(written by Islander)
Four weeks ago we embarked here on an unusual collaboration with the German avant-garde death metal band Ingurgitating Oblivion and Willowtip Records, the label that will release their new album Ontology of Nought on September 27th. What we began doing four weeks ago was the rollout of a single long song from the album, a rollout divided into three segments. Today we present the second Part, with the third and final one still ahead next month.
The name of the song is also long, and unsettling in the vision it portrays: “The barren earth oozes blood, and shakes and moans, to drink her children’s gore”. As we disclosed in Part 1 of this premiere, the rest of the song titles on the album are also unusual, and also evocative of dark moods — and all those other songs are also expansive in their duration. Here’s the track list:
photo by Ava Bonam
1. Uncreation’s whirring loom you ply with crippled fingers (14:39)
2. To weave the tapestry of nought (18:47)
3. The blossoms of your tomorrow shall unfold in my heart (11:06)
4. …Lest I should perish with travel, effete and weary, as my knees refuse to bear me thither (10:24)
5. The barren earth oozes blood, and shakes and moans, to drink her children’s gore (18:18)
In the first installment of this premiere we included a lot of detail about the album as a whole, and we’ll repeat that below for those of you who didn’t stumble across Part 1. But first, the music….
Of course you should first listen to the first segment of the song before moving on to the second segment, and so we’ll install both segments below, back to back.
In continuing to think about what Ingurgitating Oblivion are doing in this track, cosmological comparisons have started coming to mind. In this song, which you’re hearing in parts, Ingurgitating Oblivion are speeding toward a kind of musical event horizon, a boundary layer beyond which sanity can’t escape. Red-shifted in their apparent movement, they’re pushing the limits of experimentation and unpredictability in their chosen artform, nearing the point of gravitational collapse and implosion — but not there yet.
Of course, the belligerence and brutality of death metal are present and accounted for. The song’s title envisions the earth drinking gore, and gore sprays in the music. But as the band hurtle toward their own event horizon, pulling from a multitude of other musical interests, the song warps and dazzles.
You won’t see any of this coming, given the eerily haunting but increasingly ominous way the song begins. Even after the music explodes in a storm of scathing and crashing dissonance, punctuated by maniacal drum bursts and viciously ugly vocals, there’s no predicting how it will twist and turn.
It reaches heights of derangement and delirium, it ruthlessly pounds and pulverizes, it creates jaw-dropping sonic war-zones, horrible to envision, and often it sounds too alien to be earth-born. As you’ll discover in today’s Part 2 of the premiere, it also veers off into sprightly frolics and a phase of jazzy joyfulness led by what sounds like a saxophone (there’s a great bass companion in that phase, but no saxophone, as we’ll explain below) — before slugging hard and then convulsing in intricate, head-spinning spasms of even greater instrumental madness and grisly gurgling vocals, with the saxophone losing its mind too.
The multitude of crazed maneuvers sound improvisational, yet also somehow frequently locked-in when some of the most hair-pin turns occur. For good measure, the song also pounds the listeners into jelly and savagely claws through the remains looking (fruitlessly) for anything worth preserving.
Near the end (as you’ll eventually discover for yourselves in Part 3) that sax-sounding instrument again reappears in the midst of the clobbering and the catastrophes, not having recovered its sanity, freakishly wandering through the ruins. And at the very end, things dramatically decelerate and become soft, musing, and meandering. There, the pseudo-sax slowly wails the earth’s grief.
P.S. Further investigation after this article first appeared revealed that the instrument which sounded to these ears like a saxophone was in fact a flute performed by professional flutist Daniel Agi, who we’re told is also a metalhead (you can find him here). The band also gave us this additional info about Daniel and his performances on the album:
He studied flute in the conservatories of Cologne and Freiburg with Hans Martin Mueller and Prof. Robert Aitken. In 2006/2007, he was a member of the International Ensemble Modern Academy, where he received his master’s degree in the performing of contemporary music. Dedicated to both, the contemporary as well as the classical repertoire he is seen as a guest musician with, among others, the Düsseldorf Philharmonic Orchestra and Ensemble musikFabrik as well as with his various chamber music groups. As a lecturer, he has given workshops at Harvard University, Folkwang University Essen, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music Singapur and others.
Daniel plays different kinds of flutes on Ontology of Nought! I believe he played concert flute, alto flute, and bass flute. The fact that the flute sounds the way it does sound like is a combination of Daniel’s technique (he is also proficient in nay flute playing and imitates this toward the end of “The barren earth …”) and the characteristics of the instrument.
What else does this album hold in store? What do Ingurgitating Oblivion and their guests pull off in the other four excursions? We’ll get to that in due course, along about the time when we premiere the third Part of “The barren earth…“.
Now, to repeat the details we provided in Part 1 of this premiere for those who missed it:
First, we’ll quote the band’s preamble to Ontology of Nought:
“You have fully delineated the subject of a universe of finiteness and change as well as the knowledge derived therefrom // Why should you be despondent in spite of all this, thinking that you are undone?”
And here is the further comment the band have provided:
Ontology of Nought is the result of approximately five years of incessant work. It documents whatever has been instilled into Ingurgitating Oblivion and the two minds pulling the strings behind the scenes: Norbert Müller and Florian Engelke.
Trying to pinpoint some trite conceptual undercurrent would be to defile the beauty of creation. It feels alienating to us talking about our music and lyrics, as these stem from dichotomic dynamics of meticulous planning on the one hand and perfect intuition on the other. In like manner, the lyrics cannot be explained further here, but listeners are invited to do some work themselves and take a plunge into what could potentially encapsulate the world or denote nothing at all.
Musically, we just do our own thing, celebrating our Death Metal heroes, more progressive Rock, jazz, folk, classical music. We do not strive to stand for any particular brand, but we simply enjoy being torn down the torrent of haphazard ideas, premonitions, and visions.
And that’s that.
photo by Ava Bonam
Ingurgitating Oblivion consists of Norbert Müller (rhythm and lead guitars, sound engineering, mastering, all recording logistics) and Florian Engelke (lead composition, rhythm and lead guitars, vocals, Tibetan singing bowls), but the two of them also brought along an impressive cast of session and guest musicians to help make this album:
Lille Gruber (Defeated Sanity) – Drums
Ava Bonam – Vocals
Chris Zoukas (Mentally Defiled, Sacral Rage, Violent Definition) – Bass
Céline Voccia – Piano
Daniel Agi – Recorder, Flutes
Jan Ferdinand – Vibraphone, Guitars
Tom Fountainhead Geldschläger – Guitar Solos
In addition, Silke Farhat read portions of the poem “Je ne sais pourquoi” by Paul Verlaine (1844 – 1896), which appear in tracks I, II, and IV, and Mehdi Lachini read portions of ghazals 33 and 61 by Ḥāfeẓ (1315 – 1390), which also appear in those same tracks.
The front cover artwork was prepared by Dmitriy Egorov, and it includes an inlay painting called “Giuditta che decapita Oloferne” by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – 1656).
Willowtip will release Ontology of Nought on September 27th, on CD, gatefold 2×12″ vinyl, cassette, and digital formats. For more info, check the links below.
PRE-ORDER:
Willowtip ► https://bit.ly/ontology-willowtip
Bandcamp ► https://bit.ly/ontology-bandcamp
INGURGITATING OBLIVION:
https://www.ingurgitatingoblivion.com/
https://www.instagram.com/ingurgitating_oblivion/
https://www.faceboom.com/ingurgitatingoblivionofficial