Debut for the AICHER project, a collection of recordings channeling a performance presented alongside long-standing collaborator R. Rebeiro in the worn basement of the Ishiguro Building, an aged and abandoned pharmaceutical store in Kanazawa, Japan in Feb. 2024. Reinterpreted and releasing November 7 on the honourable Downwards Records of Birmingham, England.
"Colossal industrial minimalism from Downwards on a sick debut album from AICHER who deploy sheet-metal percussion and immense bass weight like some ice-cold collab between Valentina Magaletti, Emptyset and Einstürzende Neubauten, captured in an abandoned warehouse in graphic monochrome.
AICHER is the work of longtime label veteran Liam Andrews (MY DISCO, EROS), with additional production from his MY DISCO spar Rohan Rebeiro — an experimental percussionist and erstwhile collaborator of Roland S. Howard and HTRK. Together, they make resoundingly coarse, bullish industrial musick, distilling fascinations with tone and space through eight gristly and darkly sublime cuts, sharpened by production from Boris Wilsdorf of Einstürzende Neubauten and Swans fame.
Through 8 cuts, Defensive Acoustics reveals a clammy touch of reverberant buzz and below-the-belt shudder with a creeping, sensual signature of authority that strongly reminds us of Alan Wilder’s Blasphemous Rumours-era sound design for Depeche Mode, stripped to absolute skeletal fire. Tectonic plates of sound are pushed to an extreme biting point in a sort of structural stress test that feels like an oil rig in action, or perhaps more acutely, junked at harbour.
We go from the lurching buckle of ‘Ascertain’ and bilious atonality of ‘Harness Pleads’, to the vertiginous scale of the title piece and the brutal momentum of ‘An Exhausted Image’ - almost collapsing under its own bass weight, while the pranging girders of ‘Constriction’ makes us think of that 101 version of ‘Stripped’ - propulsive, full of primal energy and clanging, clipped reverb. ‘Possessions’ ends the album with a passage of bleakly romantic ambience, a judicious emotive counterweight to the preceding gnarl.
Powerfully transfixing, heaviest possible gear."
— Boomkat
credits
released November 7, 2025
Written and produced by Liam Andrews
Recorded by Boris Wilsdorf, andereBaustelle, Berlin.
Mixed by Seth Manchester, Machines With Magnets, Pawtucket.
Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker, Clunk, Berlin.
supported by 5 fans who also own “Defensive Acoustics”
What a trip! Close your eyes, take a breath, and let yourself go. My Disco favorite album from now on, primal, eerie, and a little bit of epic science fiction feeling... a. keith
Electronic artist Actress and sound designer Simon J Karis mash up harsh noise, acid techno, and lo-fi ambient on this three-track collab. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 28, 2024
Field-recording whiz Pedro Vian teams with drone-noise kingpin Merzbow for an outwardly hostile, yet strangely hypnotic, work of sound art. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 25, 2024