SEEN AND HEARD ON A BANDCAMP FRIDAY: BLUT AUS NORD, PRIMITIVE MAN, SMOHALLA, MILIM KASHOT VOL. 6

(written by Islander)

Today is another Bandcamp Friday. If you’ve forgotten the fine print, this means that from midnight last night to midnight tonight (PST) Bandcamp will waive its usual revenue share (10% for physical items and 15% for digital items) for sales through the platform.

Sadly, there’s other fine print you can find here about the impact of the Trump administration’s elimination of the de minimus exemption from tariffs. There is apparently an exception for “informational media” entering the US, which includes vinyl records, CDs, cassettes, books, sheet music, and other items, but don’t forget the decision of many European postal services to suspend shipments to the U.S. following the elimination of the de minimus exemption. Of course, this tariff-related shitstorm will not affect purchases of digital music.

Speaking of storms, our in-box blew up over the last 24-48 hours with messages from bands and labels seeking to take advantage of this Bandcamp Friday, which always happens every time one of these Friday’s rolls around. I managed to keep my nose above water and picked a few recommendations for you — on top of the great volume of other recommendations we’ve made since the last Bandcamp Friday. I wish I could make this a bigger roundup of recommendations, but life has gotten in the way.

 

BLUT AUS NORD (France)

Today Debemur Morti Productions is launching pre-orders for a new Blut Aus Nord album named Ethereal Horizons. (The fucking WordPress autocorrect keeps trying to call the band “Blue Bus Nord”.) To titillate fans DMP also released a spectacular video by Alex Mórean for a song from the album, “Shadows Breathe First“.

Well, you never really know what Blut Aus Nord will do from album to album, and I doubt we can really know from just one song what will happen over the entire course of Ethereal Horizons. Having said that, the new song is a real thriller.

Its overture is astral and vaporous, a slow-moving spell — but one that’s destroyed by an explosion of blasting drums, strangled screams, and vast waves of searing sound, which are still unearthly but orders of magnitude more devastating.

The song’s towering and vastly engulfing melodies become wondrous, and the vocals transform into extravagant singing, but the song is still tidal, moving between phases of heart-swelling spectacle and fearsome calamity. BaN also bring in bright and rapidly darting frenzies, dark and daunting chords, syncopated and head-hammering beats, a multitude of futuristic keyboard accents, and a frightening finale of world-ending scale.

Ethereal Horizons will be released on November 28th.

https://blutausnord.bandcamp.com/album/ethereal-horizons
https://www.facebook.com/Vindsval.official/

 

PRIMITIVE MAN (U.S.)

Primitive Man also has a new album coming our way this fall. The title is Observance. The press release we received about it from Relapse Records is really long, and at least for me it’s difficult to summarize what it says about the album’s inspirations and the band’s changing musical directions encompassed by it. It’s a bit easier for me to copy/paste what McCarthy has said about the first single, presented with a harrowing video by Craig Murray:

“Social Contract“… deals with some of the universal issues that people are collectively facing in terms of the rise of authoritarianism and the erasure of history. It is a backdrop for some of the more personal issues I speak about. The overarching fear, madness, anger and dread to accompany the pain of the rest. The hits at the beginning of the song also suggest a clock ticking as I believe our time with life as we know it, is about to change drastically as things are currently not moving on a path that is sustainable. The video shows examples of these “problems” and insinuates who may be to blame and who may be benefiting from techno feudalism and other “world events.”

The song is a long one, and an unnerving one. It begins with a hammering pulse (which won’t be silenced) and builds tension with a dismal miasma of viciously swarming and frantically writhing noise, scalding screams, and slowly emerging bass-throbs.

Big booming beats add a different kind of pulse, and then falter as gruesome roars and even more shrill and debilitating swarms of dissonance emerge. It creates a demented and degrading experience, a sonic nightmare that even head-moving beats and electric drum-fills can’t rescue.

And the song somehow becomes even more nightmarish, thanks to torrid howls, bestial bellows, the churn of distorted, gnawing riffage, massively groaning crawls, and catastrophic pounding. It’s a hard and harrowing form of catharsis, but maybe a necessary one.

Observance will be released by Relapse on October 31st.

https://www.relapse.com/pages/primitive-man-observance
https://orcd.co/primitiveman-observance
https://primitivemandoom.bandcamp.com/album/observance

 

SMOHALLA (France)

Roughly 14 years have passed since the release of Smohalla‘s debut album Résilience, and roughly a dozen since the album-length Tellur/Epitome split with Omega Centauri, long enough that you’d be forgiven for wondering if this project would ever be heard from again. But lo and behold, Smohalla return this year with a new album named Ruina Draconis on the esteemed I, Voidhanger label.

I, Voidhanger provides its own typically evocative introduction to the new album, which you can peruse in full at Bandcamp. It ends by characterizing the music as “a religious experience that revives the great avant-black tradition of masters ARCTURUS and VED BUENS ENDE….”

The first advance track revealed as of today is “Varon“, and it is indeed an unpredictable head-spinner, bizarre and demented in some aspects, a fucking hurricane in others, and spellbinding in still others.

The piercing, twisted notes from the opening somehow refuse to surrender in the face of the hurricane when it explodes, and even begin to maniacally dance and crazily contort within the ruinous sonic maelstrom.

A great deal more fretwork mania ensues, along with rapidly changing tempos and drum patterns, soaring voices as well as berserk howls, battering-ram grooves, an elegant (but also demented) piano refrain, humongous low-frequency undulations, swaths of gleaming synths, a segment of Blade Runner-like futurism, actual singing, eerie warbling sensations, floor-shaking throbs, and a whole lot more.

Just absolutely fascinating.

https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/ruina-draconis
https://www.facebook.com/Smohallafr

 

MILIM KASHOT VOL. 6 (Int’l)

To close, I want to draw attention to Milim Kashot Vol. 6, the sixth in a series of compilations assembled by Ron Ben-Tovim‘s Tel Aviv-based Machine Music, which is one of the few heavy-music sites I pay attention to when I’m not madly dashing around to get things done for NCS.

In the case of this new compilation, Machine Music will donate any and all proceeds World Central Kitchen, “who work tirelessly in impossible conditions to better the lives of those crushed under the hammer of violence, occupation, and repression in Gaza” (to quote from the Bandcamp page for the compilation). The Bandcamp page includes a more extensive (and moving) statement from Ron about why he decided to forge ahead with the compilation series after taking a break from it last year.

The compilation includes 19 songs by an international collection of artists. I’m familiar with many of them, but not all of them. Some of the songs are from recently released records, and others from albums that are on the way. The track list identifies songs from Déhà, NÜR, BRM, A Colossal Hand, and Lijkschouwer as track premieres; others appear to be new demos; and one of them is a 14-minute “alternate version” of the song “Fatestorm Sanctuary” by Krallice.

That ought to be enough to get you interested, and you don’t have to gamble because you can listen to every song now. This is for a very good cause and I hope you will support it, as I have with my own purchase.

https://machinemusic1981.bandcamp.com/album/milim-kashot-vol-6-world-central-kitchen-benefit
https://www.facebook.com/machinemusic1981