AN NCS PREMIERE: EMIT — “BENEATH CARVINGS LINGER”

According to Metal-Archives, UK-based Emit put out its first demo in 1998, and almost every year afterward the band released something new — demos, splits, an EP, an album — until 2007, when things went dark. Five years later Emit surfaced with another album-length demo, Spectre Music of an Antiquary, and an altered sound. It was a very limited cassette release brought forth by Glorious North Productions.

Fast forward to 2014: Crucial Blast Records plans to re-issue Spectre Music in remastered form later this month as both a digital download and in digipak format, with the new cover art you see above. To help spread the word of this event, we agreed to premiere a song from Spectre Music named “Beneath Carvings Linger”.

The cover art could hardly be more fitting, given the sounds on “Beneath Carvings Linger” and on the album as a whole. That’s not to say that all the songs are cut from the same cloth — they aren’t — but one constant is the sense that you’ve left the physical world and have been set drifting in a black ether inhabited by phantasms.

Emit apparently began life under a different name playing lo-fi black metal, and although the sound obviously changed dramatically over time, becoming more and more synth-heavy, it still claims at least a distant kinship with the more occult, ritualized, and harrowing sectors of the black metal soundscape.

Yet the music on Spectre Music (particularly “Shades Over the Mere”) is often as sublimely beguiling as it is ominous and perpetually unearthly. There is often a sense of being transported back in time through the mists to a mythical Albion — just as there is a sense in other parts of the album that some of your spirit companions have an insatiable hunger, maybe for you.

“Beneath Carvings Linger” is a drifting fog of shimmering ambience, groaning tones, and esoteric keyboard notes, with a smattering of crashing noises and the strange vocals that are a dominant presence on the album (they turn into shudder-inducing shrieks or wordless chorales elsewhere, but not in this song). It’s just a hint of the surrealistic chill that will sink into your bones over the course of the entire album.

Look for the album on October 28 via Crucial Blast.

P.S. Metal-Archives also says that Emit has now changed its name to Hammemit. But per the comment below from Crucial Blast, Hammemit and Emit are two different (but interconnected) projects

http://www.crucialblast.net
https://www.facebook.com/CrucialBlast
https://crucialblast.bandcamp.com