Coded Marking: S/T – Review – ALBUM OF THE WEEK!

Coded Marking: S/T

Out October 11th

DL | Cassette

Turning silence into a landscape of nuclear wreckage, Coded Marking’s debut album sees the three-piece explore new territories of sound: slow, dystopian, and kosmische. Yet the neck is still turned into a raging nub. Interview and review with the band’s guitar player and vocalist, Chris R by Ryan Walker.

Coded Marking are a band from Leeds.

As ever with a group as self-sufficient as Coded Marking are, sometimes where a group comes is all you need to know about them. ‘When’ is beside the point. And there’s little, if any ego to consider a question of ‘who’ considering the scene Coded Marking comes from to be a game of Guess Who regarding musical projects and members. Opinions fully formed – same opinions soon aborted. The settlement of West Yorkshire either concretising expectations that anything from Leeds is an unprecedented achievement in collectivising the incestuous, basement-heads of members belonging to a cohort of punk, post-punk, no wave, hardcore, noise and electronic bands. Leeds is a vibrating stream of activity, a throbbing magnet, an axis of ambition, a conduit around which groups form, then fragment, then form again, the fragment, and find their way back together: another band arises out of the ashes of another, a phoenix from the flames that incinerates itself because of how dilapidated and disappointing the view is.

But the groups that gather together and articulate this view, this genepool of musical units and interconnected faces includes Bearfoot Beware, New Woman, Oil (Tom B), Cattle, Soft Issues, The Reflecting Skin (Chris) and Hamer and T800 (Tom S). With all three of Coded Marking now playing in a hardcore band called Video Evidence. A band influenced by bands like Negative Approach and England’s equivalent of the Brainbombs, Drunk in Hell.

Encapsulating new moods, new members, drifting in and dropping out, deals made and deliveries dumped, another day at the office as a mechanic would pretend to inspect the intestines of a burner car from the view of their trusty creeper – Leeds is the epicentre. Coded Marking remains a firm feature of that centre. ”Leeds has a great music scene and it has been really nice to be a part of it’’ Chris tells me. ”There are some great venues like Mabgate Bleach, The Brudenell Social Club and Damaged Goods putting on lots of good shows regularly, and going to and playing shows at those places and hanging out with the people involved makes you feel happy to be part of something’’.

In regards to the community-oriented, DIY-motivated, independent-action gangs that swarm in communes around the vast citadel, they remain staple faces, indelible, intricate pieces important to the fascinating lucidity of the story, the integrity of the external structure. Humble pioneers from the start of the dawn of it all (who cares which revival we currently ride, who cares about what wave we are swept up by – good music breaks through, burns alive in the cracks of its own subcultural counterpoint).

A blueprint. A manual. An index for how to retain artistic independence. Swaying throughout the heat of the scene head on. Coded Marking are a group that both stands with and swims throughout all that. A symbol beaconing purity since they started in 2021. Erupting in the crux of the community, emptying it, whilst carving out their own woodworm holes in the very floorboards of it all. Everything connected. Everything kept at a concentrated distance. Before being brought closer and applied again to our lives. Their path is one individually chartered, carved without concern for what else goes on, immersed in the heat of the scene, in the high hills of the leafy suburbs Meanwood, or the liminal, secret nowhere lands of Armley’s Damaged Goods, or the peripheral, not-so-secret everything villas of The Brudenell Social Club for both villiers and rural inhabitants that surround this bustling nucleus. Involved. Venerated. Vital to the lineage. Their own spell. Their own cyclone. Punks but with a dark, psychedelic streak – refracted and mangled and bent and beating throughout the metallic pulse of their cold noise and chrome groove (or their chrome noise and cold groove, mind you).

Maybe it’s in the distances between their intermittent albums – linked by the odd gig, the occasional tease of something new on the horizon. Maybe it’s in the mystery they emit in these unique, stylistic silences as a semi-anonymous (no photos: can’t be fucked/afford it/need it and no PR release: same implications apply) three-piece.

Or maybe it’s in the music. The stuff that speaks for itself. Evolving on the cusp of total evaporation. Techno rhythm sections tilted into a primitive, existential punk format. A distinct isolated segment on the spectrum, away from the amok skronk of a strangled-swan saxophone, away from the black metal co-opted logos like an orgasmic discharge of Spiderman’s wrist webs on a t-shirt, away from the straight-up brutalist-school suits of Oxfam’s finest post-punk battalion, away from the general day-to-day ebbs and flows that fuels, and feeds into, the city forever enriching itself with treasures alchemically birthred the closer we reach the edge of information’s event horizon.

Maybe Coded Marking are just that. Oblivion.

Oblivion arrives with a motorik kick, a spill of minimal guitars: more stringed interpretations of cold wave synth lines on a cheap bootleg than ordinary post-punk abrasions, a hairy bass chug, looping drums and disembodied voices all mingling in the interstices. A distant howl. A bark into the black. Maimed to a white wall until your contorted, divided body turns into a blotch of mould pushed through to the other side. Then another. Abrasive screams and screeches as though being split by a strip of light and wire. A spike into the central processing unit. Zero Sum.

Afterwards, Predissolve’s eternal dirt hum hypnotises, plugs in and penetrates the mind. Laughing with madness. Ensnared and entranced by the delay burst guitars, lapsing and lapping. Mean, meat-mincing bass and drums push the pulse along – radioactive krautrock jam punctuated with crunch and bite. Ten minutes of an introduction. Shapeshifts into a suit of skin, then shits in it like a luminous vortex parasite. Space is haunted. Coded Marking hunts us through it.

It’s a dark, explosive and uniquely psychedelic experience. Refined, harnessed and channelled with greater focus on this album than the band’s previous works. This opportunity to explore elongated psycho repetition as a backdrop for the guitars to glimmer and glide, corrode and corrupt against came with the arrival of Tom Shuff who added a distinct, even liberating human energy to their heavy, industrial rage, decommissioned incinerator textures and merciless, cosmic-murder riffage. Limitation with a purpose. Maximum drive. ”It’s been more fun to jam things out”, Chris tells me, ”so I think that affected the approach of playing longer songs but still keeping a very repetitive approach with a sound that is a bit cold. I think the psychedelic elements maybe come from the Neu! influence which likely inspired a lot of bands playing psyche”.

The band have undergone a line-up change since their last release, enabling the reigns of the speeds on each track to be handled with a greater sense of vigour and resilience. Whereas the drum machine’s limitations uncaged a genuinely enthralling noise – a high-rise with a heartbeat, the addition of a human drum machine in Shuff enables the grooves to keep kicking with the group’s blinding, unbridled astral plane attack, photon explosion and surgical-steel riffage to remain wholly intact. ”With the EP it was just a setup of drum machine, guitar and bass so now we have a drummer, the whole sound changed quite a bit” Chris says. ”With the first EP, it was more Total Control-influenced synth punk stuff, and now we’re going for more of a motorik and post-punk sound. The next record will probably be a bit different too, to hopefully keep things interesting”.

Amnesty uploads itself into the eyes and sucks us through the floor. Chris R’s guitars glimmer and shatter, pulling us in before exploding into a mosaic of different alloys. Spikes and spawns grow and explode. The voice draws us in from an illusory interval realm. Elsewhere, Neon Cross cuts through anything in its path as a machete would to a veil of obtrusive vines – all eviscerating guitar motifs from a mangled, thrashing space punk lexicon. Soon after, Last Floor issues a melted descent into the void and exits as something once real, now far from it: just a memory floating on the streams of a cosmic ether of forboring concrete darkness, wire whips and chaotic debris. All amphetamine sulphate charge and sulphur dioxide textures spinning around the interlocking rhythmic drift of guitar, bass and drum, harmoniously pulsating and splintering throughout.

A scarce output in terms of quantity (yet they gig frequently), there’s little of it but when it comes people really make a big deal out of it. The voltage of the onslaught never dimmed or waned from the absence of recording material – it acquires more muscle, more momentum, the locus of what the band could be this time, or the next time around, focused, and fed through a vision of new intensity and intent. It’s a very Shellac approach to how business is tended to. ”Yeah that’s totally fair”, says Chris. ”We all have life commitments which can make output a bit slower, but generally our approach is to write something, play it live a load so we’re happy with it then record. We re-recorded our whole first album as we wanted to go for a different sound so that’s definitely slowed things down a bit too”.

Out of the avalanche, falling from the shimmering dragons and plumes of smoke, Fade To Ground floats across shifting planes with Tom Bradley’s bass never breaking a sweat whilst Tom Shuff’s steady drums keep the whole groove circling the a solid axle. Occasionally broken by Chris R’s bright chimes of feedback and chipped, gemstone melodies coaxed out of a glacial acid dune, an unremitting odyssey charging onwards forever. Damon Edge and Damo Suzuki connected to a machine and manifested via these tireless mutations.

Maybe all of that is what makes Coded Marking. The fact they can communicate oblivion, make contact with the crowd suddenly unscrewed from the floor and swirl into the ceiling in states of ecstasy upon the news that an album is about to arrive into their lives.

Maybe it’s not and you’ll have to listen to oblivion yourself.

Coded Marking are a band from Leeds, remember?

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Pre-order the album HERE

Coded Marking play Manchester’s Peer Hat with Self-Immolation Music on Thursday 17th October. Tickets HERE

Coded Marking play with Battles on Thursday 28th November at the Brudenell in Leeds. Tickets HERE

Coded Marking | Facebook

Words by Ryan Walker