It’s been a while since we last wrote about 16-year old metal prodigy Ray Heberer. The last time we did that was in the context of a September 2011 post about an artist who goes by the name All Things Rotten, the artist who will be creating the album cover for one of Ray’s many projects, Dreams of Winter. But this post isn’t about Dreams of Winter. It’s about Haemic.
Haemic is a collaboration that had its genesis years ago, when a Hungarian musician named Adam Farkas wrote a series of songs, recorded them on synthesizer, and uploaded them to YouTube. Ray Heberer (who lives in Taiwan) found the music and contacted Adam, and they began re-recording the music with Ray performing on guitar. The two of them also found a vocalist via YouTube — Mitch Shinderman, who is an American.
Haemic have now released their debut album, Fields of Sanguine, and over the weekend Ray made it available on Haemic’s Bandcamp page via a “name your price” option. As you may know, Bandcamp only allows 200 free downloads per month before converting the download into a “pay only” option. Haemic’s fans exhausted the 200 free downloads available during March in less than 24 hours. So, until April, you’ll need to pay $5 to get the Bandcamp download.
We certainly don’t want to discourage people from doing that — the money will be going to a good cause. But Ray and his Haemic mates are anxious to get this album out into the world without delay. So, they’ve come up with two ways of doing that until the stock of free Bandcamp downloads replenishes. First, we’ve agreed to host a free download of the album here at NCS in a .zip file format. Second, the guys have uploaded a compressed .rar file of the album to Mediafire.
After the jump, you can stream the entire album and get links to the .zip and .rar downloads. We’ll also give you an address to use if you’d like to order a CD of the album.
Fields of Sanguine is a substantial batch of music. It includes re-recorded versions of the three songs that appeared on Haemic’s 2011 demo plus seven new songs. The download also includes instrumental versions of five of the songs from the album proper plus a demo of another song that Ray recorded previously for a different project.
Attempting to classify the music is a task fraught with difficulty, because it’s a fusion of styles. Some of the songs have the ring of bombastic, bounding, symphonic black metal. Other songs blast and chug like a cross-breeding of technically oriented death metal and classical music (Fleshgod Apocalypse will come to mind). In other songs (e.g., “A Machine of Self Aware”), Ray breaks out into progressive and even experimental guitar flourishes or swirling leads that light up an intricately featured musical landscape.
We already knew that Ray is a very talented guitarist, but Fields of Sanguine proves that Adam Farkas is a keyboardist and a composer to watch, capable of integrating a variety of non-metal influences into a richly varied tapestry of heavy music.
Mitch Shinderman’s harsh vocals scour like a frigid wind in most songs and are responsible for a good bit of the black metal aura that shrouds the album, but he’s a decent clean vocalist, though the clean vocals appear infrequently.
In a nutshell, this is a fascinating, densely layered metal romp that will especially appeal to fans of symphonic metal with a hard edge. Here’s the album stream:
To download the .zip file of Fields of Sanguine from our high-speed Fileburst server, right-click on the following link and save the file to your device:
To get the .rar download from Mediafire, go HERE.
And finally, Ray expects to receive physical CD’s of the album later this month. To order a copy, contact Ray at this address. He plans to mail them out at his own expense.
halfbreedrayze@hotmail.com
Here are links for Haemic and Ray:
5 Responses to “AN NCS DOWNLOAD: HAEMIC’S “FIELDS OF SANGUINE””
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
I haven’t seriously listened to any of it yet, but what I’ve heard is pretty cool. Ray’s truly a great musician and I hope he goes places, I’d be surprised if he didn’t considering all the projects he has a hand in.
One had been keeping a track of this. But, the announcement must have slipped past the limited view of one’s electric parrot.
Anyway, this has turned out quite excellent. One had expected a somewhat more traditional progressive black metal album. But, the symphonic sections, the slight “necrosis”, the guitar-centric mix, and most of all, the gripping lead guitar, made for a surprisingly enjoyable listening experience.
On another note, does this make anyone else want to listen to Sleep Terror (Luke Jaeger)?
hmm, sounds interesting.
Thank you! Fortunately it seems people have been smart enough to scroll down on the bandcamp page to see the mediafire link!
I came across this fantastic album by other means (YouTube) and, as is mostly the case, I found out NCS had already featured the gem. I particularly like the instrumental tracks included. Of those, “Cold Within” really stands out to me.
Awesome album.