An evocative title, this one: “In the Wood of Hanged Men“. If you let your mind dwell upon it, you might imagine a nightmarish experience, a vision of rotting flesh descending like pendulums from gnarled black branches, swaying to the movement of their own ghastly clockwork or simply gazing down with hollow eyes from the angles of broken necks. Maybe you can imagine their own terrors… maybe you can still hear them scream….

It’s a chilling vision, and a fitting title for the music itself, which is itself profoundly unearthly and terrorizing. What you might not expect is that this diabolical, ultra-disturbing, creation by Pa Vesh En is almost capable of simultaneously creating a fugue state, an appalling spell that somehow radiates through the shattering violence and becomes arresting. Continue reading »

In the fall of last year we premiered the unnerving debut album, Church of Bones, by the Belarusian black metal entity Pa Vesh En. To borrow from the review that accompanied it:

“As the album’s title might suggest, these seven tracks sound as if they were recorded in a vast sepulcher far beneath the surface of the earth, all the shuddering and shattering tonalities drenched in reverb, the music profoundly haunting and deeply oppressive in the weight of the desolation it conveys. The album is sweeping in the scale of its apocalyptic grief and shattering in the intensity of the pain it channels into sound — an expression of emotional collapse so profound that it begins to seem majestic, an intense and immersive experience so all-consuming that it swallows up the listener, as if engulfed by the maw of a leviathan.” Continue reading »