Author & Punisher + Bong-Ra

A one-man industrial drone-doomsmith, calling Tristan Shone’s Author & Punisher a ‘project’ hardly scrapes the rusted surface. This is a mechanical exorcism. Engineering his own monstrous instruments, Shone’s hulking metal devices snarl, resist, and punish their creator with every movement. His throat is ripped raw through trachea mics while his custom-built machines recoil and grind around him. Dense slabs of sounds are constructed and clawed from his body, straining towards the melodic whilst bolts and scorched transistors. Machine fury evokes the human through circuits uncanny. Shone’s voice bleeds through fractured signals, rage tempered with precision-tooled clarity. It is a collapsing architecture built from resistance: against isolation, against decay, against the very tools used to make it. The result is a strange and singular alchemy of mechanical breakdown and human breakthrough, a framework from which to hang the fragility of flesh and a love letter to the weight of steel. Celebrating 20 years of industrial doom and drone, 2025 will see his eighth full-length album released on Relapse Records.

Jason Köhnen’s brutal vision of breakcore, a bastard hybrid suturing in doom and noise, first began festering in the Dutch underground metal scene. From crust and death-doom beginnings to the crawling chaos that is Bong-Ra, Köhnen has also helped shape modern doomjazz through his work within The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation and The Lovecraft Sextet. Collaborations with beautiful-minded mutants like Igorrr and Venetian Snares have shaped a weird and wonderful career of shattered classical motifs and grindcore menace.

Now joined by a new live lineup, Bong-Ra submerges fully into a metal lineage with a rot-fresh sound shaped by decades of auditory demolition. The trio’s new album Black Noise is a dense and hypnotic industrial metal, dissonant electronics, and nihilistic tonecraft. Bestial down-tuned riffs run ragged and roughshod over snarling vocals laced with jagged breakcore patterns and eerie ambient textures. Lines between organic and synthetic blur towards groovic pandemonium spiraling into a narrative of dysmorphic, eroding dread. Maximum Alienation.