Not long ago we published our Comrade Aleks‘ interview of Ryan Wilson, who is the musical equivalent of a perpetual motion machine and one of the two men behind the Texas-based death metal band Pneuma Hagion. The entire interview is well worth reading, but I found his comments about the Lovecraftian influence in Pneuma Hagion the most illuminating, especially in the context of the band’s new album From Beyond:
“I’ve been a huge fan of Lovecraft’s stories for most of my life. The key thing about Lovecraft is the sublime horror that he evokes; it’s a horror that can’t be seen, can’t be touched, and really can’t even be easily imagined. I love this; something that is beyond comprehension, but just graspable enough to be terrifying….
“Our minds have the power to create much more sinister and frightening ideas and images than anything the physical world can actually produce. The idea of extradimensional entities invading people’s minds is a huge theme in the stories of Lovecraft, and I enjoy trying to evoke similar feelings via the medium of music…. [M]usic is a great platform for the sublime, where the art lies in sound and not in visual cues so that your mind gets to handle all of the relevant imagery.”
Those thoughts resonate powerfully when listening to From Beyond, an album that truly does conjure terrible images of the listener’s own making, no two of them alike just as no two of us are completely alike. Everlasting Spew Records, which will release the new album on August 30th, fleshes out its thematic sources:
“From Beyond explores Lovecraftian ideas of horrifying extra-dimensional entities forcing their way into the causal universe by infecting the minds of humans.
“Each song is from the perspective of some malevolent entity of unfathomable nature trying to influence the world of mortals and trying to infiltrate our universe in order to cause its ultimate destruction.”
We’ve already premiered one of the songs off From Beyond, a harrowing horror called “Harbinger of Dissolution“, and today we’re premiering another one, this one named “Aeon“.
Although the drums in this new song rattle at a crazed rate of speed, the massive (and massively ugly) chords are hulking and heaving, and the strings squeal, proving that this hideous creature is not only huge and heartless but also insane.
The beast malignantly roars and also goes on the attack, a vision conjured by both the fretwork’s dismally down-tuned whir and the avalanche-strength turbulence in the low end. The riffing and drumming also viciously jab and ruthlessly pound, a brutish and primitive dynamism that segments the music’s poisonous swarming frenzies.
Lovecraft would be proud, even though he himself might have been terrorized by sounds such as these.
Some of you might have missed our previous premiere, and because of that chance we’ll repeat a few of the details from that earlier article — and down below we’ve also included a stream of that earlier song, “Harbinger of Dissolution“.
Pneuma Hagion made an inspired choice of artwork for the cover of From Beyond: It is William Blake’s 1795 drawing The House of Death, which was inspired by lines from Book XI of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which the archangel Michael reveals to Adam in terrible detail the doomed fate of humans — a description of a “Lazar-house” filled with afflicted people suffering in their agonies, “and over them triumphant Death his Dart Shook….”
From Beyond was mixed and mastered by Mike G., with vinyl mastering by Carlo Altobelli at Toxic Basement Studios.
Everlasting Spew will release the album in August on CD, cassette tape, and digital formats, and a vinyl edition will be released in the coming autumn. It’s recommended for fans of Morbid Angel, Immolation, Hissing, and Antediluvian.
PRE-ORDER:
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PNEUMA HAGION:
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