Grozny Penthouse is a noise and experimental-electronics project on the Newcastle upon Tyne label muza muza. It earns a separate file, where the rest of the label's roster does not, for a simple documentary reason: it is the one act on muza muza with an identity wholly distinct from the label's anchor, Big Road Breaker. The bulk of the catalogue is its principal's work under one name or another; Grozny Penthouse reads as a genuinely separate concern. The Bureau files it at Tier ∅, the held tier, on the same reasoning it applies to every living practice whose catalogue is still being made: the rank is left open rather than fixed too early.
The documented catalogue is small but distinct. The debut, The Death of Objects (2016), is a C35 cassette of six tracks, which the label describes, in its characteristic register, as "the nagging offspring of a fucked fairlight, Hitchcock and 90's Birmingham... annoying repetition with enough minimal movement to cause a semi-rush." The titles alone (Fifteen Years Lost To Cocaine, I Clean Bricks With My Hands, Killdozer My Son) mark the project's dry, faintly menacing humour. Later releases, the Grozny Penthouse EP and Shapes of Anne Forster (2019), continue the minimal-repetition idiom.
One detail keeps the project from being purely a muza muza internal matter: the track Joshua on the Los Angeles Norelco Mori Compilation 001 (2018), a small but real circulation beyond Newcastle. The Bureau's reading: a distinct, dry, rhythmically-minimal noise project of genuine interest, its standing held open while the work continues.