Black Cilice, Nornahetta, Wode @ the Boston Music Room

The mysterious being known as Black Cilice has gained – if within an admittedly small scene – a surprising degree of popularity lately. Surprising if only because it is rare to see a project so uncompromising in its enigmatic status, and so dedicated to lo-fi output, garnering significant attention. Yet, in 2017, Black Cilice dropped the mesmerising Banished from Time through Iron Bonehead productions, one of the largest labels in underground extreme metal. The record has already seen several re-presses, and any time spent on Instagram will reveal a horde of users showing off their copy of the record’s distinctive and perfectly representative artwork. I’ve noted this before, but Black Cilice’s eerie, minimalistic artwork is one of the best examples of a band’s aesthetic matching its sound.

 

With the release of Banished from Time, Black Cilice were already one of the bands that had defined my experience of extreme metal in 2017. The album is equal parts emotionally devastating, enchanting, and haunting. I read Susan Sontag’s wonderful Illness as Metaphor last week, and one of the most distinctive images in the text (admittedly, an image she is critical of, for the metaphorical confusion it causes), is the nineteenth century image of the victim of tuberculosis; more beautiful, more transcendent, as closer to death. This is the image conjured up listening to Banished from Time; of the enchanting pallor and vitality of those so close to being drained of all life. On a cruder note, the album treads the fine line between being so captivating as to demand repeated replays, and so emotionally raw and challenging to preclude them. You will be wrung out by listening to it, but you’ll press play again each time.

 

I’d thought about trying to review Banished from Time, but was reluctant given the amount of press it has already garnered, and how close some of this press has come to actually detracting from the album. You end up wondering if these reviews were written by people who even looked at or listened to the record. This idiot notes he doesn’t know if Black Cilice lyrics are in English of Portuguese, or even consist of words, despite the lyrics being included in the record. He also describes the musicianship as ‘passable’, which is both irrelevant and untrue. This barely-literate fuck-up thought it worth publishing the line ‘Vocally, this release has plenty of vocals’, and suggests that the record is ‘straight black metal with some atmosphere added in’. Whatever this means, I don’t want to know. Or take this passage from this other useless cunt, which consists of taking a boring point and writing it in ever stupider ways:

‘Mysteries had a very strange production; it was an album that highlighted the strangeness of black metal. Sometimes I forget how strange black metal is as a genre. Any black metal fan who listens to the genre every day can sometimes forget how strange and inconvenient the sounds are the same of the bands produce. Mysteries was an album that highlighted the strangeness of black metal…’

If nothing else, it’s testament to the quality of Banished from Time that you still want to listen to it after exposure to these fucking morons.

 

Anyway, an entirely unexpected opportunity – indeed, an opportunity I thought would never arise – to see Black Cilice live arose recently. In December 2016, Black Cilice played its first live show, in the Netherlands. In March this year, a second show was announced, this time in London. By luck, my current research trip for my PhD coincided perfectly with the show, and I grabbed tickets as soon as they went on sale. Little footage is available of the Netherlands show, but of what I had seen, it was impossible that this evening could be anything other than perfect. It seemed appropriate that the day of the show I spent leafing through crumbling seventeenth century manuscripts, often written on cow-hide. These stories of the now-long dead, inscribed on the flesh of the dead, seemed an appropriate companion to the night’s morbid delights.

 

The show was at the Boston Music Room, a venue I was last at with two close friends in 2015 to catch Tombs and Black Anvil. It’s a small room attached to a pub. It seems to have windows, but they haven’t been open either time I’ve been there. The show featured, of course, the usual effluvia brought in by metal gigs: some fat bloke body-banging; an incredibly tall goth with enough spiky facial piercings to look like a tool-box, who was like one of those optical illusions of eyes that seem to follow you wherever you move, except he was directly between me and the stage regardless of where I stood; and some pretend-Viking who had spent all day braiding his equally long beard and hair.

 

The line-up had initially consisted of Folteraar, who also played Black Cilice’s first show, Nornahetta, and Black Cilice. I’m not sure for what reason, but Wode ended up replacing Folteraar. I was a bit disappointed at this. Folteraar is the one-man project of the depraved mind behind elite raw black metal label The Throat, and I thought that the raw brutality of the band’s sound would translate well to the stage. Folteraar, like Black Cilice and Nornahetta, also exist, if firmly within black metal, well away from the genre’s orthodoxies. Though less like the rest of the line-up, there was something meaningful in the inclusion of Wode, though. Their more traditional sound, more obviously rooted in the early 90s Scandinavian scene, offered a demonstration of where black metal began, before Nornahetta and Black Cilice showed us where it could go.

 

Wode’s set was unfortunately damaged by a complete fuck up by the sound guy. For half the set, nothing was audible – and I mean nothing – except the snare drum and vocals. Poor production has often barely hampered black metal, but Wode’s sound requires a degree of competence behind the mixing board. Wode blend intricate, majestic twin-guitar tremming with sections of dirty, mid-tempo grooves. The end result is often somewhat uneven, sounding like a blend of Dissection and Darkthrone. In other words, they haven’t got down the blend that drove Watain’s mid-career success. When the sound guy finally realised that the two guitarists and bass player on stage had actually been playing instruments all set, and that perhaps the idea was that these should be audible, Wode showed themselves to be a tight if not exceptionally exciting live band. Even with a decent mix, the band seem a little lacking. The higher register trem-picking was all excellent, but the mid-tempo sections lacked punch, failing to hit as hard as the band clearly want them to. There’s good stuff here, regardless, but it’d be good to see the band bring their sound together a bit more.

 

Unlike Folteraar, I was sceptical regarding Nornahetta’s ability to translate their sound on record to the stage. I’m a big fan of The Psilocybin Tapes, the CD collection Nornahetta released through Signal Rex last year, that compiles all their earlier material. The Psilocybin Tapes is defined, though, by its excruciatingly lo-fi quality. Riffs, vocals, and drums are all hard to discern in the swirling, dissonant chaos of the record. It’s fucking terrifying, but you also don’t really know what you’re listening to at times. Nornahetta are certainly a very different band live, but are no less terrifying. The band consists of two men, whose names are unknown, and who swapped between bass and guitar half-way through the set. For this reason, I have to refer to them as the short-haired one and the long-haired one. They were joined here by Trish Kolsvart on drums, from the fucking mental Asagraum. Trish is a fucking tight drummer: her playing has few frills, but she can blast for minutes on end, and has a rich sense of dynamics, crucial for Nornahetta’s sound live.

 

Nornahetta’s set opened with the short-haired member chanting on the ground, with the long-haired guy and Trish offering only minimal accompaniment. Slowly they built their way from this sparse introduction, through patient repetition and Trish’s increasing activity on the drum-stool, to a dissonant maelstrom. From this point, the set rarely deviated from blasting intensity. The effect, in particular because of the effects-laden guitar work, is hypnotic. Indeed, though Nornahetta’s songs aren’t especially long, one loses sight of these distinctions – as on record – watching them live, as you’re engulfed in the chaos. I remember songs ending and starting, but that all seemed peripheral. I experienced the set as a single, intense ritual. The main difference between live and on record is that there’s way more low-end in the sound; Nornahetta are fucking heavy live. The demented howls of both men contribute to this.

 

Honestly, I think they were tight, but this was a set that was experienced viscerally, in which such subjects rarely came to mind. I have one complaint, though minor, and again about the sound. When the guys swapped guitar and bass, they also swapped mics, changing from the ones they had sound-checked on. Clearly, the long-haired guy had a far louder voice, so his initial mic was set at a lower level than the short-haired guy’s. When they changed mics, though, this meant the long-haired member was now at the loud mic, and his vocals over-powered the entire band. This would’ve been an unbelievably easy fix for the stupid cunt doing sound. When they swap mics, you simply have to swap mic levels. Instead, he did nothing. It didn’t really detract from the set, but it was still fucking dumb.

Photos taken by Instagram user @earthreborn

Black Cilice, thank fuck, brought their own sound guy, whose contribution, as well as getting the mix to sound exactly the same as Banished from Time, was to have grown a handle-bar moustache that perfectly replicated the black lines on the corpse paint worn by Black Cilice’s live members. Black Cilice played live as a four-piece; a vocalist (I assume the band’s only real member), a drummer, and two guitarists – no bass player. The live sound was incredible, as the band perfectly captured the wobbly, trebly, reverb-laden guitar tone of Banished from Time. It should go without saying, but this emphasised the extent to which lo-fi doesn’t necessarily equate to a rejection of recording values. It reveals the extent to which Black Cilice’s particular brand of lo-fi recording is entirely intentional, carefully crafted to best reflect the music.

 

Black Cilice played an hour-long set, which consisted of – I think – all of Banished from Time, as well as some material from A Corpse, A Temple, and at least one track from Summoning the Night, the dissonant ‘Chaos and Evil’. The four members all wear the distinctive cloaks of Black Cilice’s artwork, with hoods pulled down well over their corpse-painted faces, which were rarely visible. The band was illuminated only by white back-lighting, and they played drenched in the dense fog of a smoke machine. The stage was foregrounded by elaborate candelabra, and the vocalist at one point held aloft a smaller candelabrum hanging from a chain. The otherworldly, mystical presentation of the band was perfect. Too many bands – particularly in black metal – just slap on some corpse paint and think their live performances worthy of being described as a ‘ritual’. In Black Cilice’s case, there was no such pretence: this was a ritual in the deepest sense, affirming the value of taking seriously what it is to perform live.

 

It’s difficult to find anything more to say that can actually convey the experience of watching Black Cilice live. Of course, the musicianship was precise, and the band’s haunting stage presence evoked the sound perfectly. The howled vocals were particularly harrowing; more ghastly, though no less chilling, for being live. The most interesting aspect of the set was that you get a far greater sense live of how post-punk Black Cilice’s sound can be. The more noticeable dynamic shifts live reveal that, from the sparse major chord melodies that crop up throughout Banished from Time, and the metronymic drumming of the non-blasting sections, Black Cilice share much with that other no-less chilling and depressive genre. This isn’t a huge surprise: Black Cilice have released a split with Forbidden Citadel of Spirits, who in turn share members with Carved Cross, who in turn share members with Night Falls Haunting. As I’ve noted elsewhere, those latter two bands are very clearly influenced by post-punk. Witnessing the band live, one thus gets a slightly richer sense of how mesmerising Black Cilice are; of the diverse ways in which this dark magic is deployed.

 

Ultimately, watching Black Cilice was a transcendent experience; inspiring and moving. Black Cilice’s discography stands as a declaration to total dedication, the rotten fruit of allowing one’s darkest aspects to fester and slowly bloom. In its live incarnation, the band reveals that same dedication, a commitment to conceive of one’s band as a total project, in which the performance and music are one. Few bands will release music as good as Black Cilice’s, but fewer still will be able to perform it in a way that captures it and even enhances it to such an extent.

Coffin Lust – Beyond the Dark

Coffin Lust – Beyond the Dark (Sarlacc Productions)

Format: cassette

Purchase: Under the Sign Records

Price: $5AU

Listen here

 

I was a teenager through the middle of the metalcore explosion in the mid-noughties. Some people, who clearly weren’t fucking idiots at that age managed to survive outside of the trend, but for a few years I was firmly a part of it. I want to blame this on the fact that as a 15-year-old, the only shows I could go to in Canberra were shitty fucking all ages shows for shitty fucking metalcore bands. Any metal bands that came to Canberra, or Sydney, the closest large town that gets all the bigger tours, played over-18s venues. By the time I was 17 I had a decent beard and enough friends who were 18 to be able to sneak into shows, but up to that point, any desire to be involved in local live music had to be expressed through hardcore and metalcore (and not good hardcore, to be clear). I discovered quite recently that this metalcore scene still exists in Canberra, and even has an over-18s component. I don’t know what has to have gone wrong in your life to be a part of this scene now, but there is no excuse for being this much of a stupid cunt.

 

Fortunately, though I went to a lot of fucking horrible gigs, this didn’t seem to bleed too much into my record buying. I made some mistakes: an Atreyu album; a fucking Bleeding Through album. The only CD I seem to still have from being a part of that scene is Comeback Kid’s Wake the Dead, which I maintain is a solid record for what it is. For the most part, I seem to have spent these years buying Anthrax and Emperor records. I recently listened back through some of my Anthrax stuff; they remain, for me, easily the best of the big 4 thrash bands. I also bought Dark Medieval Times, the only Satyricon record worth listening to, and the only time Frost’s fucking desperate-for-attention persona can be ignored. Dark Medieval Times is completely flawless.

 

A consequence of spending too much time in fucking deadend deadshit metalcore is that I grew up with a sense that bands like Hatebreed and Throwdown were the fucking toughest bands out. In the late noughties, I got into H8000 and the late-90s European metalcore scene. Listening to Arkangel and Reprisal only furthered my sense that this was the place for fucking tough music. It was only more recently that I realised that what I loved in these Euro bands was the death metal influence in their sound. All those straight edge warriors were clearly devouring Carcass (the shit before Heartwork; Heartwork-inspired metalcore is obviously as fucking bad as the source material) and Dismember. I’m not the first person to realise this: Sam Vince describes the same experience in his essential first issue of Horrified.  What this all means is that the source for the toughest fucking riffs is not metalcore, but old school death metal. Coffin Lust knew this way before me, and this pummelling demo is evidence of just how tough and heavy death metal can be. Slam-pussies fuck off. This will beat the shit out of you.

 

Coffin Lust is the side project of Nocturnal Graves’s (and Impious Baptism, and Sithlord, and formerly Destroyer 666, and so many other bands) hyper-productive Jarro Raphael, appearing here as J. R, and handling vocals, guitars, bass, and drums. Alongside J. R., Coffin Lust’s other member is P. W., or Pete Walker, who contributes vocals and guitars, and has done time in Azazel’s Harem and Denouncement Pyre, among other bands. In other words, Coffin Lust consists of one of the most established figures in Australian extreme metal, and another member who, if less-established, has a fucking impressive back catalogue. This was always going to fucking rule, but I didn’t realise just how much until I put it on.

 

Beyond the Dark is five years old, but these riffs could have been written in 1990 or 2017. Coffin Lust perfectly capture the spirit of bands like Grave or Nihilist, and do so with sufficient intensity that nothing in this sounds dated. Despite being only four tracks long and just over 17 minutes, you will play this thing over and over again; I know because I just sit there, flipping the cassette back and forth (actually, this is an exaggeration, because my tape deck plays tapes forwards and backwards). Though there are moments of pace here, Beyond the Dark revels in old school groovy death metal; blast beats are scarce, with J. R. preferring d-beats and groovier mid-tempo patterns to a blistering pace. The only extended section of blasting comes in third track, ‘Fading Life’, beneath some cavernous low-end tremming.

 

The riffs are almost entirely played down the fret board and there are few melodies. Most of the guitar work is spent on thick chords, which are occasionally interspersed with brief trem-lines. The riffs are groovy and fucking heavy. The main exceptions come in second track, ‘Forsaken’, which features not only a section of single-note tremming, but two sections led by a clear guitar melody. None of these sections break the heaving sludge that characterises this record, though. The tremming is accompanied by double-kicks, and the leads are separated by a fucking glacial doom riff, and both feature a thick and slow low-end beneath the melody. This shit is unrelentingly heavy.

 

As well as being fucking crushing, this record is deeply evil. The comparison here to Nihilist, in particular the Drowned demo, and Grave, or even the legendary Morbid, is important. This is death metal that is both heavy and sinister, unlike Autopsy’s or Obituary’s straight-ahead brutal, groovy style.  The Stygian atmosphere of Beyond the Dark is largely provided by the suffocating slowness of the riffs, and is furthered through the minor-chord trem-lines, that could belong easily on Onward to Golgotha, and the creeping malevolence of the leads. Even when Coffin Lust break from the crushing sludge that characterises much of Beyond the Dark, their riffs continue to seethe with impious energy. The vocals also contribute to this atmosphere, as they’re fucking cavernous and raw. These are vocals straight from the depths of hell, a point confirmed through the occult subject-matter of the lyrics. Raphael and Walker growl their way through incantations of Sabbathian violence and death. The lyrics are semi-audible, so it especially matters that they match the sound Coffin Lust spew forth, and they do so with precision; as evil as the guitar work is, the vocals and lyrics are, too.

 

When reviewing Nocturnal Graves’s indomitable Lead us to the Endless Fire/Sharpen the Knives I noted that there, Raphael revealed a dedication to dynamic song-writing, a capacity to craft extreme songs that were unremittingly dark, but also catchy and diverse. These are songs that you can listen to on repeat. Beyond the Dark is the same. Though this record is clearly death metal, Raphael again pays homage to late-80s/early-90s extreme metal, and again, has participated in a record defined by exceptional song-writing. One of the best developments in recent years has been the resurgence of evil old school death metal. Coffin Lust are not merely part of this resurgence, but are at the head of this new horde of rotten worshippers. This is an instant classic in sludgy, sinister death metal, that pays tribute to old masters while dripping with fresh vitality.

Interview: Sentient Ruin Laboratories

I’d been hoping to get a review up this week alongside the SLAVE BIRTH interview, but have spent my week crushed beneath a pile of undergraduate history essays I’ve had to mark. On top of that, I’m trying to prepare for a trip to London for the next six weeks to undertake primary research at the National Archives for my PhD. I’ve still been listening to music, but couldn’t get my shit together to do a write-up of a record this week. Fortunately, two interviews I’d been planning both ended up being completed this week, and I’ve decided to post both this week to make up for the absence of a record review. Along with the guys in SLAVE BIRTH, I was lucky enough to chat to M., the main man behind grim analogue-exclusive label Sentient Ruin Laboratories. Sentient Ruin have been putting out weird and evil sounds for the last five years, but have fully come into their own this year. Already in 2017, these guys released the cassette of Necrot’s unstoppable old school Blood Offering, an immediate death metal classic, and Abkehr’s chilling In Asche, one of the most creative black metal records I’ve heard recently, equal parts raw and hateful, and depressive. Importantly, they’ve also put out a bunch of blackened crust that won’t make you feel like those genres are better separate (looking at you, Vestiges, you hippie fucking scum), and will help you forget that Young and in the Way took the first chance they got to sell the fuck out and start writing piss-weak fucking hardcore. This label is pushing the fucking boundaries of extreme metal, and I’m very happy to get to promote their work. 

Website

Bandcamp

<$6.66: Hails, could you start by introducing yourself?

M: Hails! Sentient Ruin is a one-man operation, based in Oakland CA, working mostly with friends – but we’ll forever address ourselves as “we” specifically cause it’s me and all these awesome bands, and all the people who help out. There are many.

 

<$6.66: As I understand it, you started releasing material as Sentient Ruin Laboratories in 2012, when you put out Abstracter’s Tomb of Feathers. It was another two years, though, before you put out another release, Sutekh Hexen’s Become. You’ve been steadily releasing music from that time. Can you give us a little history of Sentient Ruin Laboratories?

M: We’ve always had this admiration and curiosity toward labels like Aurora Borealis, Utech Records, The Ajna Offensive, Norma Evangelium Diaboli, Osmose Productions, Hydra Head Records, Cold Spring Records, Life is Abuse, etc. When Abstracter came out of nowhere with a debut album, they seemed like a great prospect to “experiment” with, and learn a bit about getting tapes made and the process behind it and then that of getting them out in the wild. It’s always been a learning experience. There is no user manual to this shit. Personal shit got in the way for two years, but once that was out of the way it became clear that the inspiration and excitement for a second attempt was strong. Since then shit’s never subsided.

 

<$6.66: What got you into extreme music? What shit are you listening to?

M: The normality of living in a small country town in Europe where everyday seems exactly the same and nothing ever happens. Nothing ever shakes you to the core. You lose the sense of survival, and as such, almost that of being alive. Metal became a gateway into a world of danger – reconnecting me with real life, and the real world that lurked not too far beyond, in big cities, slums, gutters, all over the world. I learned a sense of reality through metal. In the last few years Triptykon, Behexen, Knelt Rote, Hell, Lustmord, Wardruna, Zoloa, Acephalix, Sutekh Hexen, Dispirit, Darkspace, to name a few, have been the main drivers of endorphins over here…. Bands that have been gateways in the past: Slayer, Amebix, Lustmord, Judas Priest, Fields of the Nephilim, Godflesh, Beherit.

 

<$6.66: Does Sentient Ruin Laboratories work alongside other labels, and if so, which ones?

M: At this stage with postage increases and other bullshit, distributing in Europe has become a nightmare, so we often co-release with EU labels and have a local label do the legwork over there. Feast of Tentacles, Dawnbreed Records, Shove Records, To The Death Records, just to name a few. There are more, they are all amazing homies. Working with other labels is the best, and an empowering experience.

 

<$6.66: Turning to the work the label’s done this year, how does it feel to have just released the best death metal album since Blood Incantation’s Starspawn on cassette? Necrot’s Blood Offering is a fucking monster of a record. Flawless old school death metal. How did you end up putting it out? Is this paying for an early retirement? 

M: Necrot were friends of mine even long before the label. Those guys are just family. And they happen to be an incredible band. Supporting them and being involved in their art is basic instinct of survival/common sense over here.

 

<$6.66: My sense is that a label like Sentient Ruin Laboratories wouldn’t have been possible 15, or even 10, years ago. It’s really been in the last 5 years that we’ve seen a lot of the stricter distinctions between genres start to collapse. A lot of the material you put out seems to revel in this. Bands like Show of Bedlam, american, Leather Glove, and indeed Abstracter, all inhabit weird hybridisations of black metal and other genres, like sludge and noise. Necrot are probably the most easily categorizable band you’ve worked with, as they’re clearly a death metal band. But even in their case, their sound is fucking evil and it isn’t miles away from a band like Dead Congregation, who have not only worked with a black metal label (Norma Evangelium Diaboli) but have a lot of black metal in their sound. Do you think that’s an apt description of what’s been going on in extreme music? Have you found yourself in the middle of an expanding scene? If so, what do you think made this possible? And what do you make of the new sonic opportunities these hybridisations are throwing up?

M: There is always someone putting weird ingredients in a traditional dish and making “fusion” dishes and spawning a whole new era of fine dining to speak. See Neurosis, Portal, or go as far back as Judas Priest when they were a blues rock band or even further back when Pink Floyd started to fuck heavily with psychedelia. Extreme metal has always drawn from other sources to remain interesting, and of course “extreme”. The most out-there shit today is influenced by noise and power electronics or dark ambient and extreme grind for example, and it just keeps digging deeper. As such, there is an eclectic and vast array of musical tastes and influences behind this label, which is simply like a projection of someone’s mind. Always been into stuff as diverse as the Melvins, Godflesh, Tool, Emperor, Beherit, Lustmord, Simple Minds, and beyond. And it’s ever-changing. In recent times labels like Invictus Productions, Vault of Dried Bones, and Iron Bonehead have exposed an oozing hole of extreme metal which is intriguing. Show of Bedlam could have been a Hydra Head band, a label that was very influential to getting Sentient Ruin going. Going to the Nick Cave show next week, and Depeche mode in the fall. The mind is an ever expanding thing – the scopes of interest are just too many and too wide to be “specialized”…..

 

<$6.66: The shit you’ve put out, as I note, spans a range of different sounds, but it’s all united by a feeling of consuming darkness. There isn’t a huge gulf between bands like Necrot and Abkehr, and you can listen to them in succession without much of a change in feel.  It seems like you’ve put a lot of thought into establishing a particular, I guess, sonic ethos for Sentient Ruin Laboratories. Is that the case? More broadly, I suppose, what are you trying to achieve with Sentient Ruin Laboratories? Is there an underlying purpose to the label?

M: The unifying thread is struggle. Music that shows darkened traits, which is embittered and on the edge of a void. The genre doesn’t matter. Could be folk or cold wave for all that matters. Sentient Ruin Laboratories as said above is expansion of someone’s mind outward. Something touches within, and then the desire to be a part of it somehow becomes fervent and almost unrestrained. In this sense, the purpose of the label is simply self expression, both by the label entity, and of aiding in other’s self expression. The sounds must be genuine, touching, and wretched.

 

<$6.66: This is a related question. What are you looking for in the bands you work with? You’ve put out releases from bands around the world, touring band and non-touring bands. What drives your decision to work with a band?

M: Very hard to say. Whatever touches within. The main thing is seriousness. There is this desire and willingness to embrace someone’s vision. There must be some kind of vision behind it all. I think it’s also easy to tell there isn’t much trendy shit on the label. Take a band like american, Show of Bedlam, or buioingola. It’s like taking a dive inside someone’s head. And most people don’t even wanna go there, are too distracted to, or don’t have the bandwidth, attention, or proactiveness to go there and try to understand. So, a ton of shit flies under the radar, but we always take that dive, and that’s all that happens in this label’s world really.

 

<$6.66: We’re obviously fortunate enough to be in the middle of an analogue revival, which your label is clearly a part of. There are still quite a few extreme metal labels – especially in Australia – that rely on primarily digital formats. What got you into analogue, and conversely, what keeps you away from digital?

M: Interestingly, Sentient Ruin Laboratories relies a lot on digital – Spotify, Bandcamp, Soundcloud etc. You name it. So, since that’s where CDs have mutated, we still very much do them, but in their new form. CDs are like packaged iTunes gift cards at this point. Have you ever seen Amazon Disc on Demand? Check it out and you will know. Basically they just shit you out a CD from a template in real time based off the mp3 album for sale on Amazon mp3. They print the digital cover that appears on your computer if you play an mp3 and it’s done. Imagine doing something like that with a record or tape… That gives you the idea, more or less of what a CD is these days. Tapes and records are a whole different story – they complement the digital product very well. They sound different, must be absorbed differently, and just by nature, are immortal and immutable. I think there is this myth however that tapes are somehow popular “again”? That’s bullshit. They nearly went extinct at the turn of the millennium and while they survived the extinction event and are apparently less in decline than CDs, they are nowhere back to where they used to be. A bunch of dorks like me enjoy them, and that’s about it. Small runs are made, people still roll their eyes to them.

 

<$6.66: To wrap up, what’s next for Sentient Ruin Laboratories?

M: Holy shit – a ton of stuff. New Acephalix, new Abstracter, new Atrament, some more Sutekh Hexen stuff, and a long ass list of shit that can’t be announced yet. This has been the busiest year ever for the label, and it will get even worse and I still haven’t found the hand brake on this thing. Thanks for your time – as obvious, any attention given to this small operation is a huge blessing for which being thankful can never be enough!

 

Interview: SLAVE BIRTH

We reviewed the fucking mental Blight Worms/Slave Birth split cassette out through Noisebleed Records in April, and in the same month spoke to Blight Worms drummer Elliot Johnson, who produced the split. Given this, it made sense to have a chat to Slave Birth, too. As noted before, these guys have – at least as far as I can tell – come out of fucking nowhere in Canberra playing some absolutely blistering PV. Canberra has a small but surprisingly fertile scene, and we’re fucking lucky to have bands like this that work hard to create intense and inspiring extreme music.

<$6.66: Hi lads, let’s start off with you guys introducing yourselves.

SLAVE BIRTH: Hey we are Liam and Rohan, we’re both 20, and we play together as SLAVE BIRTH.

 

<$6.66: As it stands, Slave Birth have released a live demo and two cassettes since the start of 2016, with your most recent release being the split with Blight Worms on Noisebleed Records. Can you give us a short history of the band?

SLAVE BIRTH: The HUNG MIND demo was recorded towards the end of our time with a third member. after that we continued as a two piece under the new name. Since then we’ve played shows alongside a few international bands and plenty of sick local and interstate bands.

 

<$6.66: Ok, this sounds fucking patronising, and I’m sure you’ve had it before, but how the fuck did you guys get into PV? I’m nearly 10 years older than you two and I found powerviolence in my mid-20s, and still engage with the genre in a pretty superficial manner. You guys have been nailing the style since you were teenagers. How did you guys find this music and end up playing it?

SLAVE BIRTH: We have been using Bandcamp to find new hardcore, doom, and black metal since high school but it must have been late 2013 towards the end of year 11 that we really started discovering PV and grind.

NAILS’ Abandon All Life had recently come out and we were dead set on playing what they were playing, which became our short lived hardcore project, Wasted South, with two of our mates from school. Bands like IDYLLS, Dropdead, ACxDC, Weekend Nachos, and JohnXMcClane influenced us during this time. Wasted South played one show in a backyard before our bassist dropped out to focus on his jazz project and we stopped making music for a few months before the two of us and our vocalist started playing together again as HUNG MIND in 2015.

 

<$6.66: So far you’ve worked with two labels; your self-titled cassette came out through Lacklustre Records, based in Canberra, and as noted above, the Blight Worms split was on Noisebleed. How did you end up working with these labels and what was the experience like? Will you work with them again?

SLAVE BIRTH: We started working with Leekspin at Lacklustre just by asking if he would be keen to do some tapes for us and he told us that he digs our band and was more than happy to hook us up. He made the process of making and selling the tapes incredibly straight forward and easy for us.

Damo and Finch from BLIGHT WORMS got us in touch with Tex at Noisebleed. We would love to work with them again. Lacklustre and Noisebleed have done a lot for us and we are really grateful for it.

 

<$6.66: Though you’ve put out three releases already, the total time of recorded music you guys have put out is about 15 minutes. Have you considered doing a longer Slave Birth release, and if so, how would that work? One of the things I love about Slave Birth is how fucking intense the experience is. You put a tape on and get absolutely thrashed for about 3 minutes, and are left in a fucking heap. I don’t know how that would translate over a longer record like a 30 minute album, whether some of that intensity would dissipate or not.

SLAVE BIRTH: There have been a bunch of parts we’ve written and scrapped, mainly influenced by drone and doom. They’re usually long and drawn out and sort of kill the momentum that’s been built, you know? Although they are heavy as fuck and we do like them we decide against using most of them on SLAVE BIRTH releases.

The other influence we have played around with over the years is harsh noise. If we were to force a longer run time we would probably just throw in a nasty load of noise and guitar feedback, but we’re pretty strict with ourselves when it comes to deciding what makes it onto each release and what would otherwise just be filler.

 

<$6.66: You’ve played a fair few Canberra shows, both supporting Australian and international bands, and also alongside other local bands, and you’ve also spent time playing outside Canberra. What do you think of the Canberra scene, and how does it compare to other places you’ve played?

SLAVE BIRTH: Canberra is our home and we love the people here. Our community is kind of small compared to other cities but there is no shortage of love and passion for the music we play. There aren’t as many bands and venues as there are in Melbourne or Sydney and that does mean you hear the same music a lot. But it also means you grow that much closer to the people playing and listening and it all feels extremely tight knit. It’s beautiful.

When we played our first interstate show at Wasteland in Sydney last year we were a bit nervous going into it, but the people there were cool as fuck and made us feel really welcome.

 

<$6.66: I’m really interested in the ideas that underlie the band. When I saw you guys live in February, Liam spoke on stage about the importance of veganism to both of you. What role does veganism play in Slave Birth?

SLAVE BIRTH: Animal rights is something that became important to us not too long after we finished school. We learned more about animal agriculture and the atrocities and injustices we had been paying for unknowingly for 19 years and decided to take action beyond simply not consuming animal products. We made new friends with some very down to earth and inspiring people through volunteer work and activism with Vegan ACT and places like Little Oak Sanctuary.

As far as the band goes, we both just kind of wanted somewhere to vent some frustration as the pile of new information grew and we discovered all the lies that we’d been fed our whole lives.

 

<$6.66: Do you guys deal with any other lyrical themes?

SLAVE BIRTH: Usually our lyrics come from things that we as individuals have felt or experienced growing up into our adulthood as well as things that frustrate and anger us. We write about world hunger and poverty, the senselessness of war and rape, human selfishness and greed, feelings of fear, betrayal, anxiety, self loathing, and grief.

We don’t really like writing heaps of lyrics either, we try to make our points concise, sometimes only using a few words or sentences.

 

<$6.66: This question is probably more for Liam. As I understand it, you’ve been dealing with some serious health problems that limit your capacity to play guitar. Can you give us any insight into that, and how it will affect Slave Birth going forward?

SLAVE BIRTH: Towards the end of last year I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease similar to rheumatoid arthritis which has given me a tough time with joint pain and overall illness and fatigue. It hurts to play guitar, especially fast music due to swollen and inflamed joints in my fingers, elbows and shoulders.

 

<$6.66: On that, what are the current plans for you guys for the rest of 2017?

SLAVE BIRTH: We are in the final stages of writing and getting ready to record a split with METH MIND from Louisiana. Other than that we have no plans yet.

 

<$6.66: Thanks a lot for the interview lads, any last words?

SLAVE BIRTH: Huge thanks to anyone that has checked us out, this project has already gone way further than we ever thought it would.

Old Arrival – Blazing Fire of the Black Light

Old Arrival – Blazing Fire of the Black Light (self-released)

Format: cassette

Purchase: From the band**

Price: 6EU

No streaming links you fucking poser

 

** Old Arrival don’t have an Australian distro, so I picked up a couple of extra copies of Blazing Fire of the Black Light. If you’re in Australia and looking for one, let me know at under666blog[at]gmail[dot]com; $10AU postage paid. If you’re in the Northern hemisphere and want a copy, I’d recommend getting in touch with Old Arrival directly at xarag.asuras[at]gmail[dot]com

 

This tape is by Old Arrival. It’s called Blazing Fire of the Black Light. I had to email a guy called Xarag to get one. There are no streaming links online. Xarag begins his emails with ‘Hell Awaits’. The artwork on this tape consists of a poorly drawn inverted cross ON FIRE and pentagram ON THE MOON, a field of skulls, some hanging victims, and some mountains. There is a photo of both band members breathing fire. This was apparently recorded ‘IN TOTAL DARKNESS’. In short, I knew this fucking thing was going to rip before I even chucked it in the tape deck.

 

Old Arrival are from Saxony, in Germany. They’re a studio-only two-piece, made up of Xarag Asuras, who played bass in Reign in Blood, and hear handles guitar, bass, and vocals, and M. V., who plays drums. They self-released this demo in 2015, and it remains the project’s only output. Blazing Fire of the Black Light is four tracks of fucking raw old-school black metal. I found these guys in the recent Golgotha/Black Candle split zine, an excellent read covering black and death metal, contemporary art, Holy Terror, and other aspects of the underground. It is, it should go without saying, better than the hysterical limp-dick-rubbing of V.I.T.R.I.O.L. I wrote about a few weeks ago. I was interested in Old Arrival not only for their near-total opposition to the internet (I know, ironic given I’m writing this on a blog), but because the band was described as genuinely replicating the 90s spirit of black metal. Also, the band’s capitalisation of phrases like ‘THE UNHOLY FORCES OF EVIL’, which they randomly inserted into their answers, suggested a band that did not fuck around and had exactly the attitude I want when listening to raw black metal.

 

On getting the tape, I was surprised that the old school assault didn’t quite match the description in Golgotha/Black Candle, where Old Arrival were compared to Darkthrone. Darkthrone might be fucking raw, but they are also melodic; it’s not Emperor, but Nocturno Culto has crafted some inspiring and grim leads.  Indeed, of the ‘classic’ Norwegian bands, Old Arrival are probably closest to Pentagram-era Gorgoroth, where Infernus used a distinctly stripped back and primitive style of riffing. You know, before arch-poser I-write-lyrics-about-Satan-as-a-parable-not-because-I’m-a-Satanist King ov Hell turned Gorgoroth into a business, and before Gaahl joined to spout bullshit reflections about the importance of freedom of speech as ‘the only way to evolve’. As in, literally the defence of free speech proffered by the nineteenth century utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill. In other words, Gaahl’s defence of freedom of speech is the defence of freedom of speech central to the liberal political tradition, a freedom of speech defended for helping humanity ‘grow’. So much for fucking subversion. The later years of Gorgoroth can thus be seen as little more than a defence of the established order. What a pathetic death for a band that once seemed so dangerous.

 

Anyway, Old Arrival share the primitive rawness of Pentagram, but even on that album, Infernus at times revealed his melodic sensibility, which Old Arrival do not share. The best old school comparison for Old Arrival is actually Ildjarn or even Ancient, before they were even worse than later-era Gorgoroth. This sits somewhere between Forest Poetry and Ancient’s only good album, Svartalvheim, the artwork for which is basically replicated by Old Arrival on the inside of the cassette layout here. The riffing is as primitive as Ildjarn, but Old Arrival play these riffs through almost meditative cycles of repetition, evoking the latter band.

 

I love the use of this quasi-drone repetition in black metal. The use of basic repeating riffs played for minutes on end gives this music a ritualistic quality, as the band patiently build a Satanic atmosphere that consumes the listener. Importantly, Old Arrival spend their time low on the fret-board and rarely move away from chords, while the drums offer little variation from blast beats and rolling double-kicks. These songs churn with little variation to break the trance. It took a lot of listens to begin to pick out the riffs here, and I think this is to Old Arrival’s credit. This record is far less about catchy riffs than it is about establishing an atmosphere, about creating the sound of ritualistic devotion. Indeed, Old Arrival note they were created on a Walpurgis Night, a clear allusion to their dedication to dark rites. That they intersperse their churning chords with rare blazing leads of razor-sharp single-note tremming increases the ritualistic feel; acts of crude savagery that punctuate the meditative trance. Had Old Arrival overused such leads, though, the magic would’ve been lost. Old Arrival’s sound is defined through the effective repetition of basic chord-patterns to build ritual intensity. To stuff too many leads into this, to break the repetitive riff-cycles, would’ve been to destroy this.

 

The production here is exactly what’s required. I’m tolerant when it comes to production in black metal. As noted previously, I love the lo-fi microphone-in-another-room sound of Sump and Carved Cross. I’m also a fan of the clear, balanced production of Deathspell Omega, or Erebus Enthroned. My basic requirement is that the production help evoke what the music seeks to, that it contribute to the sound. For Sump, being barely audible contributes to how fucking filthy the riffs are. For Carvel Cross, the experience is all the more suffocating. For Deathspell, a rich production is needed to make sense of the dense complexity on offer. Thin sound would prevent Erebus Enthroned from hitting so fucking hard. The only production I can’t stand in black metal is when the music is overproduced to the point of killing any atmosphere, so sterile as to render it impotent. Take Pestilential Shadows (and take time to note the weird circa-2006 metalcore cover art), who actually share a guitarist with Erebus Enthroned; all these riffs are good, but it sounds like a mildly frustrated computer. I don’t give a shit.

 

Old Arrival aren’t so lo-fi as to leave the riffs entirely blurred, but it’s sufficiently lo-fi that the drums, guitar, vocals, and bass all meld into one wall of sound. This is exactly what’s needed here, for it pushes the emphasis on atmosphere over individual riffs. Tonal variety is reduced and individual instruments don’t stick out of the mix. The listener is drawn into the dark ceremonial world of this obscure German cult.

Sewercide, Fetid, Unbound, Monoceros, Needledick @ the Basement, Canberra

I was initially planning to do a write-up of Old Arrival’s furious Blazing Fire of the Black Light, but decided to go for a gig report this week, not only for the novelty, but because I am still caught up in the fervour of catching Fetid’s Australian tour on Tuesday night. Since Inquistion had to unfortunately cancel their Australian tour last year, Canberra hasn’t seen a solid metal show. I mean, Wretch have probably played a bunch of times, but I’m not a 45 year old neck-bearded virgin, which the preferred aesthetic of both Wretch and there fans. So, I was stoked to find out that brutal US death metal band Fetid were coming to Canberra touring their recent Sentient Pile of Amorphous Rot demo. They were touring with Brisbane’s Unbound, who I hadn’t heard before, and Melbourne-based East Coast US death metal-worshippers Sewercide, who recently dropped a split 7” with Cemetery Filth, and put out not only their fucking ripping Immortalized in Suffering last year, but another split 7” with Of Corpse, the former incarnation of Fetid.

 

Stand Your Grounds!, a local hardcore booking agency were putting on the show, which likely explains the mixed bill. I didn’t make it in time to see openers Needledick. Needledick haven’t recorded yet, but I’d seen a couple of videos of them live. They look like a decent live band, and they play proper hardcore, not some dumb metalcore, but I don’t really give a shit. They played a Reagan Youth cover, apparently. If you like hardcore and this sounds like your thing, then I guess it’s your thing. It’s not mine, but that shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of Needledick.

 

Canberra-based doom band Monoceros played next. I’d been wanting to see these guys for ages, and I got to the show just after their set began. These dudes are just coming off their debut release, the sprawling one-track, thirty-minute doom epic Space Dungeon, and their set consisted of the track in its entirety. I’m into Space Dungeon, and love, in particular, the way in which the record is built around a single riff, varied and returned to throughout the thirty minutes. Live, these guys are fucking heavy; way heavier on record, and they’re heavy on record. For a three-piece, the sound is big, and singer Dom’s anguished shouts, and even more anguished facial expressions, provide the perfect accompaniment to the crushing riffs.

 

I have one criticism of Monoceros, and though not damning, I think it matters. At their best, especially when crawling through Space Dungeon’s crushing main riff, these guys approach the harrowing discomfort of funeral doom. Along with the glacial tempo and mammoth riffs, they effectively use sections of disgusting feedback, leaving only drummer Mozz’s pounding to drive the song. My problem, though, is that they intersperse this devastating funeral doom with basically a mish-mash of riffs culled from every style of doom: there’s some bluesy stoner doom, with clean vocals; some atonal sludge; and a bit that was almost a guitar solo. The effect of shoving these random sections between slabs of hypnotic funeral doom is to alleviate all the tension Monoceros develop through their ritualistic repetition of the song’s central riff and the sections of feedback. The crawling, creeping unease they work so patiently to build is snuffed out as the band unnecessarily trade in crushing the audience for bland mid-tempo riffs. These guys are young, Space Dungeon is ambitious, and at its best is fucking gripping, so I hope they build on that. There’s a lot of potential in their sound, and it’d be great to see it focused.

 

Unbound brought the fucking social justice next. Frontman KP acknowledged the traditional owners of the land, railed against ‘the powers that be’ that teach us to hate immigrants, and condemned sexual violence. None of this seemed excessive, given KP’s sincerity, certainly enhanced by the fact that his hairstyle can be best described as a mullet without the front bit. I hadn’t heard Unbound before, but had heard they were some kind of metalpunk band. I get why they have that label, but it fails to fully express how fucking raging their sound is, and their set was. Basically, Unbound sound like Immolation if Immolation wrote songs no longer than two minutes. This shit is dark, raw, and fucking aggressive. I’m pretty sure in one song, KP repeatedly screamed ‘the burning gate’. It doesn’t even matter if he didn’t: they sound like a band that could plausibly have lyrics like that. These guys sounded fucking big for a band with one guitarist, largely because bassist Rick is fucking active, playing chords and leads to fill out the band’s sound. Unbound have a demo out this year already, so I’m getting on it.

 

The last time I saw a metal band at the Basement, where this show was held, the UK’s Conan headlined, and played literally the heaviest set I’ve ever heard. Conan were heavy on a level that went beyond sound; my body shook the entire set. Fetid weren’t that heavy, but they were not far off. Fetid play brutal, sludgy death metal. Drummer/vocalist Jullian came on stage in an Autopsy long-sleeve, and that is the basic reference point for Fetid’s sound. This shit is guttural, and the riffs get so slow at times as to take the band into death-doom territory. Fetid are a tight live band. Bassist Chelsea fucking shreds, rounding out the bottom of their sound with a thick, totally fuzzed out tone. Clyle, the guitarist/vocalist, plays his guitar so low he looks like he’s in fucking KoRn, but is one of those dudes who can just lock his wrist on the bridge and coast through any riff; whether tremming or chugging his way through slower material, Clyle looked totally unfazed. The band is anchored, though, by Jullian, who also plays guitar in Cauterized, also out of Seattle, which Chelsea also plays bass in. Jullian keeps Fetid’s sound sufficiently varied – crucially, not too varied to be anything other than brutal fucking death metal – by hammering through a blend of blast-beats, d-beats, and mid-tempo grooves. I picked up the Sentient Pile of Amorphous Rot demo – the set consisted of all the tracks on the demo plus some new material – in a lurid pink.

 

After Fetid’s West Coast Autopsy-worship, it seems appropriate the night ended with a death metal band paying tribute to the US’s East Coast scene. Sewercide fucking love early Morbid Angel and Incantation. This shit is fucking evil and just as raging. Most of Sewercide’s set was up-tempo, with fill-in drummer, Fetid’s Jullian, blasting his way through. Occasionally, the band sit down into something chunkier, or  even just play a ripping trem-riff over double-kicks, or a groovier beat, adding some filthy heaviness to their already-punishing sound. Crucially, though playing fast, these guys don’t play some boring-as-shit tech death. Sure, they’re great musicians, but the riffs are up front, rather than concealed behind a wall of tech-masturbation.

 

More than anything, though, the most distinctive aspect of Sewercide live is how unbelievably tight these fucking guys are. Sewercide are easily one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen; not only do they play my favourite type of US death metal, which is both fucking dark and heavy, but they play it with a precision most bands fucking dream of. Singer/guitarist (and former bassist) Tobi broke a string at one stage and changed guitars mid-song, and the remaining one-guitar band was still better than basically anything I’ve seen live in the last five years. Through razor sharp harmonies, rapid tempo changes, a bass solo (the bassist is one of those guys who heard Cannibal Corpse in 8^th grade and decided at that moment that the only things that matter in life were being as good as Alex Webster and punishing massive bongs), and more, Sewercide nail everything.

 

Tobi’s stage presence is heartfelt and hilarious, and he shouts out meaningful tributes to his tour-mates alongside requests for beer, abuse of audience-members, and the following statement, more true this night than most others: ‘fucking death metal forever’. Tobi’s enthusiasm for underground gore-soaked, obliterating death metal affirmed for me a point KP made earlier in the evening. It was a point I knew already, as will many of you, but it’s a point worth making again-and-again, and valuing. ‘Fuck spending all your fucking money to see the bands of yesterday’, KP declared. ‘The fucking underground is today’. He’s right. Fuck spending $60 to watch the washed up husks that were once Carcass slog their way through the Carcass songs you didn’t even grow up loving. Necroticism is no less meaningful or crucial because whatever passes for Carcass today needs to be put out of its misery. Everything fucking dies. Have you heard that new song Morbid Angel have been touring? I have. It’s shit. But this show wasn’t shit. For $10 I saw two of the best death metal bands in Australia, and fucking Fetid. All these bands pay homage to the sounds of early US death metal, but all are fucking totally vital, and immediate. As KP put it: ‘fuck yeah, the underground’.

Malhkebre – Revelation

Malhkebre – Revelation (I, Voidhanger Records, Total Holocaust Records, Hidden Marly Production, Tour de Garde)

Format: cassette (released by Tour de Garde)

Purchase: Ahdistuksen Aihio Productions

Price: 5EU

Listen here

 

Despite, or perhaps because of, the seriousness of a lot of black metal, much of the public discourse around the genre has sought to mock it. See, for example, this reasonably accurate collection of ‘ridiculous’ photos of black metal bands (criticising the Fenriz picture is stupid, because it’s great, but I can’t hate an article that points out that Dark Funeral look like a fucking mess, even if the idiot author likes they’re dull as fuck music). Though these fucking articles are always written by some clickbait jerk off cunt who has never listened to black metal and basically thinks the genre consists of Dimmu Borgir and a bunch of bands that want to be Dimmu Borgir, the absurd seriousness of some involved in black metal is funny. I wrote last week about how fucking goofy the cover for Vrag’s Species of One is. You can’t look at that disaster and not laugh.

 

That said, I completely endorse the seriousness that permeates the genre. Unlike most forms of music, black metal is characterised by the total devotion of its most adept practitioners, and to see them enact their black arts with dedication is enthralling and horrifying. With the exception of Darkthrone and Immortal, most notably, the best black metal is entirely serious and this does nothing to compromise these bands or render them the subject of humour, so powerful is their twisted work. Where a work fails to attain this power, though, it is hard not to find such seriousness anything but comical, as a case of style completely failing to match the pathetic substance on offer.

 

My most recent experience of this came reading the first issue of V.I.T.R.I.O.L., a new French zine focusing on ‘esoteric exchanges’ with bands. The idea behind V.I.T.R.I.O.L. seems promising. The zine takes its focus to be the spiritualism of black metal, and seeks to engage with an array of bands indebted to Luciferian Gnosticism regarding their spiritual direction. The end result though, is the boring wanker who writes this, Alcide, just telling bands the boring pretentious shit he thinks about Gnosticism, while lamenting how university ‘didn’t bring me much’ (university isn’t for everyone, certainly, but the reason it wasn’t for this braindead cunt was because he is flat-out too fucking dumb to learn anything), and complaining that Mgla lyrics – and yes, this is ostensibly a black metal zine – are ‘way too nihilistic for my liking’. He also doesn’t like Clandestine Blaze. Fuck off.

 

Confusingly, the actual music played by the bands is all-but ignored. The only comment regarding music – a reference to an Ascension bass-line – is caveated with the claim that ‘I hardly talk about music in these pages because I think it speaks for itself’. Sure, to a degree it does, and band interviews that just talk about the band’s latest fucking tour or whatever give us nothing worth reading. But all the interview subjects are bands, so some attempt to link their spiritual practice to their music would have been meaningful and insightful. Instead we get this shit; too glossy to even burn properly.

 

The zine does have its highlights, though. The worthless wank in here is supplemented occasionally by some moments of complete hilarity as this clueless, pretentious twat attempts to rub himself off again-and-again page-after-page, with tales of his painful stupidity. Highlights include Alcide complaining that his ‘vibe’ is killed if he sees a band doing soundcheck before playing live, complaining about bands that don’t wear sufficient robes, describing his mid-crowd ‘quasi christic postures’, and spending a whole interview with the embarrassingly named film-maker Jimmy ScreamerClauz desperately pursuing his incorrect assumption that ScreamerClauz’s work is based on Gnostic principles, which Alcide, in a rare moment when he is not consumed in autofellatio, ultimately apologises for at the close of the interview.

 

The apotheosis of the zine’s hilarious absurdity, though, is a description of a live ritual Alcide was involved in organising, staged in a cave. This is an admittedly appropriate venue for experiencing the torridness of live black metal, but Alcide’s account offers seriousness stretched to the point of hilarity. Guests and bands were welcomed with ‘necessary libations’ and (and this is really the best bit) prior to Hetroertzen’s headlining set, those in attendance took a break to sit at a ‘banquet table’ where ‘fine food and wine were delivered’. In other words, attendees received welcome drinks, and mid-way through, they all sat down for a tea-break. They got fucking catering. Have you ever heard something so fucking munted in your life? Can you believe cunts think this is a valid way to praise the turgid filth that gushes forth from black metal’s most fetid abysses? Of course the zine’s co-founder liberally uses ‘#magick’ on Instagram posts, and awaits a ‘true and elegant’ book cabinet. These mother fuckers belong at some medieval fare, where they can be given some cute welcome drinks of fucking mead, before sitting down to some pretend-medieval feast while listening to a lute player, all dressed up in their gowns and their 40+ years of sexual frustration. If this is black metal in 2017, I am out. Fuck this forever.

 

There is one exception in the epic shitshow that is the first issue of V.I.T.R.I.O.L: Alcide’s description at this cave ritual of Malhkebre frontman Berzerk (Eklezjas’Tik Berzerk) descending into the cave while self-flagellating. This image stuck with me, a brief glimmer of something deeply credible and unsettling in the midst of Alcide’s relentless masturbatory paroxysms. I found the opportunity to pursue my curiosity in Malhkebre while ordering a bunch of tapes from Ahdistuksen Aihio Productions, which quoted promo claiming that Malhkebre’s Revelation offered a ‘manifestion of true Death worship’ and ‘Satanic Resistance’, featuring ‘hysterical vocal incantations’. That this cassette was released by the flawless Tour de Garde sealed the deal.

 

Revelation is black metal at its most inspiring, intense, and devastating. Since first listening to this cassette, I have been unable to stop thinking about it, so haunted have I been by the demented fervour spewed forth across these 38 minutes. The closest sonic comparison I can think of for this record is the riff-based material on Deathspell Omega’s perfect Si Monvmentvm Reqvires, Cirvmspice. Both records excel in their use of suffocating walls of dissonant trem-picking and twitching tempo changes, moving between sections of bloated sludgy low-end to blazing cacophonous fury. Where Deathspell Omega crafted something epic and monolithic, Malhkebre seek to drag the listener through the fucking gutter, trading less in crippling technicality and complex song arrangements than in bludgeoning raw force. Despite being in some ways more straightforward than Si Monvmentvm Reqvires, Cirvmspice, Revelation loses nothing in comparative vitality. For Deathspell Omega’s disturbed use of crawling, off-kilter picked out dissonance to break up their tempestuous riffing, for example, Malhkebre torture their audience with sparse, deeply disturbing ambience and ritualistic chanting.

 

Listening to Revelation is a harrowing experience, and requires a degree of fortitude to get through the punishment Malhkebre mete out here. So affective is this experience that attempting to make generic musical critiques almost seems worthless. Sure, the vocals are too high in the mix, and the low-end is thin at times, but even these meagre criticisms are pointless in the face of this record’s unbridled destructiveness. I’m always reluctant to single out particular songs that stand out on a record, for I’m convinced that an album should be thought about as an album, rather than as a set of discrete tracks, and a record like this proves it. Revelation sucks you in from the opening bell-chimes, to such a degree that it is only after multiple listens that distinct tracks become visible.

 

To listen to Revelation is to be consumed by the torment of Malhkebre’s sound, a feeling that never dissipates, from blast-beats, to ambience, to chanting. Who gives a shit what other bands these guys are in, or whether they run record labels, or anything else? All of life – fortunately, even all of V.I.T.R.I.O.L. – fades before this crushing offer to the darkness. ‘Pains, Anguishes, Invade my body’, Berzerk howls on ‘To Become or Die’, and this captures what listening to Revelation is like: whether wishing to be invaded in such a way or not, these emotions course through the listener. This is black metal delivered with complete seriousness and sincerity, and performed with such an unhinged devotion as to unite style and substance. Revelation is everything promised by Berzerk’s violent ritualistic performance, and the deranged band member photos and decapitated and sigil-adorned bodies of the album artwork. This is contemporary black metal and its finest. There is no escape. There is only Satan.

 

Praecognitvm – Inalienable Catharsis

Praecognitvm – Inalienable Catharsis (Iron Bonehead)

Format: cassette

Purchase: Iron Bonehead

Price: 4.20EU

Listen here

 

Black metal has an uncertain relationship with visual arts. Certainly, some records have stunning artwork as moving and significant as the aural filth within. Every Deathspell Omega record has featured artwork that captures the agony-ridden, demented soundscapes on offer. Throughout the 1990s, Darkthrone produced not only a succession of near-flawless releases, but developed an aesthetic that defined the freezing grimness of Norwegian black metal. Despite anonymity, Black Cilice has demonstrated how effective band photography can be in representing a band’s sound, from debut album A Corpse, A Temple, through to recent harrowing offering Banished From Time (I realise that some earlier Black Cilice releases, like the Human Poisoning demo, also included photographs, but A Corpse, A Temple marked the point when the band settled into their – or his – present aesthetic).

 

Sometimes, I have no idea what to make of a band’s artwork. Take, for example, Floridian Winter’s Miley Cyrus-inspired layout for The City. I’m still not sure how to feel about it. For me, Floridian Winter’s baffling approach to album art is still preferable to bands that rely on artwork that holds no ambiguity or mystery, but attempts to simply make a literal point. Vrag’s Species of One is an example of this: look at this fucking dull mess of a man-goat-demon hybrid. You can’t hate album art like this, of course, as there’s something endearing to it, but it achieves none of the intended effect. The unfortunate artwork for Praecognitvm’s Inalienable Catharsis is perhaps even worse, despite being far superior technically than the munted disaster Vrag released. Not only is it totally literal, but it’s not even goofy in an enjoyable way. When asked in interviews what their music is about, Praecognitvm describe it is a journey, and what is there album art of? Some guy going on a fucking journey.

 

Of the many things you could criticise this blog for (the posts are too long, they’re not really about the album in question that much, it’s mostly just shit-talking about other stuff, etc), a particularly valid criticism is that all the records I write about here I review with almost excessive positivity. Reviewers are, I suppose, required to engage critically with the music they write about, whereas this blog has thus far offered little short of total support for the records discussed here. The principal reason for this is that I tend to write a lot when I write about an album (even if large parts of each post, as is the case here, are not actually about the album), and I really can’t be fucked spending that much time writing about a record I think is shit. I write about records that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and reflecting on, and I tend to reflect most about records I love, that mean something to me, and those are the records I feel are worth writing about.

 

Today’s post is something of an exception. I am not in love with Praecognitvm’s Inalienable Catharsis. This is largely not the band’s fault, but is a result of my personal preferences. Praecognitvm play a style of black metal that is relatively close to that of bands like Ash Borer or Wolves in the Throne Room. I’ve seen this particular sub-genre within black metal described in a number of ways, all of which are not particularly helpful. ‘Atmospheric black metal’ is maybe the stupidest fucking name imaginable, because it equates atmosphere with using a fucking delay pedal. What music doesn’t have atmosphere? When I listen to Blasphemy, I would say the atmosphere is raw and hateful. When I listen to Dissection, it’s majestic and bitter. All music has an atmosphere. This shit just has a particular atmosphere  you can generate by picking out melodic chords with a delay pedal on and no distortion, before you turn on the distortion and trem-pick those same chords over a blast beat, with just as much delay.

 

‘Post-black metal’ also seems far too loose a term, as it’s been used to describe bands as diverse as Caïna and Alcest, the sounds of which have much in common with shoegaze, as well as folk-influenced bands like Agalloch. There are problems with ‘Cascadian black metal’, too, not least because these bands are not all based in Cascadia (this point is made here, but the author suggests post-metal or metalgaze are better terms, which is a stupid thing to say). It seems unhelpful to describe a Chilean band like Praecognitvm as Cascadian; to make sense of music made by two South Americans by describing it in terms of a North American region. Anyway, you get a sense of what they sound like.

 

Whatever this particular genre is called, I don’t really like it. I enjoyed some of the early Wolves in the Throne Room material, because it was heavily indebted to Burzum, and I like the rawness of Ash Borer, and dissonant weirdness of Fell Voices. I find bands like Alda and Petrychor completely fucking spineless, though. Whatever they play has blast beats, but it shares very little with most black metal. Praecognitvm are closer to the former bands, than the latter, but much of Inalienable Catharsis fails to attain the level of aggression that flows through Ash Borer and Fell Voices. There is nothing wrong with any of the riffs on Inalienable Catharsis, but these songs mostly just seem to move back and forth without clear direction between those quiet sections where melodic chords are slowly picked out on a delay-drenched guitar, before those same chords are tremmed over blast beats that never seem sufficiently fast or intense. In other words, most of this follows the template of the genre, and doesn’t reach the peak of the genre due to what feels like a lack of purpose or intensity. Ultimately, if you like this style, you will probably like Praecognitvm. The album is well produced, with a thick low-end, the riffs are well written, and the vocals – a high point – are haunting.

 

I decided to write about Inalienable Catharsis, though, not because it is a solid example of a type of black metal I don’t particularly care for, but because there are moments in this record that reveal the potential for this band to create something incredible. In the first, third, and fourth tracks (‘Forest of Shattered Souls’, ‘Reminiscence’, and ‘Ashes and Blood’, respectively), Praecognitvm offer glimpses of something far beyond the washed out tremming, and gentle melodic picking that make up most of this record. In each of these songs, A. and M. take time to wind back the tempo and delay and settle into a groove. The riffs in these sections are notable for their use of dissonance, and because they are played in a lower register than almost every other riff on the album. These mid-tempo grooves, accompanied with howling reverb-laden vocals, evoke the mysterious wonder and majesty of early Emperor, perhaps best exemplified by the final riff on ‘I am the Black Wizards’, and pre-incarceration Burzum. The deeper tremming on ‘Ashes of Blood’, too, is a highlight, hitting far harder than any of the higher-register fast material here. It is on the strength of these sections alone that this album repays repeated listens, and for which I will eagerly await any further releases from Praecognitvm.

 

In interviews, Praecognitvm have spoken about the importance of enigma and eeriness in black metal, and have said they are drawn to the more mysterious sounds within the genre. At their best, they evoke this feeling to a degree that few bands have managed to since the early 1990s, and I hope that this comes to define future offerings from the band.

 

Erebus Enthroned – Night’s Black Angel

Erebus Enthroned – Night’s Black Angel (Abysmal Sounds)

Format: cassette

Purchase: eBay (cassette initially sold by Abysmal Sounds, but now sold out. CD available from Séance Records)

Price: $6AU

Listen here

 

For those keeping score at home, I fucking hate that Angry Metal Guy site. The whole fucking thing reeks of unrestrained twatishness, from the stupid fucking star-rating system, which presumes that the best way to understand a record is by deciding whether it’s a ‘3’ or a ‘1.5’, to the cunty arrogance that accuses bands of failing to act like ‘professional bands’ for requesting to have their material reviewed (why you’d want these fucking morons to hear your music is beyond me) without sending a promo pack months in advance. The site also has an extended pseudo-philosophical discussion of the impossibility of objectivity in music reviewing, which treats the following statement with all the italicisation and profundity it doesn’t deserve: ‘objectivity is a logical impossibility in regard to art’. The lack of sophistication on display in this boring as piss masturbatory shit on objectivity and its ‘logical impossibility’ is reflected in the – again, supposedly profound, yet fucking banal – suggestion that ‘music journalism’ doesn’t exist because it can never be ‘objective’, and the accompanying implication that all other journalism is ‘real’. It’s as if no philosophy has been written since the 1960s, and we can keep using ‘objectivity’ as a basic analytical category to make sense of the world around us, with the exception, of course, of art. Fucking crypto-positivist scum.

 

What I really fucking hate about these fucking wankers, though, is that they tend to review albums by giving you a literal play-by-play of what happens in each song (see, for example, this random review of an album I’ve never heard and would probably hate). The problem, here, is that it reduces music to a set of components. ‘What does band x sound like?’ ‘Oh, a blast-beat then a mid-tempo section’. These guys are fucking idiots, so presumably that’s how they actually listen to music, as a steady progression of components, one after another. As I hope I’m making clear, I think that this way of considering music belongs in the fucking gutter. Breaking music down to little more than a set of techniques destroys any attempt at affective engagement with a record. It’s to ignore that a record is far more than the sum of its parts, that there is something far more meaningful at work than can be expressed by simply listing the types of riff used and the order they’re used in.

 

In short, I’m much more interested in what a record can make you feel, on how it affects the listener, what the experience of listening to it is like, than I am in reciting what different sounds you will hear in each track. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s obviously partially self-defeating. Trying to capture this emotive, experiential element of listening is never entirely possible, because you’re attempting to capture something that is fundamentally non-linguistic. That said, failing at this is still better than being so fucking dull that you hear records as just a sequence of sections that can be described in terms of the techniques in use.

 

To illustrate this point, consider the record I am writing about this week: Erebus Enthroned’s stunning 2011 debut album Night’s Black Angel. I want to revisit this record because I think it’s one of the best Australian metal releases ever, and one of my favourite albums ever. Also, I’ve spent the last two weeks listening non-stop in my car to frontman Nihilifer’s recent solo record, Ignis Gehenna’s Baleful Scarlet Star, after spending the preceding fortnight listening to Erebus Enthroned’s 2014 sophomore album Temple Under Hell, both of which I picked up this year from Séance Records. Neither of those records were purchased for under $6.66, but Night’s Black Angel was.

 

The thing with Night’s Black Angel and, indeed, Temple Under Hell, is that if you were to provide a play-by-play of each section in each song, and were to do the same with, say, any Dark Funeral album, there would be basically no difference. Both bands rely on a mixture of sections of blast beats with dark trem-picked melodies built around minor chord progressions, open expanses where these chords are strummed out, and mid-tempo sections of chugging power-chords. The difference is, Dark Funeral are fucking terrible, while Erebus Enthroned produced two flawless albums of Luciferian adulation before breaking up.

 

Night’s Black Angel is in no way a genre-breaking record, nor is anything here notably original. This is black metal played with total devotion to the tradition. Erebus Enthroned’s sound hovers somewhere between the scorching melodies of early Dissection, and the grinding, overwhelming darkness of Euronymous-era Mayhem. I’m not convinced there is anything wrong with this. Moreover, I’m not fully convinced that thinking in terms of originality is ever that useful. In the rest of my life, I’m a PhD student in history. In particular, I study the history of political argumentation; the rhetorics that over time, have been used to defend and attack, or exercise, forms of political order. One of the subjects I’m interested in is the increasing opposition among historians to the history of political theory envisioned as a set of classic texts by classic authors – Plato, then Aristotle, Machiavelli a bit later, then Hobbes, then Locke, Bentham, then Mill, etc. – with each author treated as significant for supposedly offering something original.

 

As recent historians have tried to show, not only is there no clear connection between many of these authors, but most of them were working within much more specific contexts. In each case, their work was far less ground breaking than has been imagined, for they were responding to, and using, many of the arguments of their day. One of my favourite texts that attacks this reliance on originality as a useful appraisive category in the history of political thought is Conal Condren’s The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts. There, Condren scorches historians for, among other things, seeking originality in the works they study on the grounds that the category provides little appraisive value. For Condren, ‘originality’ is too loose: either every text is original, for not being a complete copy of something that came before it, or none are, because all of them in some way constitute a re-working of the foregoing. We are no closer to understanding a text with such a term.

 

I think that Condren’s point is equally applicable to music. Look, for example, at records labelled original. In my review of Consummation’s debut record, I emphasised that music journalists who treat Deathspell Omega’s use of dissonance as entirely innovative have simply failed to listen to enough black metal to understand how significant dissonance is within the genre. This point was not intended as a critique of Deathspell, whose music I find equally stunning and horrifying, but to indicate that their records are a particularly brilliant re-working of themes already existing within black metal. So, Deathspell are not original in the sense of creating black metal that has no ties to the genre as it stood before them, and if they are original for re-working aspects of the genre in a way that no other band has, then presumably so is every other record ever. Enough with originality.

 

Night’s Black Angel is certainly a re-working of aspects long held to be central to black metal. Pretty much everything you can find on this album can be found in classic black metal records from the early 90s. Acknowledging this, though, is to say nothing of the quality of the record. What makes this record so significant for me is that it is perfectly constructed. I noted when reviewing Nocturnal Graves’s Lead us to the Endless Fire/Sharpen the Knives cassette the dynamism of the record, the capacity of Nuclear Exterminator and has compatriots to write songs that never falter in their intensity, while moving through an array of dynamic shifts. The same can be said of Night’s Black Angel. This record is vicious throughout, burning with an evil intensity. Whether the band is trem-picking minor chords over blast beats, picking them out over thunderous tom-rolls, or sitting back into mid-tempo grooves, Erebus Enthroned’s music seethes with a defiant and perverse hatred.

 

It is that sense of unrelenting scorn and evil that makes this record stand out, that divides it from so many other black metal bands that play in this style. This sense goes beyond what can be expressed in describing components of the record, but I think there are two things that help set this record apart. First, Night’s Black Angel was recorded live, and that ritualistic energy is present here; this hasn’t been edited to death in a studio, but retains something violent and raw, perhaps encapsulated best in Nihilifer’s scathing vocals, which reek of a sincere belief in the Satanic. Second, like the Nocturnal Graves cassette, this record evidences real devotion and care in the richness and diverse textures of the songs.

 

The dynamic variety here is mostly clearly seen in fourth track, ‘Horns of Severity’, which consists of a steady crescendo, beginning with a single haunting lead, which is steadily built upon, constantly threatening to open up into a brutal assault, which arrives with the erocious blast-beats opening the next track, ‘Blackwinged’. Ninth track, ‘Temple of Dispersion’, does away with instruments almost entirely, offering only sparse and deeply uncomfortable ambient sounds beneath Nihilifer’s roars. Neither ‘Horns of Severity’ nor ‘Temple of Dispersion’ offer any comfort, any sense of respite, but show a different, if equally evil, face of this record. These tracks perfectly balance the savagery of the other seven tracks here, dragging the listener along a dark path, as evil as it is varied.

 

Sure, you might have heard all these sounds before. You might have even heard them from a band as shit as Dark Funeral. But it is rare to find such sounds brought together with such devotion and commitment, rare to find a band capable of binding these sounds into such an important opus.

Forever Grey – Autumn Calling

Forever Grey – Autumn Calling (self-released)

Format: cassette

Purchase: Prime Ruin

Price: $6US

Listen here

 

Australia is, in most respects, a wonderful place. It’s fucking sunny (occasionally too sunny), there are lots of beaches, some fucking forests, and way less people than a lot of other countries. As any keen geographers reading this will know, however, Australia is also the continent located the furthest from nearly every good distro or record label. If you’re reading this and not in Australia, I doubt you fully understand the import of this. Unless purchasing records from an Australian label or distro, it’s pretty standard to be paying far more for shipping the fucking things to you, than you’re actually paying for the records themselves.

 

The best way of managing this, of course, is by trying to maximise the number of records you can get within a shipping price-bracket. Invictus Productions had a 40% off sale over the weekend and I spent at least an hour trying to work out the ideal ratio of tapes-to-shipping. Staring at an online shopping cart to see whether adding or substracting a single tape has changed the shipping price for better or worse is total piss. It’s a process, though, that often involves just buying tapes by bands you’ve never heard of because fuck it, two more tapes in the cart won’t change the shipping cost. Sometimes these tapes are shit, which doesn’t matter very much, but occasionally, you find new riches, as is the case here. I’d been searching everywhere for Fuath Vough’s Monolith to the Brollachan Priest, and finally found it, alongside some Axnaar, through Prime Ruin in the US. I could add a third tape without an increase in shipping, so chucked this Forever Grey record in, purely on the basis that I knew they played some kind of post-punk.

 

Forever Grey are a two-piece from Michigan, consisting of Kevin Czarnik and Samantha Kubiak, two former house-mates. Between 2015 and 2016, they put out an absurd nine releases, all self-released. Both Kevin and Samantha sing in Forever Grey, though Kevin does more vocals here than Samantha, who plays bass, while Kevin plays guitar and handles electronics. The drums are entirely programmed. The programmed drums are one of the defining aspects of the record. Sparse and metronymic, entirely unembellished, they provide little more than rhythmic basis for the songs. In some bands, that would be a problem. Here, it perfectly captures the uncompromising bleakness and minimalism of this record.

 

Autumn Calling is music stripped down to its most basic components. Most songs are driven by the drums and equally metronymic bass, which does little more than thump out 3-4 note rhythmic patterns. The bass is at times joined in this by throbbing synth lines. The vocals offer no respite from the lack of melody. Kevin’s deep baritone vocals are strictly monotone, as are Samantha’s slightly higher range vocals. The lack of tonal range in the vocals highlights how cold, how almost-inhuman parts of this record are. The lyrics are often indecipherable the vocals are so over-laden with reverb, but where you can discern them, they are suitably morose, as Kevin and Samantha almost chant their paean to death. The dual vocals are at their best on ‘Arctic Flower’, where Kevin and Samantha’s droning tones conjure a deeply uncomfortable dissonance. Melodies are few and far between, and retain the minimalist feel of this record: simple patterns of often only 2 notes are picked out on guitar or played on the synth. Kevin never plays guitar chords; this would be too rich for a record characterised by bleakness. Indeed, the use of these occasional melodies does nothing to render the record richer; the slightness of the melodies highlights how sparse this is.

 

There are two clear exceptions to the anti-melodic focus of the record: ‘Blanket of Ice’, and album closer ‘Drawn to the Water’. The former of these tracks features the wispy and haunting vocals of Anna Schmidt, who might be the vocalist of Prudence, who share members with Forever Grey, while the latter track opens with a synth melody both infectiously catchy and completely morose. These rare instances of glistening melody don’t interfere with the record’s atmosphere: their juxtaposition with the near-absence of melody serves to highlight that minimalism, revealing how intentional it is; and they retain all the desolation that fills the other tracks here.

 

This blog exists to focus on extreme metal, so a review of a post-punk (or, I guess, coldwave) record seems slightly out of place. What I want to emphasise is that I don’t think that is so. The atmosphere here is hardly a great distance from something like Carved Cross. Indeed, as I’ve suggested, Carved Cross seem to have a sound in-part drawn from post-punk. Moreover, black metal has long had a relationship with coldwave, darkwave, and post-punk. Bands like Hateful Abandon, Crooked Necks, and Joyless have exploited the thematic similarities between the more depressive end of black metal and post-punk. Forever Grey are not, in any way, a black metal band, but play a brand of post-punk that feels very close to a lot of that black metal. This isn’t ‘extreme’ in any clear sense, but it’ll still make you feel like shit.