So, there I was sitting at my desk, smack dab in the middle of an endless sea of cubicles. Hoping to kill two birds with one stone, I grabbed my promo copy of Blood of the Black Owl’s third and final album A Banishing Ritual and popped it into the CD drive so I could give it a listen while getting some office work done. I continued typing away on my keyboard as the disc began to play, when suddenly things started to get a little strange. My vision began to blur, my dual computer screens turning into amorphous masses of indecipherable fuzz, swirling into a tie-dye of malformed letters and numbers. And that’s when everything went black…
Continue reading ‘Feature Review: Blood of the Black Owl – A Banishing Ritual (Bindrune, 2010)’
Tag Archive for 'Ambient'
In my scientific research in the lab I work at, we use formaldehyde (and its derivatives) as a fixative and preservative agent, to freeze the state of tissue/cells, so those that we want to keep intact remain that way and do not get contaminated with foreign microscopic organisms.
This allows us to achieve an inert, unchanging environment, to preserve the original state we started with. In a way the music by Seconds in Formaldehyde follows the same features. It is stagnant, sluggish, torpid and seemingly unchanging; it dwells on and strives to maintain flow and texture, pattern and magic throughout the seven tracks on this album. However, this is more of an appearance than anything else, as there is development and change throughout each track.
Seconds in Formaldehyde is an ambient/drone project by Martin Fuhs from Germany and he is also the man behind the label releasing this album, Waterscape Records. He previous released three albums through other labels and used a guitar (and computer) to make the sound heard on these albums. Continue reading ‘Seconds In Formaldehyde – A Shiver In Red (Droehnhaus, 2010)’
Matt Finney is one of those rare modern day renaissance men that seems to have a hand in everything. Whether creating unique and immersive ambient, experimental and noise music to stimulate your ears or crafting poetry that jumps off the printed page directly into the center of your mind, Finney is an artistic jack-of-all-trades. I first interviewed Finney as part of the ambient/spoken-word duo Finneyerkes and found him to be a highly articulate and engaging subject. Much to my surprise, he e-mailed me a few months later asking if I would be interested in another round of interrogations, an offer I couldn’t possibly pass up.
When I conducted this second interview via e-mail with Mr. Finney, Finneyerkes had recently dissolved and another project, the lo-fi acoustic Ferdinand the Bull had sadly crashed and burned before it had a chance to blossom. But, in a fortuitous turn of events as I was all set to post the piece, Finneyerkes has gotten back together and Finney also has several written projects in the can as well.
Continue reading ‘Interview: Matt Finney’
I’ve always enjoyed split releases. Typically they’re like getting two eps for the price of one, and can often serve as a great (not to mention cost effective) way to discover new artists. Afterall, if a band/artist you already respect deems another, lesser known band/artist worthy of sharing a release, chances are you just might enjoy that lesser known musician as well. Such is the case with this split release between A Death Cinematic and Sons of Alpha Centauri.
Continue reading ‘A Death Cinematic / Sons of Alpha Centauri – split (self released, 2010)’
It took me a long time and a great deal of contemplation to finally organize my thoughts on A Death Cinematic’s A Parable on the Aporia of Vengeance and the Beauty of Impenetrable Sadness. Sure, the interview I conducted with the man behind A Death Cinematic had given me some much needed insight, as had the time spent poring over the sprawling double album itself. But things didn’t completely click until recently, as I was reading The Gunslinger, book one of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. As I read the story of Roland, the last Gunslinger walking across the arid, endless desert in search of The Man in Black, it occurred to me that A Parable… would make the perfect soundtrack. Continue reading ‘A Death Cinematic – A Parable on the Aporia of Vengeance and the Beauty of Impenetrable Sadness (self released, 2009)’
Sometimes, trying to get a band/artist nailed down for an interview can be akin to pulling teeth. It can literally involve weeks or even months of myspace messaging and playing “e-mail tag” just to get a few basic questions answered. Luckily, this was not the case with Alabama-based ambient/electronic/spoken-word duo Matt Finney and Randy Yerkes, aka Finneyerkes. After receiving an e-mail from Matt, I was pleasantly surprised to check out Finneyerkes’ music and discover a sort of dark, dreamy, narcotic beat poetry, like Lustmord collaborating with the late William S. Burroughs in a smokey dive bar. Finding that the twosome were more than eager to answer my queries, the following interrogation was conducted via e-mail.
Sonic Frontiers: For those who might not be familiar, tell our readers a little bit about how you two met and formed Finneyerkes.
Finneyerkes: we met in high school in an environmental science class. we sat next to each other and bonded over our love for growing absurd facial hair, modest mouse, and the electric six. our friendship was cemented after matt when to to randy and his brothers band, Franklin and the Neato’s, first basement show. randy moved away shortly after that but we kept in touch for a while through AIM, email, and myspace. the formation of Finneyerkes came when randy was recording his first Moosejaw album Glada. it was mostly him doing ambient/electronica with samples thrown in. matt approached randy with the idea of recording some of his poems that he had been writing and using them as vocals for the songs. we stuck with the idea and here we are.
Apocalyptic. Desolate. Enigmatic. The music of A Death Cinematic is all of this, and so much more. Lying somewhere between the windswept, spaghetti-western drone of recent Earth and the dark, eerie soundscapes of Lustmord, A Death Cinematic is one man’s attempt to create a soundtrack not to the end of days itself, but to it’s lonely, horrifying aftermath. I caught up with the man behind ADC via e-mail to discuss the motivations behind his music and the beautiful, handcrafted artwork that accompanies his recordings. The following interrogation ensued.
Sonic Frontiers: When did you begin recording music as A Death Cinematic and what were the circumstances surrounding the project’s creation?
A Death Cinematic: i started to record music as a death cinematic in the spring and summer of 2007. i was just messing around with the amp and my guitar and recording everything into a boss loopstation. the mixing and recording capabilities were very limited but i was trying to capture certain moods as i was improvising with the instrument and the effects. i really was curious to see what i can do with a limited set of parameters. at first it was just an experiment and since, it has grown into something a little larger. i have also extended the parameters a little. for example i no longer use the loopstation as the primary recording device but i still do make all the sounds through the guitar, amp, and effects.
It’s the first listen of Oxygen Flash that stays with you. That first sense of dizziness and disorientation as whirrs and pulses ping back and forth and back again, the genuine unease over what sonic environment you’ll be plunged into next, and the overwhelming awe over how the whole thing sounds so perfectly coherent and together. At no point does it feel like a collection of individual sounds – each audio atmosphere on Oxygen Flash morphs and moves with the harmony and co-ordination of a single entity.
There is a certain beauty to be found in ugliness and filth. The mesmerizing quality behind something so pure in its horrific/pornographic nature that you can’t look away from it; crime scene photos, a particularly depraved S&M video, etc. Much in the way that such displays of the dark underbelly of human nature can be so visually entrancing, so too is the music of the Netherlands’ Gnaw Their Tongues an exercise in hypnotic audial obscenity.
As you might have noticed, I took the month of July off from writing an installment of DE. The reason being is that nothing seemed to crawl its way across my desk that I found inspiring enough to write a column about. Now, don’t get me wrong, I work with a ton of great labels that send me killer releases on a regular basis, just take a look at some of the reviews I’ve written lately for proof. But, I had been wanting to take this column back to its roots, which are obviously in black metal, and quite frankly nothing I’d heard recently in the BM department was really getting me excited enough to stoke the fires of a new installment of Dethroned Emperor.
That is, until I received a package from Transcendental Creations containing Migdal Bavel, the latest release from one-man black metal terrorist De Magia Veterum. The album is a sickening swarm of the most unholy blackened noise you’ve ever heard, like listening to Merzbow jam with Ildjarn and Filosofem-era Varg Vikernes while they get fist-f**ked by Lucifer. Everything on Migdal Bavel is buried under a thick black layer of utterly corrosive distortion. The song structures are pure chaos-theory, careening tremolo-picked melodies degenerate into scathing washes of pure white noise. A drum machine pulsates in the background, attempting to keep time but ultimately only adding to the album’s swirling, destructive dementia. The vocals are a disturbing, drainpipe distorto-howl reminiscent of Xasthur’s Malefic but even more inhuman sounding, if such a thing is possible.
Continue reading ‘Dethroned Emperor #22 (De Magia Veterum and the realms of black noise)’
It’s easy to trick yourself into believing there is no beauty left in the world. Most of us lead dreary lives, grinding away the hours behind a desk amidst a sea of cubicles, only to waste what little freedom we have at the end of the day in front of the mind numbing glow of the TV set. Little by little, our natural world is being depleted and destroyed while the elite few reap the benefits of this wholesale rape. The media paints a constant picture of a world full of nothing but the ugly, the violent and the barbaric. It is easy to convince yourself we live in a disgusting, depraved waste of an existence, only to wither up and eventually die to little fanfare.
Fortunately, we have the music of Amber Asylum to remind us that there can still be moments of utterly majestic beauty amidst the morass of nihilism we so often find ourselves mired in. Lead by multi-instrumentalist and singer Kris Force, the San Francisco based group has been a beacon of dark magnificence for over 10 years, and nowhere is this more evident than on their latest album, Bitter River.
Continue reading ‘Amber Asylum – Bitter River (Profound Lore, 2009)’
Bedtime Stories released under the project name Taun, is a product of the collaboration between two musicians, Me Raabenstein (Berlin, Germany) and Harold Nono (edinborough, UK). These two musicians discovered each other’s music over the net and realizing they were aiming at similar sounds, decided to work together.
