into the unknown

where does the time go.

Indonesian duo Vurilanda does whatever the fuck it wants to. In lo-fi fashion, naturally. One release they’ll be a horrific deviation of raw black metal, another will exude a subharmonic drone wall of doom, others will be a mix of the above while mixing scrap percussion resulting in a miasma of early Gnaw Their Tongues overdriven noise and Brighter Death Now scuzz. The premiere track off this rehearsal demo falls into the category of “others” and sounds as if it were early Dissecting Table slowed down and pitch shifted to the very depths of hell. Choke on it.

One good deed deserves another, this time from Crucial Blast comes a new release by Finland harsh experimental electronic outfit Boredom Knife. 23 minutes of nightmarish, shapeshifting noisecraft. Industrial noise captured inside an active wind tunnel - metal groaning under stress and upon shattering sending shrapnel in all directions. There are rhythms at play in forms of different oscillations and pulses that aid and abet in pure cacophony.

Ob come from Chile with filth and sludge. A trio consisting of drummer René Ramos, bassist/vocalist Mauro Rocha and synth/electronics abuser Aspid. Ob are an unholy instrument of pile driving noise with similarities to Combat Astronomy, Morkobot or siła and Samo infused with death metal vocals and sci-fi ambience. Long form songs with outstanding bass/drum interplay and noise textures bubbling in between the spaces and bleeding out through the speakers.

Just so happens Minneapolis, Minnesota duo DUG answer the question of what happens if gluey porch treatments Melvins and Godflesh with Ted Parsons wrote songs together. This sounds as if Buzz is using Broadrick’s gear and Justin is imploring him to, “Turn it to 11” while Dale and Ted slowly trade off behind their kits. Minimalist and destructive. You know you deserve it. Digital via the band and physical through The Ghost Is Clear.

Again with minimalist arrangements and maximalist amplitude comes London’s Modern Technology. New album, Conditions of Worth, via Human Worth. Normally something with a stoner lean wouldn’t rock my boat, but, I think being this being a drum/bass duo works for me. Not that it is truly stoner rock, it tows the line closer to noise rock and happens to have fuzz tone here and there that nudges into desert rock/stoner territory. Unlike a lot of that style the vocal delivery Modern Technology employ is slurry hoarse screaming doused in reverb. Wanna know what else is killer? The recording. Holy shit. Moves air and gives the feeling you’re in the room with these guys performing.

Appropriate Sludgelord Records will be curating the debut full length of Strasbourg, France’s Peine Kapital as it has done so with their sophomore EP, Infraordo. Peine Kapital have a handful of self releases and how does this full length differ? Well, judging off the preview single the sonics are decidedly more powerful and there is more space for the feedback to hang and drum hits to reverberate. Funny enough, there are moments here that, not unlike other slow motion riots, recalls the dearly departed Virulence in terms of arrangements and harmonic riffing gurgling up from primordial ooze. Vocals are particularly lacerating screams that hang with Jonathan Hébert (Come to Grief) and Michael D Williams (EHG). While there are hints of Black Sabbath to Peine Kapital’s crawl it isn’t as overt as many who trade in riff merchant murkcraft and they line up with Winter doused in feedback.

Seems I’m of a one track mind today as Azimut provide more post sludge and drudge for the ears. Five tracks of corrosive filth and cinder block heavy riffage. The long form meditative journeys conjure ominous and bleak landscapes and horrific narratives that are all the more dread inducing given they are in their native tongue. Can match this savage horde with Croatia’s Muka and Lithuania’s Erdve for that specific Eastern European brand of off kilter churn and burn post metal.

Moving westward across Europe to Portugal for Wells Valley “Vessel Possessor” and an E. Elias Merhige xerox style video. Achamoth releases September 29 via Lavadome Productions. I do believe No Clean Singing will be doing a full album premiere shortly. This release further crowds a stellar year for album of the year contention. No Clean Singing premiere: https://www.nocleansinging.com/2023/09/25/an-ncs-album-premiere-and-a-review-wells-valley-achamoth

With personnel including regular escapees from the Centipede Abyss asylum, Zvylpwkua (what does it mean?) are a force of interdimensional sonic terrorism. Don’t let the ambient wash and percussion of “Dimension Walker” fool you, Zvylpwkua is deformed death metal and grind with a free jazz improv feel that is an absolute assault on structure, form and reason. The Outlying Entities is full of skronk and skree, many angles and breaks in linear patterns where bellowing low register vocals counter balanced by alien transmissions translated as noodling guitar lines threading throughout herky jerky arrangements that at turns blast, seize to a halt, reconstitute to push and pull against forces of order and function with the logic of nightmares and dreams. Crom-Tech gone guttural and augmented (or degraded, your choice) with noise.

Polish noise rockers ZESPÓŁ SZTYLETY opening riff of “Blask” bears more than a passing resemblance to the Stooges “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog” and mutates into ethereal guitar noise and rambling spoken word and escalates to screams and driving Detroit muscle car rhythms. Video track “Czasem” has a more melodic bent that recalls a collision of shoegaze and post punk somewhere between the Cure and Swervedriver. Checking their back catalog, combining disparate styles of punk, shoegaze, no wave and noise rock is their stock in trade. This Piranha Records transmission sounds bigger without losing the grit, grime to a polished production.

Osmose Productions dropped a single from Efraah Enhsikaah a little while back and color me intrigued. Utterly savage vocals, cold, driven riffs that are as informed by Polish black metal as it is the Norwegian hordes and the Icelandic tribes. Stately and majestic in a state of dissonant melodicism. Parts of this remind me of Andavald and Mgla. One Thousand Vultures Waiting To Be Fed come late October. Looking forward

San Francisco’s Martikor ticks all the requisite boxes in its bandcamp tags for me - and the theme of this particular piece: post, sludge, doom metal. Add a touch of black metal magic to the Martikor recipe for Soliloquy and this 46 minute debut is nothing if not confident in its delivery and presentation. Moody, melancholy atmospherics turn crushingly heavy on a dime. The sparse, less is more approach these long form songs take added with intelligent sound design. While there are layers of guitar and augmenting instrumentation it isn’t suffocating or claustrophobic. Elements are panned and spaced in such a way that the shifting, pushing, pulling is in service of the song writing dynamics. If I were to draw comparisons, perhaps Atriarch, but, I feel this is more engaging as I prefer Martikor’s vocals, song arrangements, and overall creepy aura (which can have dissonant takes on traditional doom metal of Paradise Lost and even Candlemass as well as nods to post punk goth mainstays like Bauhaus and The Cure.)

please support: Everything Went Black, The Metal Dad and his fiendish five podcast, No Clean Singing, Stereogum: The Black Market, The Devil’s Mouth, Aversionline, Invisible Oranges, Horror Wolf 666, Into the Necrosphere, Sol Nox Podcast, The Book of Very Very Bad Things, Plague Rages, Thrown to the Abyss Podcast, Freedom Has No Bounds, Machine Music, Dreams of Consciousness, Doktor Dismemberment’s Midnight Murderplex and Crucial Blast’s Warhead…. most of these sites update daily and weekly, most likely more frequently than what I provide.

Wrapping things off with a couple upcoming Avantgarde Music releases from Spain. You wouldn’t be wrong upon looking at the artwork and thinking they’ll be bent to the black, but, there is a lot of death metal in their dna.

Voidescent

Akouphenom