Kino III: Xaman

Liner Note Author: Rupert Howe.
Recording information: JTI, Brixton.
The early-'80s/'90s recordings of British noise/industrial-leaning rock band Skullflower laid serious groundwork for the experimental scenes that would follow. Along with U.K. contemporaries Coil and Ramleh, as well as acts in different countries working in the same noisy realms (Dead C in New Zealand and Japan's High Rise), Skullflower's psyched-out blasts of noisy chaos were made with the same guitar, bass, and drums instrumentation of far tamer and more traditional bands. The Kino series collects the group's earliest, often impossibly hard to find material, with Kino III offering a remastered version of Xaman, an early album that was long thought to have been eternally lost, the original master disc destroyed somewhere along the way. ~ Fred Thomas