Codex Obscura Nomina

BLUT AUS NORD - Spectral Subsonic Waves (The Sound Is An Organic Matter) As is their wont, BLUT AUS NORD follows up 2014’s classicist Memoria Vetusta III – a truly iconic album of epic, beauteous and atmospheric Black Metal – with a dichotomous trip further into unfathomable realms of the Black Metal avant-garde. This is yet another new way. The 4 pieces that comprise Spectral Subsonic Waves spring from the interstices between outsider black metal, noise, dark ambient, electronic psychedelia and 20th Century classical. Exospheres of skewed glissando melodies incant magick atop hallucinogenic rolling beats. The ghosts of fractured snarls, unnerving whispers and ritualistic ceremonial choirs conjure an aura of subliminal dementia. Collapsing microtonal oscillations and Doppler shifts drag the listener through chemical excess into the despondency of modern age self-realisation. "The Parallel Echöes" showcases BAN’s strongest and most vital beat-making to date: powerfully industrial pounding flecked with trap articulations and a dead-eyed skank which propel the genuinely unnerving melodies into new forms of darkest ‘electronica’. The gobsmackingly intense "Infra-Voices Ensemble" is a strangely beatific finale, a piece of coldest industrial techno which inspires hellish euphoria through destructive bass weight, damned choirs and disorientating, pursuant chord progressions which hunt down and possess the synapses. Malevolent devotional music for murkiest internal contemplation. Or the Saint Vitus Dance. ÆVANGELIST - Threshold Of The Miraculous In a seamless transition from fevered mind into fever dream, ÆVANGELIST produce possibly the strongest single track of their rapidly burgeoning oeuvre - 20 minutes of sepulchrally intimidating, haunted and horrendous experimental black metal. Where the BLUT AUS NORD side revels in an altered inner hell-state, ÆVANGELIST uses martial double kick, dissonant raked arpeggios, The Riff and outward tropes of extreme metal to affirm the power within isolationism, to assert the strength in difference and to reject all that is beneath them. Threshold of the Miraculous is an awakening, propulsion into action, a repeated avowal to transcend. Incessant dissonant arpeggios and slurred chords swirl amidst aerated synth and smeared sheets of twisted melodicism. An array of wraith-like voices leads into spoken word exegesis; muscular rhythms and disturbing percussive touches hammer home powerful invocations before breaking down into cathartic passages aligned with the genre-splice of ULVER's Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the bass-driven heft of GODFLESH, overlaid with reverberant echoes of early 4AD, post-punk and reclusive electronica. A declaration of strength within the bloody trails of psychological disconnect.