Amber Asylum – “Sin Eater” • Prophecy
Ambient | Neoclassical
Celebrating their 20th anniversary, Amber Asylum is back with a dialectics symposium between heavy and orchestrated music. A coalition that is far from unknown, considering the significance of Richard Wagner‘s profuse exclamations on metal; being as well the topic of research which Kris Force, former Neurosis collaborator and Amber Asylum‘s chief-of-staff, has devoted all of her artistic realms. “Sin Eater” is an extensive, languorous séance of eerie string arrangements, living amidst Apollonian and Dionysian terrains of thought, calmly rational and truculent impulsive, while feeding on Dead Can Dance‘s spirit and on Maurice Ravel‘s French impressionism. A wok of haunting beauty. [EP]
Cloak Of Altering – “Manifestation” • Crucial Blast
Black Metal | Electronics
This can only be work of nerd, a colossal one whom we know deeply, since only a cyclopean geek would put his spare time into alternate dimensions, otherworldly realities, sniffing out for neptunium-technological patterns while not giving in a single one millimeter to reality randomness. Would you purge your soul to code? Would you submit your compassion to cybernetics? Would you trade «love one another» for the cryptic stamps of event horizon? Would you concede your limbs to be crushed and gorged by spacetime’s orgastic inconsiderateness? Mories would as Cloak Of Altering glances the futuristic element as being violent, predatory and too much for the human body to bear. Cloak Of Altering is an apocalyptic work of life-extinction, bit[beat] after bit[beat]. Give it your hand and stop waiting for Deathspell Omega. [GMC]
Gratified – “-” • Defiled Light
Harsh Noise
I remember laying down on her bosom, falling asleep momentaneously as she was touching my starched white collar. People were roaming back and forth in that bright, shiny, Victorian room, as if they are tied down to the walls by an invisible yet magnetic umbilical chord. The ceiling was mutating shapes & outlines and the afternoon was being compulsively dissolved like a sugar cube in hot ginger and cinnamon tea. All clocks disappeared somehow. People kept slowly dancing in a much-coordinated motion, velvet cats pulled by cotton strings and loomed black cloth, there were no words, you could only hear step after step after step, it was eerie even for a fearless narcissistic. I suddenly grabbed her hand harshly, and gradually it got colder. People stopped. The clocks went on. [GMC]
Horoscope – “El Espejo Y El Mar” • Wharf Cat
Electronics | Ambient
A garrison for abstract and ambient, Horoscope is a solo effort of René Nuñez focusing on undefined aesthetics and sexy flirts with experience. He even records some stuff in his own bathroom to redefine what is balmy-raw in electronics. I just want to put this album on my iPod and fucking up a high-end London club DJ set with it, until everyone leaves and I’m all alone drinking a bloody Negroni. Yes, let’s do it, you’re all invited. [PS]
Orgy Of Carrion – “Everlasting Blood Of Night” • Defiled Light
Raw Black Metal
Nothing else need, but solitude, a bottle of scotch, three or four shady pictures of you, of the day we drove together the botanical garden in Glasgow, my ego self-rendering itself in razor blade despair, cutting its ethos piece after piece, and this record, zero experimentation, lo-fi minimalism, discomfort, swimming in grief, hushing the inhuman, summing misfortunes, shooting pills, meeting the lowest, lying, self-shaming, tasting a time that gets muddier and muddier with each second. [GMC]
Protester – “Paincave Sessions” // EP
Hardcore Punk
Missing Washington DC hardcore? There you go, just for you: Protester. Four short tracks waving blurs of heat upon everyone’s face, while showing off that 80s-do-not-mess-with-me-beat-it attitude. Solid straight edge punk and an excellent for their upcoming LP on Trash King Productions. [PS]
Sunn O))) – “Kannon” • Southern Lord
Drone
Siddhārtha was born from the right side of his mother, so tell us the myth, an unpleasant evidence of how unholy is the vagina regarded by all great churches, from East to West, mono and polytheistic; all of them trying to dissimulate vaginal delivery, all of them implying we, mere mundane mortals, are tainted, impious from the very beginning given the fact that only the chosen few got to exist thanks to immaculate-virginal conception. Hierarchy; the chain of command separating the prophet and the peasant – those who were born through light and those who were given the right to be here only because cervix had enough dilation to let us pass onto. We, banal conglomerate of cells and nanobiology, considering our initial position, considering our profane birth-stance in opposition to the bright parturition of divine, are the darkness. Sunn O))) in “Kannon” are concatenating a symbolic, meta-sonorous bridge between the two embankments; the conspurcated birth and the ascension of death, as if our souls could get less vulgar and more translucent as life moves forward. And there’s no such thing as purgatory in the process; Sunn are from for sure if they’re doing what is right – and by right I mean logical, taking into consideration NOBODY knows what’s on the other shore. Perhaps, no such thing as luminous could ever be achieved by those who step into this existence unblessed, unCANNONnized by darkness. To try to reach the answer, to assume comfort as demagogy, to be immune to the platitude of straight-forward deliberation, is Lord and SOMA‘s mission at the moment; could inner peace be achieved, and then shared, through this bridge they’re building? Could inner peace be attained by the power of the mantra? They’re striving for it; and not for the first time – the album’s last track is a tantric expansion of “Dømkirke”‘s “Cannon”. [GMC]
Un – “The Tomb Of All Things” • Black Bow
Funeral Doom
Funeral doom carries a perversive constriction of tangible, depressive emotionalism. The genre atemporal classics base themselves on slow progression tactics which let that distress flow out in tiny tidbits of melancholy. It is a natural consequence of ‘Halifax doom’ and, unsurprisingly, Un hails from the UK as well, gathering the empowering, atmospheric brutality of old school honestness, i.e. Skepticism and My Dying Bride. An introspect 53-minute debut opus, blurred between riff repetitiveness and melismatic melody. [EP]