AN NCS PREMIERE: TETRAGRAMMACIDE — “SPECTRAL HYAENAS OF AMENTA HOWL, THE VULTURE OF MA’AT DESCENDS, AND TAHUTI WATCHES WITHOUT HIS APE”

We can confidently predict that the forthcoming second album by Kolkata-based Tetragrammacide will drop jaws, boggle minds, and pop eyes wide open among fans of black/death metallic extremity. That prediction won’t come as a complete surprise to people who’ve heard the band’s previous releases, but even for those people this album may strike like a revelation.

As before, Tetragrammacide‘s new music is one violent audio vortex after another, creating an overarching experience of explosive sensory overload. Yet it truly is also head-spinning, not merely ruthlessly assaulting but also remarkably intricate and technically lights-out, which are dazzling qualities that become vividly apparent thanks to the album’s professional production.

As fan have also come to expect, the band’s fondness for song titles of extravagant length and esoteric meaning is also jaw-dropping. You can see that in the name of the song we’re premiering today — “Spectral Hyaenas Of Amenta Howl, The Vulture Of Ma’at Descends, And Tahuti Watches Without His Ape” — and in the album’s title: Typho-Tantric Aphorisms From The Arachneophidian Qur’an.

Tetragrammacide‘s new accomplishments are even more remarkable, given that the band recorded the new record as a duo; they sound like a horde of much larger numbers. They refer to their collaboration as “cosmic power-zones entwined discreetly by unregistered topographical phenomena and invisible distortion of the subtle ontological matrices by a warping of occult space-time!”

Go ahead and smile (we did). They do have a way with words, as intricate and over-the-top as the music, even if the meaning may be perplexing. And let’s not stop there. Here is the explanation of the new album’s inspiration, as rendered by the PR agent for the band’s label Iron Bonehead Productions, and the band themselves:

While the preceding full-length had its heart fixated on “Srishti Drishti Vada” – doctrine of perception through the creation – this new opus has sprouted itself under the Upanishadic tenets of “Drishti Srishti Vada”: doctrine of the creation through perception and “Ajata Vada” – the radical doctrine of non-creation.

State the band, “This way, the phenomena is completely negated, eliminated and rightfully renunciated under all possible situations of any given philosophical, esoteric and religious narratives!”

But let’s get to the music now.

The first single from the album was “Nuit Arches Over The Neither-Neither City Of Cubes; Hadit Meditates While Hanging Upside Down Inside A Tesseract-Ka’aba“. Figuratively speaking, it blew the top of this writer’s head clean off, prompting these immediate reactions here:

“Prepare for a creepy symphonic intro followed by hyper-speed discharges of automatic drum-weaponry and bowel-loosening bass frenzies, corrosive riffing that swarms and writhes in monstrous madness, and words discharged in equally monstrous roars.

“The song is mostly blazing fast and riotously frenetic, but it’s as intricate and technically impressive as it is freakishly violent. If you pay attention, the fretwork also gloriously swirls and moans in agony, and it manages to radiate an aura of the occult, in keeping with the title. The song also comes with a suitably frightening occult-themed video.”

And now some further linguistic lahar prompted by the song we’re presenting today, “Spectral Hyaenas Of Amenta Howl, The Vulture Of Ma’at Descends, And Tahuti Watches Without His Ape“.

Here, sheer madness reigns from the first moment — drums going faster than seems comprehensible; the bass mimicking a subterranean earthquake; the fretwork heated into the red zone, creating sensations of utter delirium; and the vocals discharged in serrated-edge howls that are both fervent and feral.

The riffing maniacally whines and whirls, screams and eviscerates, and darts about like swallows on fire, creating sensations of destructive cruelty as well as unchained exultation, but the band also deliver punishing pile-driver grooves and a head-exploding solo.

We couldn’t help but investigate the song’s title. Those investigations revealed this:

That Amenta was a symbol of the horizon and the place where the sun sets, and became known as a representation of the land of the dead, the underworld, and the western sandbank of the Nile, which was where the Egyptians buried their dead. In this way, the Amenta became a symbol of Duat, the realm where the dead dwelt. (Per this source.)

That Ma’at (or Maat) was an ancient Egyptian godess who personified concepts of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice, and regulated the stars, seasons, and the actions of mortals and the deities who had brought order from chaos at the moment of creation. She also performed “the Weighing of the Heart”, a ritual that took place in the Duat where her feather was the measure that determined whether the souls (considered to reside in the heart) of the departed would reach the paradise of the afterlife successfully. (Per this source.)

And that Tahuti, also known as Thoth, is the Ibis-headed Egyptian lunar god of Wisdom, consort of Ma’at, patron of science, mathematics, history and literature, and Nome-god of Hermopolis (Khemennu, near present-day Mallawi). One of Tahuti‘s sacred animals is (of course) the ape, particularly the Hamadryas Baboon or Cynocephalus. (Per this source.)

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Typho-Tantric Aphorisms From The Arachneophidian Qur’an contains 9 more songs besides the two you’ve now heard, for a total track length of about 45 minutes. It will be released by Iron Bonehead on November 3rd, on CD and vinyl LP formats. The album’s astonishing cover art was created by Orryelle Defenestrate.

Keep an eye on the locations linked below for further info about the album and how to acquire it. After the links, we couldn’t resist including the complete track list.

IRON BONEHEAD:
https://ironbonehead.de/
https://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/IronBoneheadProductions

TETRAGRAMMACIDE:
https://www.facebook.com/tetragrammacide

TRACK LIST

1. Trans-linguistic Utterance Of A Sacred Orgasmal Cry Fills The Lemurian Sky (By The Same Mouth, One True God Crieth Hriliu)

2. Spectral Hyaenas Of Amenta Howl, The Vulture Of Ma’at Descends, And Tahuti Watches Without His Ape

3. Mandelbrot Scarab Of Fractal Manifestation Trapped In The Arachnid Webs, Spun Above The Hidden Pathways Into Non-Euclidean Interbetweenness

4. Fundamental Reconciliation Between Maya And Yama Through Perpetual Okbish-Ouroboric Cunnilingus

5. Nuit Arches Over The Neither-Neither City Of Cubes; Hadit Meditates While Hanging Upside Down Inside A Tesseract-Ka’aba

6. Kalikshetra-Kairo Consciousness Revival (Alogical Exegesis Of The Sandhipada-Sarisreepa Continuum Vigyaan)

7. Thanatos And Eros Wrestle Forever, Folding And Unfolding From The Substratum Of Supreme Voidness Of S’lba

8. Intoxicated Bees Of Sekhet-Aarhu Circumambulate The Abode Of Self Beheaded One Who Forever Danceth In Her Shaktisexual Ecstasy

9. One Who Weaves The Chthonic Garland Of 52 Skullphabets Severed By The Sword Of Neti-Neti

10. Golden Ontological Embroideries Of Pythagorean Meta-Geometries Sewn On The Blue Veil Surface Of Nought

11. Fifteen Streams of Lunar Kalas Secrete From The Quaking Yoni Of The Goddess Sixteen (Tantric Alchemy Of The Cascading Nectars Of Sodashi)