(written by Islander)
Less that two weeks ago the Swiss experimental extremists Death. Void. Terror returned after a five-year silence with their release through Sentient Ruin Laboratories of an EP named To The Great Monolith 2.5. The EP’s name signifies a progression from their 2018 debut album To The Great Monolith and their 2020 full-length To The Great Monolith II, but it was a progression in more than name.
That EP revealed a metamorphosis in sound from the band’s first two albums. As Cvlt Nation wrote when premiering the EP:
The cavernous, abyssal black/death deluges from their past releases surprisingly gives way to ritualistic, folk-tinged dirges of solemn tribal black metal with striations of occult rock and psychedelia. The guitars remain heavy and hypnotic but appear cleared of their debris, shimmering and resonating into the continuum with vibrant fervor as they trace the lineaments of a mystical liturgy accompanied by keys, synths, bone instruments, tribal percussion, and mantric chants. Urfaust comes to mind as the hypnotic, experimental dirge unfolds its contemplative wings, while the guitars’ solemnity and weight reverberate with the stern echoes of Bölzer or The Ruins of Beverast.
As it turns out, the EP functions as only the first stage of the band’s return, and the second stage is another album slated for release by Sentient Ruin on September 25th. Its title is To the Great Monolith III: Rifts, and today we’re premiering its fifth track, “V. (– —) Daphnyr“.
As many of us are well aware, Sentient Ruin’s proprietor has a lavishly evocative way of introducing new records to its followers, and has demonstrated that again in portraying this new album of Helvetic shapeshifting. Here’s just an excerpt:
A seismic convergence of primordial trance and awakened consciousness, tearing open the boundaries of improvisation to expose the essence of catharsis. The rift is both metaphor and confession: a fracture in doctrine, a deliberate wound inflicted upon orthodoxy by the practitioners themselves….What pours through the rift is devastating. Abyssal, chaos-wielding atmospheric black/death metal mutated into ecstatic occult rock and tribal hallucinatory sprawl…. A sonic entity shedding skin, growing new flesh, irrigated by ritual and animated by an internal battle between instinct and will, trance and reflection, doctrine and heresy.
Of course we have our own (much more prosaic) reactions to the album excerpt you’re about to hear — the song ” V. (– —) Daphnyr“:
It is a kaleidoscopic experience, a shapeshifter in itself that continues to reveal the metamorphosis of the band’s music since their last album. It opens with a phase of near-symphonic opulence that’s unsettling — both solemn and menacing. As those layered tones vibrantly ring and shiver, thumping beats and humming bass tones arrive, along with crazed cries that seem in the midst of painfully fracturing.
It’s a strange and even strangely seductive beginning, but you can’t get too comfortable with it because the music changes (repeatedly): Ambient whispers and dimly warbling drones create a vaporous miasma, and macabre distorted words emerge, almost like the snarls of a cat — or they might not be emissions from a throat at all.
Slow beats and cymbal ticks surface along with ringing sonic cascades, and then the music vastly expands, brightly shimmering again like a celestial vision, backed by a slow rhythmic march and fronted by a chilling array of agonized growls and screams. The heavy beats and throbs are compelling; the stratospheric waves are immersive, and begin to sound like unearthly voices rendering an exotic song.
The song changes yet again in its final phase, the beats arriving with even greater spacing between them, the vocals resembling throat-singing, the surrounding music manifesting as a morass of crackling abrasion and searing sheen.
Sentient Ruin will release To the Great Monolith III: Rifts on 12″ vinyl LP, CD, cassette tape, and digital formats, and pre-orders can be placed now via the links below:
https://sentientruin.bandcamp.com/album/to-the-great-monolith-iii-rifts
https://sentientruin.com/