(written by Islander)
About half an hour after I finished yesterday’s roundup I left home with my wife and didn’t return until nightfall. Waking up later than usual today, I immediately got diverted from anything musical by reading a long discussion by two really smart people about a harrowing political and economic subject. By the time I finally re-oriented myself to the column you’re now reading, my clock for this thing was winding down, so it’s shorter than I had hoped it would be.
In deciding what I’d need to leave on the cutting room floor, I found myself focusing on music that in different ways is unorthodox, at least in how I think about black metal orthodoxies. But you can be the judge of that, as I hope you will be. Of course, to judge, you need to listen.
ANTIVERSUM (Switzerland)
Ten years ago we premiered Total Vacuum, the debut demo by the Swiss band Antiversum shortly before its release. Almost eight years ago we then premiered the title song from the band’s debut album, Cosmos Comedenti. Finally, Antiversum are coming back with a second album, this one named De Nemesis Omnes et Omnia.
If I only had more time I would have listened to it already (one of the perks of being a scribbler about music), because the band’s first two releases were so startling. But I’ve only listened to the first advance track, a 14+-minute song named “Pulsar Feralis“, which you should listen to as well.
Once more, Antiversum embark of their own distinctive investigation of the void. The introductory phase of the song creates a freezing and hostile atmosphere, with waves of static, eerily whistling transmissions, and ghastly voices. Then the music starts to heavily pound and batter, segmented by bursts of buzzing frenzy and eventually giving way to blasting beats and even more maniacally whirring fretwork.
The band continue to ruthlessly pound but they also needle the listener with piercing guitars that dismally wail and frantically quiver, while the reverberating words come forth in cavernous roars, strangled snarls, and maddened cries — all of them frightening.
The band also continue flipping the switch, speeding up and slowing down but never diminishing the forceful punch of the drums, creating moods of violence and agony, of immense menace (thanks in part to the immensity of the bass tones) and utter hopelessness, and of shattering catastrophe. All in all, the song is a transfixing nightmare.
(In a couple of weeks we’ll be premiering another song from the new album. I’m eager for you to hear it.)
https://www.amor-fati-productions.de
https://amorfatiproductions.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/antiversum
PORENUT (Slovakia)
The Slovakian genre-hexing band Porenut have prepared a new album named Výstup k svätej Kunde, which unfolds in “chapters”. They describe it as “an album about one lake, two little figures and mumbling at the end of time.” The cover art, as you can see, is peculiar. Along with the music, the release will include a 40-page booklet featuring lyrics and “a surreal short story” in both Slovak and English, which explains why the song titles are chapter numbers. The story was written by Porenut‘s vocalist.
I’ve been given advance access to the album and that booklet. I haven’t listened to the album yet, but I did read the short story, in English of course. It reads like the translator, who might well be the author, is fluent in English. It’s a very well-written story, very engrossing, and to say that its narration is “surreal” would be an understatement. The word “horrifying” also comes to mind. Someday I might try to summarize it for you before the album comes out, but I also seriously doubt I’m capable of doing that, and might ruin the experience if I tried.
As noted, the booklet also includes the lyrics. They are Slovak words, and the booklet doesn’t include a translation of them. I skipped down to the words for “Chapter IV“, since that’s the first song Porenut have provided for streaming. I ran the words through an online translator. What came out the other side was poetic, and also surreal, describing a prophet in furs and the desires of powerful children in or near a mysterious lake. I’ll leave to another day (maybe) how this scene connects to the short story.
photo by Štefan Šimuni
Porenut released “Chapter IV” with a video that features clips from the animated film It’s Such a Beautiful Day by Don Hertzfeldt.
At first, the song has a big bounding groove, the kind of rhythmic punch that gets muscles moving, but what the guitars do around that is very quirky — a sparkle of shrill and dissonant notes that seem to express a kind of bizarre jubilation. As the livid, snarled vocals arrive the mood of the music shifts, with the drums spurred into blast-beats, the bass feverishly throbbing, and the guitars viciously gnawing and frantically wailing.
Things get very wild and very distressing, but still macabre, and the changes keep coming like there’s no tomorrow. The stringed instruments start rapidly pulsating; the drums rush like weaponry fire; the guitars create a tangled mass of mauling and piercing dementia; the vocals yell and scream, sanity coming apart at the bloody seams. And the music bounds and spins, dancing in derangement.
“Head-spinning” doesn’t begin to describe what this experience is like. It’s weird, it’s raucous, it’s hard to comprehend, but it’s a thriller. The video is amazing too!
Výstup k svätej Kunde will be released on August 29th; it’s being released on vinyl by the Slovak label Nomad Sky Diaries. The album’s title, by the way, translates to The Ascent to the Holy Cunt.
https://porenut.bandcamp.com/album/v-stup-k-sv-tej-kunde
https://www.facebook.com/PorenutSk
VÖRNIR (Int’l)
I came across this next song thanks to a brief note at the end of a recent weekly musical roundup at Machine Music. The note reported, without any more detail, “Mystiskaos and Amor Fati announced a new album from new project/familiar faces Vörnir“. I quickly followed the note’s link to a song, and then spent considerably more time trying to figure out who was involved in the project. An Amor Fati Facebook post includes these names:
A. Woldaeg – Guitars, Bass
Swartadauþuz – Vocals, Additional Guitars, Ambience
War – Lead Guitars
H.V. Lyngdal – Additional Vocals, Ambience
K.P – Session Drums
I’m pretty sure the first name is Alex Poole (U.S.), and both Swartadauþuz (Sweden) and H.V. Lyngdal (Iceland) have resumes (as does Poole) that are easily found at Metal-Archives. I’m also pretty sure that War is Rory Flay (aka Collier d’Ombre, Necklace of Shadows), but I don’t have any official verification of that. I don’t have a guess about who K.P is.
Well, enough with my snooping and sleuthing, let’s get to the song, “I“. It has an instrumental overture that creates mental visions of gothic menace and encroaching horror, a supernatural sighting that chills the skin. Without warning, however, the song goes off like a sudden volcanic eruption — voices screaming and roaring, drums blasting away, the riffing like a dense and blistering pyroclastic flow.
Tendrils of piercing sound twine and whine through the maelstrom, and become more noticeable when the violence of the surge diminishes — which it does, but only briefly. Nothing about the hideous, demonic insanity of the vocals ever diminishes – they’re forever ghastly and horrific — and the drums continue seizing attention as well, while the storming riffage (an amalgam of grit and fire) and the frenzied and flashing lead-work consume listeners, intent on leaving nothing but ash behind.
The name of Vörnir‘s debut album is Av Hädanfärd Krönt. I haven’t seen a release date or pre-order links. Amor Fati described it this way in that Facebook post I mentioned earlier:
Embracing the black abyss and writhing in doom’s claw, Vörnir’s debut LP Av Hädanfärd Krönt exhibits a spiraling descent into blackened mass and disarray. Inspired by early 2000s orthodox black metal and dark ambient works, Vörnir reinvigorates a sound seemingly resting, but not forgotten. Av Hädanfärd Krönt purveys a frenzied campaign of stampeding fury and blinding maniacism, still rooted in occult and the traditional boundaries of black metal’s wretched core.
https://www.amor-fati-productions.de
https://amorfatiproductions.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/amorfatiprod/
BÁL/YMBEROPHILIA (Hungary)
The one-man Hungarian band Ymberophilia wrote us recently about a split release named Elmúlás that he did with another Hungarian one-man band, Bál. It was a humble message but also an intriguing one (including the part about Ymberophilia being “a not-so-common expression for when someone gets ‘excited’ when there’s a storm”), and so I found time to check out the split — which I’d now like to recommend.
Each band contributed three songs to the split. The ones from Bál come first in the Bandcamp stream. Their opening song, “Io“, is a startling thing to hear. Backed by vividly battering beats, the riffing furiously snarls and maniacally screams, as do the vocals. And while the song’s ferocious throbs don’t completely vanish, Bál also sends up brazen and blazing chords, slows the pace in order to deliver pulverizing stomps laced with weirdly vibrating high-end tones, injects sounds of bestial chewing and tormented angelic voices, spins up the song into a whirlwind of sandblasting abrasion even as those angels continue crying out, inserts growled words and plaintive piano keys, brings forth monstrous roars and garroted screeching — and revives that big throbbing pulse and its companion of sizzling fretwork madness from the beginning.
Like I said, a very startling and surprising way to begin. What follows from Bál is a two-part song named “Consumed By Shade“. Without trying to map out every last thing that happens, I’ll say that the two Parts include changing phases. Part I sounds mystical and pastoral, meditative and melancholy, with only dimly muttered words in the shadows. It’s more than halfway through before the bass rears its musing head, and the drums never rear up. It’s a very depressive but thoroughly soulful and spellbinding piece.
It probably won’t come as a big surprise to learn that Part II, which flows seamlessly from Part I, is considerably more distressing and orders of magnitude more breathtaking, thanks to the shrieking and roaring torment of the vocals, the more scathing and generally unhinged nature of the riffing, the furious blasting surge that eventually overtakes the song, and the expansiveness of symphonic synths that broaden the music’s harrowing and engulfing sweep.
And then it’s time for Ymberophilia‘s three songs, beginning with “A falaim“. That one launches with military beats, dense riffing swarms that are absolutely searing, and crazed screams. But the song also includes dismal and depressive melodies that slowly undulate through the immense low-end upheavals and incendiary swarms. While the pacing and rhythms of the percussion change, the music is relentlessly intense, including when the riffing gets more stripped down (and very heavy and dark) and the vocals turn to folk-like singing.
The momentum of “Féreg“, on the other hand, staggers and drags, still abrasive in tone but more deeply depressive in mood. Yet with a rumbling drum progression, Ymberophilia viciously opens up the flamethrowers and sandblasters again, and then follows that with a rocking beat, grimly raking riffage, and a gang tandem of guttural growls and asylum yells. The song is a skull-scourer from beginning to end, but its melodies of heartbreak make their mark too.
The split ends with “Levelek a porban“, a fierce and savage charge once again designed to burn listeners to the ground and stomp the glowing fragments into smaller shards. But once again, the song incorporates raking and throbbing melodic chords whose feelings of soul-stricken grief and abandonment get under a listener’s skin, and it eventually claws and staggers its way forward without hope — until something surprising happens in the final seconds.
Bál is a very tough act to follow, but I think Ymberophilia holds its own, making the split well worth having as a whole, and a good incitement for looking into what both bands have released in the past.
https://ymberophilia.bandcamp.com/album/elm-l-s-split-album
https://www.instagram.com/ymberophilia
https://www.facebook.com/p/Ymberophilia-61561171485684/
https://linktr.ee/valentbaal
https://www.facebook.com/valentBAAL