AN NCS PREMIERE: ACAUSAL INTRUSION — “TRANSFORMATIONAL DEATH PHENOMENON”

For reasons that our man Andy Synn incisively explained in his review last year, Acausal Intrusion‘s debut album Nulitas was a rare piece of work. My favorite fragment from the review was this one: “[T]his is one record that actively feels like it’s evolving and mutating as you’re listening to it, which is no mean feat”.

It wasn’t just that Nulitas morphed from song to song, it was that the individual songs themselves seemed to change when listening to them a second and third time, which was a strange experience. But as Andy also noted, it was only after repeat listens that the album began to make sense — albeit a weird and warped kind of sense.

Now this dizzying and devastating duo are fast returning with a new album, this one named Seeping Evocation. Not surprisingly, it’s a challenging listen, and a frequently disturbing one. As the band’s label I, Voidhanger Records, expresses it:

“Once again the watchwords are chaos and transformation…. Seeping Evocation is like a living organism from another dimension, a giant black hole that pulsates and breathes, the eye of a forgotten Lovecraftian god open to our reality, ready to burn and destroy everything.”

Nythroth

We all got a first exposure to Seeping Evocation through the revelation of a song named “Mnemonic Confabulation”. As I wrote at the time, it’s one of those songs that just makes me shake my head in wonder at the combination of technical extravagance and chaotic construction:

“The song doesn’t proceed in anything resembling a straight and steady path. It slows and towers, shivers and quivers, races and roils, bludgeons and broils, becomes celestial in its splendor and delirious in its madness, and drifts into eerie other-worlds. The drums will keep popping your head long after the song ends, and it will take some time before your head stops spinning too. It truly is a mind-blowing spectacle that demands to be heard over and over again.”

Especially coming on the heels of Nulitas, that one song ought to be enough to convince adventurous and un-fragile listeners to get in line for Seeping Evocation, but we’ve got further inducement, if such were needed, in our premiere of the second single, “Transformational Death Phenomenon“. Here is the band’s stream of consciousness expressed through the song:

“…pseudonym propagated expressing estimated threats well published details embracing expression breaking spiritual path channeling the physics broadly associated in the thousands synchronizing miracles in a curious universe inexplicable connection to the palpable constraint in distance time cycles of transformational death phenomenon of mystical warfare erupt cosmos as life drains…”

Cave Ritual

The experience of this song is as destabilizing and as fascinating as the first single, and no more wedded to a straight and narrow path. It brings in the more doom-laden and devastating elements of the band’s confounding approach to death metal, and subjects listeners to a punishing and agonized stomp, but it also convulses in bursts of cataclysmic drumming and fiery but demented guitar seizures.

The music also gallops and vividly throbs, weirdly wails and contorts in displays of violent ecstasy, and sometimes sounds like a mad excavation machine gouging through concrete at high speed. Near the end, however, it slows dramatically, and becomes… dreamy. And you’ll want to listen to it for the drum work alone, which, as always, is astonishing.

 

 

I, Voidhanger Records will release Seeping Evocation on September 30th, in these formats: Digipack CD (limited to 200), 2LP Gatefold vinyl (limited to 200), and. It features the transfixing cover art of Cyril Aestesis, and it’s recommended for fans of Ulcerate, Gorguts, Timeghoul, Convulsing, and Demilich.

PRE-ORDER:
EU Store: https://metalodyssey.8merch.com
US Store: http://metalodyssey.8merch.us
Bandcamp: https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/seeping-evocation

FOLLOW ACAUSAL INTRUSION:
https://www.facebook.com/acausalintrusionband