(written by Islander)

The copy/paste keyboard function is vital to preserving the sanity of people who write about metal in its global settings. Sometimes that’s because band names, album titles, or song names are in a language different from that of the writer. Sometimes it’s because metal bands have a tendency to just make up words for such things, and the words can be unpronounceable due to confounding juxtapositiions of consonants and vowels. And sometimes, but much more rarely, something significant is expressed in long strings of numbers.

Which brings us to the Canadian band Endspace. The name Endspace can be typed without difficulty, but copy/pasting is necessary for the identification of its two members. They are: 040118180514 and 102119200914. Equally strange, this isn’t the first time those two members have identified themselves numerically, even though Endspace is a new band — because they are also members of Fractal Generator, in which they are known by the same collections of digits.

This might lead you to assume there are similarities between what Endspace is doing and what Fractal Generator have done. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but you wouldn’t be entirely right either. At a high level Fractal Generator lean into death metal, whereas Endspace lean into black metal. And yet they are only just leaning, because both bands put lots of often head-scrambling twists, turns, and layers into their musical (and lyrical) concoctions.

In the case of Endspace, their first concoctions are encompassed by a debut album named First Contact that will be released on October 2nd by Transcending Obscurity Records. As the label says, it is “sci-fi themed black metal”, and it’s “light years ahead of what we’re accustomed to hearing”. Continue reading »