Reaper

October 17 2021October 17 2021

Nachtmahr – Electrowerkz

Last night Smith and I went out! Out! To see a band! Well, two bands really but it was out and my first time in London since February 2020 when we saw Aesthetic Perfection. We got the train in and booked into our hotel room – proper full on night out! After getting changed we headed to Electrowerkz, which was quite close to the hotel and entered. I had forgotten my photo ID and the security people were very good at sorting that out as I had photos of all my ID on my phone, they accepted me fortunately.

I loved this touch of some old CRT showing a logo as we walked up the steps. It added to the feel of the place. We didn’t see the first two bands as we were drinking and chatting to the merchandise people. I think I bought some dog tags, but I have no idea where I put them, I’ll have to have a look shortly. I liked the few changes that had been made to the building and ambiance, the main floor looked really good.

Before The Crowds - Electrowerkz — Before The Crowds – Electrowerkz

Reaper is a band/person we had wanted to see for a long time as a couple of his albums are really good. A nice split between industrial and EBM. I enjoyed his set although I think there could have been some other songs added to make it greater but I guess you have to trust the artist and the things they want to play might not be what I want to hear.

I really enjoyed the Reaper set. It was about this time that I started to appreciate the new sound system in the room. I could hear all the nuance in the songs, which I knew quite well anyway, and this was a surprise as normally my hearing dies quite quickly into a gig and I can’t tell what’s going on apart from noise.

Nachtmahr - Electrowerkz — Nachtmahr – Electrowerkz

Nachtmahr were brilliant. They played a great set and the crowd really liked it. I don’t think this makes a top ten of gigs, but it’s definitely in the top half. I had a great time and danced quite a bit – I think the alcohol helped a lot with that. Overall this was a good gig. A couple of great bands and really good fun. Brilliant!

This is communication number 1977 and so in keeping with recent tradition I list below some events of that year:

Jimmy Carter pardons Vietnam draft dodgers.
The rings of Uranus are discovered.
Optical Fibre is used to transmit phone calls for the first time.
165 Killed in a fire in Kentucky.
Never Mind The Bollocks is released by the Sex Pistols.

March 18 2016

Gardens Of Seth – Reaper

After getting into aggrotech I was searching for music. Reaper was an artist I really liked, the album The Devil Is Female is pretty awesome. So, I found some more albums by Reaper. But, it turns out there are three artists called Reaper. I’d downloaded all of them. The Gardens Of Seth is labelled as “METAL” on my phone to remind me that it is an album of metal and not hellectro.

Do I like the album? I haven’t listened enough. It’s pretty hard and heavy with large themes overall. It’s an occasional listen.

AFAIK the band are Italian.

January 1 2014January 2 2014

Dirty Cash – Reaper

This isn’t really an album. It’s more an EP. Of the eleven songs on the album, seven are the same song just re-mixed. I really like the other Reaper stuff and this is ok. It’s more commercial and less dark/devil-ish. Not really my kind of electronic music but ok nonetheless.

I hope to see Reaper at some point in the future. His songs really mix the darkness and sex.

October 29 2013

The Devil Is Female – Reaper

Reaper is a DJ whose music comes under the genres of aggrotech or hellectro. I like that sort of music and have done since I saw Combichrist play at Wembley Arena supporting Rammstein. The Benelux countries have some excellent things of which to be proud and this music style is one of them. What else would you expect from an area of land that has been conquered and fought over so often.

The Devil Is Female is an awesome album. I love it. The album cover is scary enough to make me feel uncomfortable – just the point of art (create emotion). The opening song is a good old dance-floor filler. Good beats and a simple repeated melody. The album makes the most spectacular turn upwards with the second song:
X-Junkie
The happy dance beat and melody underlie disturbing lyrics. I am not going to go into much detail here. You should listen to it. What you should most definitely not do is listen to the song on the tube with any women around you. Just listen on your own, somewhere.
Now, the album does include a number of remixes of X-Junkie and I can forgive that as the rest of this guy’s work is really good. Happy for him to indulge himself a little on this album.
Other highlights:
She Is A Devil And A Whore
190
Execution Of Your Mind

Hellectro isn’t for everyone. Thank goodness. I like how exclusive it is.

April 30 2013

Angst – Reaper

Reaper – a band I found out by searching for more aggrotech. I like this album, it’s got a dirty dance sound (that’s more an unclean sound rather than lots of songs to which you can dance dirty). There isn’t much in the way of vocals and what lyrics there are seem to be from movie soundtracks. Obviously it’s all rather dark and gory. That just makes it all the better.
HELLectro!

November 3 2012November 3 2012

This is not a communication about the TV show Reaper, although I thought that was good fun. It is also not about Mr Grimm as what could I say about death? It is definitely not about the rock classic “(Don’t fear) The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. This communication is about the rare ambiguity that occurs in iTunes.
I rather like the music genre of Aggrotech or as it is also known – Hellectro. There is a band called Reaper who have released some music and recently it appeared that is was quite cheap on iTunes so I downloaded all of it.
The problem is that when I played back the EP “Monsters in my head” it was quite clearly a different genre of music. It was more electro than hellectro. Perhaps this was an early Reaper piece but I had my doubts. A little bit of Internet research and I discovered that there were two Reapers of similar music but different enough for me to spot. Bugger. “Monsters in my head” is a little too clean for me.
So I checked the other Reaper downloads and it turns out that the Reaper album “Gardens of Seth” is by a metal band and definitely not anything whatsoever to do with Aggrotech. The ban might be Italian, definitely not from an English speaking country. As it stands “Gardens of Seth” is rather outdated and has a rather late eighties sound. It is quite good at what it is but not quite what I want. Perhaps I will listen to it more when I’m having an Iron Maiden revival.
The moral of this communication is that you should check discographies on the Internet before downloading songs by an artist whose tunes so far you have rather enjoyed.