AN NCS PREMIERE: AGONANIST — “THE GATEWAY”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 242026
 

(written by Islander)

In late August Transylvanian Recordings will release a second album by Agonanist, which is the experimental music project of multidisciplinary artist Tyler Henthorn, who is based in San Francisco. The album’s title is The Spirit of Gravity, and the label describes its contents as: “Dark, Hypnotic, Dissonant & Mystical Black Metal. Somewhere between a fever dream and a claustrophobic nightmare. Sonically unruly, jarring, & entrancing.”

The album has many unusual aspects, which we explored with Tyler in an interview you’ll find near the end of this article. It was produced in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where Tyler lived for many years. Further, in creating the music he used microtonal instruments, experimenting with EDO (Equal Divisions of the Octave), cutting the octave into numerous steps, with side A of the album described as “a mix of 17ET and 12ET, and side B of 22ET” (with ET standing for “Equal Temperament”).

Moreover, Agonanist enlisted the participation of some notable guests. He sent demos of the songs to Andrew Lee (Ripped to Shreds), Colin Marston (Krallice, Gorguts, Behold the Arctopus), and Kevin Paradis (Benighted, Svart Crown), and gave them the freedom to put themselves into his compositions.

The results are indeed sonically unruly, jarring, and entrancing. Tyler explains: “The Spirit of Gravity represents inevitability, our experience of time being an illusion, causality being a continuous web that spans the entire universe where everything exists at once in a splatter of liquid.”

In reading those words, and in listening to the album, it’s not surprising to learn that Tyler is a fan of the great Polish science fiction author Stanisław Lem (1921-2006) and that the name Agonanist is derived from an episode in one of Lem’s stories. But more about that later (much later). For now we should turn to some of the music on The Spirit of Gravity, including a song named “The Gateway” that we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (SOLSTICE EDITION): AGONANIST, STARER, ATMOSSOMTA, INCINITOR

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jun 212026
 

(written by Islander)

We wish you a Happy June Solstice, the longest day of the year for everyone living north of the Tropic of Cancer and the shortest day for people living south of the Tropic of Capricorn. (I hope I got that right!) We also wish a Happy Father’s Day to fathers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the UK, and Ireland — and maybe some other countries, but I haven’t checked. I also haven’t checked on how often the June Solstice and Father’s Day coincide here in the U.S. and in those other countries, but they’re coinciding today (the last time was in 2021).

I spent a big chunk of yesterday outside in an early celebration of Father’s Day, a day early because the dads planned to spend today with their families, and probably didn’t want those families to see how tilted they were getting during this 8-hour outing (I prefer “tilted” to “wasted” because it’s the Earth’s “tilt” that produces the solstices). The setting was beautiful, the weather was glorious, the beer was cold and plentiful, and the sun still hadn’t set here in the Pacific Northwest when I collapsed into bed around 9 p.m.

All that brightness and conviviality weren’t conducive to the contemplation of dark music. It’s still very bright where I am this morning (though fog is in my head), and looking ahead to the longest day compounds the difficulty of immersion in dark music. The sun pulls one way, the black metal pulls the other way. I’ve attempted to find an equilibrium by recommending a few things, but not as many as I might have on a different Sunday. Continue reading »