Godbert on reeds and Russel Smith on guitar, marked another phase transition. Argon I is sheer free-form cacophony like a bunch of drunk wolves howling at the moon and strumming random strings. The guitars duel to the end, each one trying to outdo the other in terms of un-listenable sounds. Argon II (The Golden Saw) is just 17 minutes of sharp drilling noise. Argon III (Each Builds His Own Wall) (Cruising At 31,000 Ft.) is a 30-minute concerto for mind-expanding distortions heaped one on top of the other: screeching brakes on rails, chainsaws cutting lead pipes, trumpeting elephants in the jungle, gurgling sewers, a mob of madmen demolishing their asylum, chimps playing bagpipes, epileptics banging random objects on the floor and scratching glass windows. Skullflower was beginning to compete with noisemeisters such as Birchville Cat Motel and Dead C. The horn fanfare of Argon IV has the irreverent festive quality of an Albert Ayler-esque free-jazz jam except that the blaring and farting horns are attacked by a swarm of chirping and buzzing guitars. Few bands sounded gloriously demented like this.

Skullflower then released the live Adieu All You Judges (Broken Flag, 1995), Infinityland (Headdirt, 1995), one of their heaviest works, Transformer (Sympathy, 1996), one of the calmest, and This is Skullflower (VHF, 1996), possibly a self-parody, with the angelic Lounge and the 40-minute live jam The Pirate Ship Of Reality Is Moving Out. Their sound was increasingly stuck in heavy droning space-rock. Skullflower had mutated from industrial metal into psychedelic folk with mixed results. Bower shut the project down for several years.

Total (which was also the original name of Skullflower) was the "ambient" project of guitarist Matthew Bower, documented on many releases: Beyond The Rim (Majora, 1993), Here, Time Is Space (Majora, 1994), Sky Blue Void (Freek, 1995), Glassy Warhead (Pure, 1995), Exploded Star Sad Servant (Self Abuse, 1995), Tansmusik Der Renaissance (Freek, 1995), Clear Factory (Majora, 1996), Buffin' The Celestial Muffin (Rural Electrification Program, 1997), To Fall Like Cherry Blossoms (American Tapes, 1997), Kaspar Hauser (Metonymic, 1997), Eternity's Beautiful Frontspiece (VHF, 1998), Solid Objects Cast As Goblins (VHF, 2000).

Matthew Bower's side project Hototogisu, mostly a duo with Marcia Bassett of the Double Leopards, released several limited-edition products such as White Wind of Autumn (REP, 2000), Cuckoo Cloudland (Destijl, 2002), the triple-LP Floating Japanese Oof (Destijl, 2004), which is perhaps their artistic peak, Swoon Scream (Heavy Blossom, 2004), Ghosts from the Sun (Heavy Blossom, 2004 - Important, 2005), Brooming Mephific Blast (Esquilo, 2005), Awful Symmetry (Heavy Blossom, 2005), Prayer Rug Exorcism (Heavy Blossom, 2005), Sardonic Wooden Moonlight (Heavy Blossom, 2005), and then Green (Eclipse, 2005), that refined their fusion of heavy metal and white noise, Sculpture Built Upon the Graves (Heavy Blossom, 2006), Some Blood Will Stick (Important, 2006), Chimarendammerung (Destijl, 2006), Robed In Verdigris (Nashazphone, 2007), Spooked Summer (Heavy Blossom, 2007), Under The Rose (Heavy Blossom, 2008), containing just two lengthy noise jams.

Another Matthew Bower project was Sunroof, devoted to a psychotic version of cosmic music on the double-disc Delicate Autobahns Under Construction (VHF, 2000), featuring John Godbert and Neil Campbell; on Found Star Sound (2000); and on Sad Frog Wind (Giardia, 2001), containing two lengthy jams of ambient music for droning psychedelic guitar.

The double-disc Bliss (VHF, 2001) offered a masterful blend of guitar, electronics and percussion that perfected Sunroof's aesthetic (?) program. After two facile chaotic whirlwinds of noise (Columbine Kisses 1 and Columbine Kisses 2), the 18-minute Chirrups Of Certain Being is not so much abrasive as grotesquely irrational, like a group of teenager randomly banging and strumming around the studio, performing a hysterically fast version of a Velvet Underground jam with help from a deranged symphonic orchestra. Minimalist repetition is both the forte and the limit of Sunroof. Great ideas (the fluttering raga of Gold Carnation Legacy, the Hendrix-style soloing of Star Sound, the bell tolling effect of Distoria, and especially the cosmic hiss takeoff of Bliss) get repeated over and over again until they lose their magic. The 14-minute Dirty Joke From Outer Space, that simply weaves bird songs and frantic guitar strumming, sounds like a high-school prank. The eleven-minute Her Peacocks Fly Amain fares a bit better because Neil Campbell's synthesizer intones a cubistic machine chant. Impressionistic moments tends to win, such as the sea of droning waves in Cloud Generator In The Blue Sky Of China 1 and the violent nebula of dissonance in Cloud Generator In The Blue Sky Of China 2. It appears that this sprawling demonstration of amateurish ambitions could have been pruned down to a modest EP.

Sunroof's epics continued on Cloudz (VHF, 2003), a more rhythmic work closer in spirit to Neu. Rainbow Electric Sabbath (Nature Tape Limb, 2005) contained five untitled pieces recorded in a more primitive manner.

Sunroof's double-disc Silver Bear Mist (VHF, 2005) is an ambitious albeit incoherent summa of noise art, from driving Hendrix-ian jams (Great Empty Display Shelves) to videogame soundtracks (Bear Melt), from sendups of classical music (the music-box from hell White Stairs) to trembling acid ragas (Blizzard Emblem Treaty) and to droning cosmic music (the 19-minute uber-drilling feast Placed Before The Burning Green Forest). Alas, the listener has to cope with the usual waste of disc space, here well represented by the 20-minute droning exaggeration of Sky Blue Sword and the 14-minute minimalist repetition of Stacked Diamonds. The winners are the two peaks of distortion and speed, halfway between digital hardcore and the coming follies of Panzer Division Lou Reed: Mariuana Suicide and especially Be Sure To Boogie, that sounds scored for millions of glass shards. Notable is also the psychedelic dementia of Luminous Kite.

Sunroof's progression towards a wall of noise continued on Panzer Division Lou Reed (VHF, 2007), that is basically Matthew Bower's equivalent of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, the heaviest and most cacophonous of Sunroof's albums. The colossal two-movement Slew Plateaus (for a grand total of 36 minutes) lays down an abrasive noisescape before the drumming introduces an agonizing suspense. The guitars still cannot articulate a riff. The second part begins with an even more primitive and distorted drone, like a Jimi Hendrix glissando that simply keeps getting more and more violent and cacophonous. All the momentum created by those chords goes up in smoke, disintegrates, never turns into the killer riff that one would expect. The intensity of this piece pales compared with the shorter Etoile Sauvage, that is pure metal machine music of the most evil kind, albeit with virtually no evolution. And no less virulent and vitriolic is Stairways And Terraces Descending One Beyond Another In A Stupefying State Of Exhaustion, sheer terror turned into guitar noise. Etoile Sauvage and Stairways And Terraces represent the extreme manifestation of Sunroof's anti-aesthetic aesthetic.

After a hiatus of seven years, Matthew Bower resurrected Skullflower for the impressive Exquisite Fucking Boredom (Tumult, 2003). Its highlight is the four-part super-doom suite Celestial Highway, which is a sort of sequel to Argon. Its overture, Celestial Highway I, simply repeats a hard-rock riff and a pow-wow drumbeat for almost 13 minutes. Celestial Highway II takes 14 minutes to morph the guitar riff, still propelled by the same beat. Celestial Highway III increases the noise, but it's basically more of the same until it dissolves like galactic dust. However, Celestial Highway IV harkens back to the dense dissonant drones of Obsidian Shaking Codex, with additionally a bouncing quality reminiscent of videogames and slot-machines that becomes progressively more and more cohesive. It's the fourth movement that redeems the first three from their utterly monotonous dynamics.
The other two pieces on the album are mediocre, but Saturn is notable as an electronic version of Skullflower's classic droning sound.

Orange Canyon Mind (tUMULT, 2004 - Crucial Blast, 2005) was another hyper-noisy psychedelic freak-out. The cosmic distortions of Starry Wisdom, the harsh hiss of Annihilating Angel and the dense magma of Forked Lightning sound more indulgent than ever, and now even a bit amateurish. They sounded more accomplished when Skullflower was in fact the project of an amateur.
The best, or at least most dynamic, part of the album is represented by the epileptic voodoobilly Orange Canyon Mind and the gritty drones of Vampires Breath (over pow-wow drum beat). Meanwhile, Ghosts Ice Aliens is another attempt a` la Saturn to "electronify" Skullflower's sound, and Goat Of A Thousand Young is his first successful return to Argon's free-form noise, now bordering on musique concrete.

The noise further increased on Tribulation (Crucial Blast, 2006) reaching a point of sheer feral brutality. Bower found his inspiration again in Lost In The Blackened Gardens Of Some Vast Star, which is but one long modulated massive distortion. Dying Venice is less visceral but boasts a whirlwind of chirping and drilling dissonances. Tribulation unleashes an even thicker avalanche of noise but it also lets a distant melody filter through it. The voice is mixed with the screaming instruments in Silver Stars Rot Mindlessly, but drowns into a vortex of industrial clangor. Increasing the intensity of the dissonances, Void Of Roses flirts with the apocalypse at extremely high beats-per-minute. In The Depths Of The Stagnant Pond, instead, slowly but methodically buries the music into an abyss of senseless distortions. This Skullflower album sets in motion one atonal hell, the second best one after Argon. In the following years and decade many would attempt to match the same manic droning euphoria, but few would even come close to it.

Abyssic Lowland Hiss (Heavy Blossom, 2007) documents a live Skullflower performance.

Matthew Bower opted for chaos and violence again on Skullflower's Desire For A Holy War (Utech, 2008), a vortex of dense galaxies of organized noise.

The triple-disc Circulus Vitiosus Deus/ Circle Of Serpents/ Valley Of Scorpions (Turgid Animal, 2008) offered three hours of hypnotic loops, black metal, dark ambience, industrial music, and so forth, almost a summary of everything that Skullflower had tried over the years. Because of its hodgepodge of styles, Taste The Blood Of Deceiver (Not Not Fun, 2008) sounded like a fourth part of the triple-CD.

La Noche De Walpurgis (2008) and the live Pure Imperial Reform (Turgid Animal, 2008) continued to indulge in free-form guitar noise.

Malediction (Second Layer, 2009), another of Bower's most extreme works, contains only three pieces. The 24-minute A'arab Zaraq - Ravens Of The Burning Of God is the usual tornado of guitar distortions, except that this time it is coupled with storming drums. To Bower's credit it is not easy to maintain that level of madness for 24 minutes. It's a tidal wave of potentially deadly riff that never coalesce. Somebody is screaming in the background but it's hard to hear him, this too an existential metaphor.
The drums are even more hysterical on Ghost Bitch Of Black Flame, that begins mimicking a swarm of bees and that also include acid vocals buried in the ebullient mix.
The 17-minute Drenched In Moonsblood (Waxing Gibbous) relents a bit, and at this slower speed the suspenseful, melodramatic dimension comes out.
Extreme uninterrupted radiating noise had become routine for Bower, beating Japanese noisecore at their own game.

The EP Vile Veil (Noiseville, 2009) contains yet another lengthy noise-jam, Vinum Sabbati. The way it is mixed makes it sound like a colossal scream before the "swarm of bees" effect becomes colossal.

Bower and cellist Samantha Davies also formed Voltigeurs that debuted with Voltigeurs (Turgid Animal, 2009) and Tentacle Rape (2009), the latter containing three lengthy pieces.

The double-disc Strange Keys To Untune God's Firmament (Neurot, 2010) presented a brutal and cacophonous version of Skullflower, that had given up on the song format and on the riff to focus on sheer intensity and fear. Hence Shivering Aurora (9:19) is just nine minutes of loud thick destructive distortion. Starlit Mire (9:27) stages a more complex kind of noise, still an utterly distorted soundscape but with the resulting register pushed to the limit of a church organ and a pattern of bursts that evokes a military campaign of carpet bombing. The glissando orgy of Enochian Tapestries (8:09) sounds like a remix by an orchestra of detuned guitars of Jimi Hendrix' rendition of the US anthem at Woodstock. The locus shifts from pure mindscape to an industrial setting with City Of Dis (8:07), a chamber piece for android vocals, radio interference and pulsing metallurgy. The geography then widens to cosmic horizons with the floating clusters of Gateway To Blasphemous Light (14:20), another piece like Enochian Tapestries that might hide a melody, however horribly disfigured in the process, reduced to the wavering wail of a damned soul burning in hell while monumental celestial bodies revolve and collide high above. These are musical essays of metaphysical consequences. The frenzied beats and the million of tiny biting squeaking animals that populate the chaotic Basement Of An Impure Universe (11:07) represent the ultimate apocalypse, Bosch's paintings on fast forward. Not much can be done to dissonant music after this kind of annihilation of musical forms. Had the album ended here, it would have been a perfect, highly emotional journey from nothingness back to nothingness via unspeakable pain. The remaining pieces do not add much, except to reinforce the sense of panic and desperation. The banging and jarring Blood Mirror Streams (7:02) is like torturing a corpse with extreme ferocity. Ditto for the hysterical chirping of Blackened AngelWings Scythe The Billowing Void (8:37) and for the relentless steel-insect buzzing of Chaotic Demons Fly In To My Eyes (8:41). These are all general rehearsals of requiems for humanity. The post-mortem autopsy ends with Rheingold (7:33), its manic drone mimicking the tone of a church organ and evoking the universal judgment. If there is one album that promotes Matthew Bower to rock music's chief painter of the afterlife, this would be it.

Fucked On A Pile Of Corpses (Cold Spring, 2011) contains seven shorter songs, and sounds like a series of corollaries and footnotes from its predecessor. It reaches the same level of brutality only in Tantrik Ass Rape.

Valley of Fear (Legion Blotan, 2012) documents a collaboration between Justin Broadrick, Matthew Bower and Samantha Davis, a bit repetitive and self-indulgent.

Matthew Bower formed Black Sun Roof with violinist Samantha Davies and released Feral (VHF, 2012), with the distorted voodoobilly Lions & Peonies, the dense cacophony of Temple of Mithras and the harrowing abrasive drone with gothic bells of Night Mare's Milk, and the double-disc 4 Black Suns & A Sinister Rainbow (Handmade Birds, 2013), with the ten-minute Thunderbolt Cumshot Axis, that are even more chaotic and orgiastic than usual. The EP 3012 (2012) contains the hissing wall of noise of 3012.

Birthdeath (2013) is a four-disc collection of rarities from 1986-1990.

Voltigeurs abandoned the black metal sound of the first two albums for a cryptic form of industrial noise in the four lengthy jams of Carrion (Second Layer, 2012) and on Possession (Turgid Animal, 2012).

The duo of Mathew Bower and Samantha Davies packed the double-disc Draconis (Cold Spring, 2014) with drum-less blistering esoteric guitar onslaughts like Dazed Nymph In The N.O.X., To Raise Wolves and Nightblooms For The Witch Queen to which Davies seem to contribute timid synth and droning violin a` la Tony Conrad. However, the album ends with the quasi-ambient 15-minute excursion Dakshinikalika. Most of the pieces simply repeat the same pattern over and over again, perhaps inspired by Zen mantras.

In The Violet Hour (2015), subtitled "cosmic meditation ornament", contains three colossal quasi-ambient pieces (presumably for meditation). The first one, Tyme Machine (27:50), propelled by fat synth tones, is the worst offender, an endless looped "om" a` la LaMonte Young. Fluttering Pipistrellas (17:46) is the only one that achieves a modicum of interest in the way it mixes the instruments into squalling drones but there is no reason why it should last as long as it does or why it shouldn't last 300 hours.

Trapdoors And Tunnels (2015) is a confused mess of an album, with some ambient pieces, some silly looping pieces, some digital noise and a remix of an old piece.

Military Temples (2015) contains remixes (dedicated to Coil, apparently a strong influence on Bower).

Sunset Ornaments in Black Glass (2016) contains three lengthy "cosmic meditations" of controlled noise drones. Mirage is simply a grating drone prolonged for 15 minutes and Departure Lounge sounds like the recording of a sewage pipe, but the noise patterns of Sumatran Cloud Alignment are marginally dramatic.

Another double disc, The Spirals Of Great Harm (Cold Spring, 2017), indulged in childish noise drones in compositions like Thunder Dragon (11:04), And Carthage Must Be Destroyed (11:57), Ice Nine (10:51), The Firebright and Linda Show (13:57) and Yuggoth Within (10:06), that show virtually no development and therefore last way too long.

The Black Iron That Has Fell From The Stars (Nashazphone, 2017), another collection of three lengthy compositions, remixes Centripetal Spiral Dance (a 23-minute EP of 2016) as The God Who Licks Up the Blood Dew'd Kalas From the Altar of Set and adds two new compositions, of which only a few minutes of Feral Academy are worth the trouble.

The format is the same but the three compositions of The Wisdom of Venom (2017) are more "humane". A Walk Through English Woods by Water (19:51) pits one guitar's anarchic metallic noise against a tidal abrasive drone (a strong stereo effect), but, as usual, nothing else happens in almost 20 minutes. Horrendous Dew (13:22) is Bower's calmest composition in a while, a gentle loop of guitar that soars into anthemic riffs, with a somewhat apocalyptic ending.

Werecat Powers Of The Crossroads At Midnight (Nashazphone, 2018), ostensibly inspired by ancient Egyptian mythology, repeats the format of a side-long composition (the 19-minute We Move on Points of Shattered Mirrors, intensely gothic but also more celestial) and two shorter ones (Charnel Ground and Departure Lounge). Again they are based on simple methods of indefinitely looping sounds. The same year also saw the release of the mini-album KK Kobra (2018) with four shorter pieces.

The mini-album Sa Man Tra Ba Dra (2019) contains two 15-minute compositions: Ravel and Klear Dew Hell. Their droning noise is getting more and more trivial. Between the two, the latter is a bit harsher, but they are both self-indulgent to an astronomical degree.

Just Say Yes (2019), instead, is a tribute to Syd Barrett via Shine On You L.A. Machine (13:01) and Welcome to Crazy Diamond (22:54).

Purity (Turgid Vermin, 2019) Clarity (17:29), another tedious and exhausting drone excursion, Rune (16:26), a suite of more celestial and fluttering drones, and the dramatic, almost stormy drone of Ursa (21:00).

Ram (2020) contains five compositions, three of which exceed ten minutes: Falconers Glove (14:23), Jewel in the Skull (15:30), and Sovrain Grip (15:31).