For the past 10 years, the Annihilvs label has been a staple in the New York-area Post-Industrial & Power Electronics scene. Owned and operated by Leech of Navicon Torture Technologies, Annihilvs has worked with a cross-section of artists that span the spectrum of Industrial music. In the late 90s and early on in the new millennium, with the formation of the weekly industrial event ATROCITY, Leech (and by extension, Annihilvs) was involved in the organization of numerous live performances by landmark artists in the underground. Early ATROCITY shows included the milestone, first ever NYC appearance of Noisex, which was followed by a slew of underground electronic shows during the following years.
Whether it was independently, or in cooperation with other entities, during the years 1998-2002 Annihilvs organized performances in New York City by the following artists: Ah Cama-Sotz, Asche, Aural Blasphemy, Converter, Cruelty Campaign, Death Squad, Dysmorphia, Exercise in Disgust, Fragment King, Holocaust Theory, Hydra, Hypnoskull, Imminent Starvation, Klangstabil, Meson, Travis Morgan, Morgenstern, Noisex, NoizGuild, No Festival of Light, Orphx, Pain Receptor, P•A•L, Silksaw, Synapscape, Synth-Etik, Tarmvred, Terror Organ, Vromb, Winterkälte and more.
In June 2005, Leech organized the APEX FEST, featuring the first US appearances of Swedish cult acts Irm, Institut, Jarl and Kaiten, sharing the stage with American artists Omei, Post Scriptvm, Slogun and Canadian act SKM-ETR.
As a label, Annihilvs has risen from its modest beginnings in August 1997 as the first outlet for NTT, to set a standard for releasing high quality industrial albums; maintaining the DIY ethos of an organization owned and operated by a passionate artist, rather than functioning as an opportunistic vehicle for commercial gain or pretentious social status. The Annihilvs roster has grown to include recognized names in the industrial underground such as Irm, Jarl, Propergol, and Wilt, while working closely with lesser-known local artists such as Black Centipede, Silent_Command, and M Slagle.
Plans are currently in the works for an expansion of the scope and reach of the label, as Leech continues pressing onward and upward, striving toward maintaining his presence as a positive force in the New York underground scene.
In September 2006, Annihilvs, in partnership with fellow NYC-based promoters Brooklyn Dildo Factory, founded the series of live events known as UNSOUND.
With the intention of breathing revitalizing air to New York City, UNSOUND has hosted a diverse range of underground industrial, ambient, post-metal, doom, drone and experimental artists:
Angel of Decay, Aidan Baker, Ästen, The Beta Cloud, Black Centipede, Casey Block, Marc Burch (a member of Industrial legends Schloss Tegal), Cenotype, Clipped, Conure, Coven of One (a member of The Legendary Pink Dots and Dead Voices on Air collaborator), Death by a Thousand Cuts, Destructo Swarmbots, Edgey, Iszoloscope, The [Law-Rah] Collective, Mekh, Todd Merrell, MGR (Mike Gallagher of Isis), Mutus Liber, Nadja, Negativehate, Novelist, Ocean, James Plotkin, Power Circus, Prometheus Burning, Radial, Replogen, Sikhara, Silent_Command, Sleep Museum, Skincage, Statas, Terrorfakt, Tonikom, Troum, Unearthly Trance, Whitehorse, Wilt, Woe is Me, Bain Wolfkind, Tim Wyskida, Zerodollars and Z'ev, with more to come in the near future.
On Saturday January 26, 2008, UNSOUND produced their biggest event yet, filling the venue to capacity. SCOTT KELLY (NEUROSIS) played a beautiful solo acoustic set. JARBOE (ex-SWANS), was joined on stage by love is nothing. (the new project of Leech of NAVICON TORTURE TECHNOLOGIES). Also appearing were Crowleyan doom sorcerers UNEARTHLY TRANCE, legendary experimentalist JAMES PLOTKIN (ex-KHANATE), STEVE MOORE (of prog-horror freaks ZOMBI), and electronic/sludge/doom outfit INSWARM. On this night, UNSOUND celebrated the artwork of world-renowned graphic artist SELDON HUNT.
This amazing event followed two nights of NEUROSIS shows at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple (1/24 & 1/25).
Review of ANNIHILVS releases by David Mark Hedges:
I felt in touch with an aspect of creativity that I do not give very much time to: nor am I available very much to it.
How can I say it? Not the dream side- that part when metaphors take over and stories toy with expectations or anticipations and fears.
This stuff seems hammered from an anvil of pure terror and of nightmares. It is as if you are the smith who shoes the horses that storm through the worst nightmares and against which not only are bystanders, (innocent or not) totally hopeless, but that hopelessness, as an eternal state is proved because if you don't listen to the music, you will be defenseless when the evil herds and Huns level life as we dreamed it, and if you do listen to this music you will give birth to the herds and Huns or hums and grinds of the closed nightmare.
Escape from this nightmare is only possible when a dream comes your way and your can hitch a ride on one of its wings.
I think when people figured out how to take conscience out of the use of language, they welcomed Wagner.
The rules of harmony, that Wagner studied for just 6 months, are not just rules of composition, they consist of the study of sounds that provide us with souls that resonate and try to understand each other.
The work these people are doing with sound seems to aim at getting people to understand each other on a much more abrupt and less conventional basis- although, they do not rush the listener into any first impressions for what the total impression will be about.
Their music is polite, gentlemanly, politically patient, in a way, according to its own language. And then, after a certain duration, a little path of rarely used grey cells begin to ask something of the musical surroundings that seems answered, or seems to have been already answered by the physical, architectural, and economic surroundings. The music goes on, and the world gets worse. The music plays on more, and the world's decay quickens.
When the track ends and the CD player has no more to do but to stop or to loop, if it has been so programmed, which it has not, there is projected from the accumulation and evaporation's of noise, a certain kind of silent uncertainty.
It is as if the CD player has perhaps, through the experience of hearing or having had played this CD become now more conscious of its use- that its use has no real use in the domain of sound, except for the whirrs and occasional sputters it makes when a finger print, rather than a laser sequence, becomes music.
A famous harpsichordist told me, at a master's class, that the harpsichord differed a great deal from the piano in that when you hear a piano you don't hear the actual piano.
You hear the tones the piano makes. With a harpsichord, you hear all the gears and echappements and plectra, and the way the awkward mechanism works, as a machine, to make a tone or pitch or sound.
There is more purity in this music than in the compromises of sound of listening to delicate piece of music across a confused band of radio waves and static, so that you are not sure what it is you are hearing, though you know, and your ear is striving to hear what it is hoping to hear. This music is about what one has lost hope to ever hear, and yet, against all hope, despite all the attempts at burying the shame, and making denial the greatest river ever, the nightmare comes back again and again and it will, it must, until Parents start to call their sons Adolf again, and the camps are just another factory that was closed because it was not profitable to stay open.
I do not know how to listen to this music any more than I know how to listen to my nightmares and use them as the real source of a writer's inspiration or material.
ADVANCE TICKETS ARE NOW AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST UNSOUND EVENT AT FONTANAS, FEATURING ROSETTA, BALBOA, NORTH & HULL. ADMISSION IS $12.00
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