Trepanerungsritualen & Nordvargr - Konung Krönt i Blod / Salve Teragmon EP

Album: Konung Krönt i Blod / Salve Teragmon EP

Artist: Trepanerungsritualen & Nordvargr

Label: Cyclic Law

Catalogue  no: 124^th Cycle

Tracklist:

1  Konung Krönt i Blod

2  Salve Teragmon

What happens when two juggernauts of the industrial scene collide and re-envision each other’s material? In a nutshell – this recently released limited edition 7” of 300 is what you get. It’s amazing just how much brooding malice and blackened atmospherics can be crammed into something which comes in at just under ten minutes.

‘Konung Krönt i Blod’ (King Crowned in Blood) is savage enough in its original form (which can be heard on TPR’s 2014 Perfection & Permanence album) but somehow Nordvargr has managed to create something even more terrifying by stretching it, dragging it through fire and mud, then rinsing the detritus off in industrial-strength acid. What the process leaves is a blackened bare-bones carcass drenched in decay and filth.

TPR (Thomas Ekelund) slices apart the black-industrial/swamp-dance stylings of Nordvargr’s ‘Salve Teragmon’ with an axle-grinder, reassembles it with rusty nails and surgical sutures, and then finally subjects it to unhealthy doses of radioactivity. The original’s percussive element is the only part of it that’s been retained but even then it’s mutated into something considerably begrimed, soiled, and thoroughly infected and dripping with ichor.

This has been out since May 1^st but I have no hesitation in declaring it one of my records of the year so far. It has all the elements that dock into my taste receptors in whatever part of my brain that processes such things and brings out the happy. It’s been quite a while since I’ve heard such stained and tainted magnificence. If you can find the original 7” vinyl the grab it, otherwise it’s available on Bandcamp on the link below:

https://cycliclaw.bandcamp.com/album/konung-kr-nt-i-blod-salve-teragmon

Essential.

Psymon Marshall 2019

Kollaps

Album: Mechanical Christ

Artist: Kollaps

Label: Cold Spring

Catalogue  no: CSR269CD/CSR269LP

1. Tracklist:
2. Ankara
3. Crucify
4.  Fleshflower
5.  Blood Premonitions
6.  Traducer
7.  Mechanical Christ
8.   Love is a War

Let’s cut to the chase here: what we have here is nothing less than the soundtrack to a society in decay and on the road to extinction. Despair, anguish, isolation, terror, and the sheer violence that constitutes much of the present global state of play has been sublimated through an act of nefarious alchemy into the seven tracks presented to us by this Australian trio.

This is a portrait of a world immersed in noise, where everyone’s screaming but no one’s listening. Harsh, grating, and covered in rust the colour of blood, this is as near to a prognosis of where we’re heading as you’re likely to get anywhere. Gargantuan in sound and depth, mechanical and machine-like in execution, and as relentless as the steamroller of industrial and social ‘progress’ we’ve been witness to in the last fifty years, it’s almost as if Kollaps have managed to distil the dichotomous relationship between the pace of scientific evolution and our inability as a species to cope with it all. And in the space between one state and the other the very fabric of order and stability are inevitably collapsing.

If the void could articulate the rush to destruction this would be it: howling, screeching anger and frustration, voiced through scraping steel and hammering percussive exclamations, along with distorted and almost unintelligible vocals – we’re yelling but those with the power to step off the accelerator refuse to listen or take any notice. Human nature made manifest in sound.

This is at once both brilliant and frightening, both enlightening and terrifying. It’s both a clarion call and an epitaph, an apocalyptic manifesto written in blood and metal. Listen to this on your way to work every morning; turn the TV news and party political broadcasts down and play this as their soundtracks; listen along whilst watching gameshows, grifter televangelists, snake oil salesmen, scenes of destruction and drought, and starving children. It’s all converging into a singularity, and Kollaps is the star of the show.

File under “Armageddon”.

Psymon Marshall 2019