Oblivion Guest - The Light In the Black Hole.

Album: The Light in the Black Hole

Artist: Oblivion Guest

Label: Self-released via Bandcamp

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist: 

1. The Light in the Black Hole

2. Mind Awake, Body Asleep

3. Digital Duress

4. If We Should Fail… (Black Hole Mix)

5. After the Fire

6. We Need to Go (Black Hole Mix)

7. Faster than Deception

8. Rapture (Black Hole Mix)

9. Bazille Murder (Black Hole Mix)

10. Fallen Men

11. Into Chaos

12. Last Gasp

13. Strangled Beauty

Oblivion Guest is musician, producer, composer, and performer Hunter Barr, the founder member of KnifeLadder along with Andrew Trail and the late John Murphy. He also works and tours with Black Light Ascension, Antivalium, This Is Radio Silence, and Naevus. This present work is the full soundtrack to a performance in Dresden of ‘The Light in the Black Hole’, by Barr and dancer Una Shamaa as part of Tanzwoche 2019.

This totally surprised me, as I was expecting something completely different – but don’t be put off by that because, in spite of being composed of thirteen electronic, even danceable, tracks, it’s every bit as atmospheric and mood inducing as any free-form ambient opus. Yes, there’s percussion, down and dirty bass rhythms, and ‘traditional’ song structures, but these pieces are aimed solely at a radioactive and mutated post-apocalyptic dancefloor of the future. Here you dance while you decompose.

The sound is dense, big, layered and for the most drives along at a behemothic clip, barrelling towards its inexorable date with destruction and dissolution. Dust and rubble trail in its wake, buildings collapse, seas dry up, fires burn, storms roil continuously, the acidic rains are never-ending, and the only living things left alive are misshapen, diseased, and distorted parodies of what were once the fauna and flora of the green earth. The land is barely recognisable, and the very air is smog-engulfed, polluted, and poisoned. However, there are also quiet and more contemplatively reflective moments too, brief respites from the relentless hopelessness of it all – the rays of a putrid sun shine through fleeting breaks in the clouds.

Favourite tracks: ‘Mind Awake, Body Asleep’, rife with swampy beats and harsh percussion; ‘Last Gasp’, a blanket of jet-blast electronics sweeping catastrophically and convulsively over an already-beaten land, and the last track ‘Strangled Beauty’, a haunting, keening lament, or perhaps the hint of a promise to return to what the world had once been. It’s all here – life, death, and the possibility of rebirth

The album will be available from August 2nd 2019 at Oblivion Guest’s Bandcamp page here https://oblivionguest.bandcamp.com/ as a CD and digital download,

Psymon Marshall 2019.

Suffer In April, more French Greatness?

Suffer In April – Femme Fatale – demo  - 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nESUZ5ztBg

1 L'ennivrance des sens 

2 les oubliées de la lumiere 

3 Tinté de lumiére sa peau comme un diament  

4 Le voyage sants retour (Snix Cover) 

5 Obédience au plus grand des chagrin

6 l'apogé de l'art du meurtre 

7 Femme Fatal . 

8 Transcendance Nocturne 

9 Eux deux 

10 Viande Froide 

11 Carne

Suffer in April is a French project by Patrick Andre. I decided to review this project because I was just sent some links/pestered via messenger over a period, today I clicked on one and I can’t believe what I am hearing. Femme Fatale seems to share the same forward-thinking attitude that made early Cremation Lily so excellent. It’s Harsh Noise overtones and deep keyboard instrumentation mixed with pained vocals and sharp sounds. There’s also Guitar mixed in at some points, the quieter passages are strong, the vocals are different – they chant, wail, roar and are generally solid throughout, maybe even next level. Later there are some great female vocal harmonies that are looped over vortexes of distortion.  The later more straight up harsh noise pieces are also music to my ears. There are moments of cinematic greatness here and some passages of evocative beauty happening there, this is a very strong recording, it’s sonic vocabulary is at once simple and sophisticated. This short review is a warning, a warning of potential or maybe present forward-thinking greatness. Haven’t decided which one it is yet, I'm still blown away.

Choppy Noodles 2019

Tribes of Medusa - Lilith Enshrined.

Album: Lilith Enshrined

Artist: Tribes of Medusa

Label: Sombre Soniks

Catalogue no: N/A

Tracklist:

      1.      Lilith Enshrined

According to Jewish folklore, Lilith was the first wife of the Biblical Adam, not Eve. In the original rendering of the creation of humankind myth she came into being alongside Adam at exactly the same time, and not from any part of her husband (unlike Eve, who was created from one of Adam’s ribs while he slept). She was an entirely separate and individual creation. However, she turned out to be something of a wilful woman who rejected God and her husband and so was, naturally, demonised by subsequent generations and portrayed as a baby-killer. Christianity especially has some major issues with disobedient and upstart women, and so the traditional myth of Adam and Eve was promulgated to the exclusion of any mention of Lilith (and yet, Eve was responsible for the Fall of Man). However, in some of the left-hand path systems she’s been adopted as an agent of sexual domination and feminism, and the Great Mother of Daemons.

On a more earth-bound level she’s the inspiration behind Brooklyn, New York’s dark ambient/industrial Tribes of Medusa project. And here she is in all her chaotic glory, a truly dark avatar of all that is dangerous to the patriarchal conception of what women should be – in other words, free, an utterly dynamic force of nature, bounden to nothing and no one, and ultimately free to choose her own destiny and path in life. She is the apotheosis of womankind, guardian of the procreative and life-giving powers, nurturing, strong, and independent of mind and spirit.

Tribes of Medusa get right to it on this 30-minute slab of blackened maelstrom – guttural bass rumblings and slashes of guitar announce her presence, the goddess dressed in red and black, ready to seduce, to mesmerise, and to conquer. Her spirit is earth-born, rising up from the very bowels of the world. Seismic chords crash and clash, wrenching and catastrophic: mountains tremble and empires fall. Fury and ferocity, madness and passion, erupt violently, emphasising Lilith’s supremacy in exciting the desires of men. She is a roiling, tumbling, unstoppable juggernaut: this is the Dark Goddess in her prime.

If you want to be battered continuously by a wall of cacophonic industrial guitar noise, then this is the one for you. It’s relentless, endlessly crashing against the shores of your mind and soul. This paean to the original woman, the original feminine archetype, is all that it should be and more. Lilith deserves your worship.

Available at https://sombresoniks.bandcamp.com/album/lilith-enshrined in digital format and also from https://sombresoniks.com/home

Psymon Marshall 2019