(written by Islander)
We are about to premiere a surreal video for a track from a new album fittingly named Black Abyss Invocation by the enigmatic Finnish duo known as Vomitriste. Set for co-release later this month by Roman Numeral and Machine Tribe Recordings, it represents a horrifying new chapter in the band’s creative impulses.
What they’ve done before consists of six albums, which Vomitriste have recently released as a compilation called Droneworks (2022-2024). As that collective title suggests, the music could be (too simplistically) summed up as an amalgam of “colossal, noisy drones and profound dark ambient.” But what they’ve done on Black Abyss Invocation leaves that behind and makes a new start.
The change was unexpected even to the band. They say the new creations, which were created in a single session overnight, left them “perplexed” as they opened their minds and accidentally stumbled across new methods of expression. Here’s how they explain it:
“We realised we’ve achieved everything we could under the sonic umbrella of the now former existence of the band, and decided that instead of caving in, we’ll just push through any and all barriers and see what awaits on the other side, and as far as we’re concerned, succeeded in doing just that.
“Vomitriste in its current and continuing form is nothing but utmost dread and hellfire – a deformed and purely evil vessel aimed to tame the cacophony of mind into something more tangible, yet simultaneously abstract, as if you weren’t alone in your psyche anymore. Worse is underway, always.”
We’ll also include another kind of summary that is being provided in press materials for the new album:
“Certain aspects of their previous doings are present, but the seminal orientation across the record lies at the perimeters of black ambient and death industrial, taking elements from black metal and noise and mashing those together with dark ambient and electronics, with the inclusion of ritualistic and trance-inducing, jarring rhythms and way-past ominous atmospheres.”
And with that, we’ll turn to the song we’re premiering today — “Void Sermon“.
A febrile imagination could envision the kind of unbearably awful tortures that might produce the horrific screams which launch this song, in the midst of what sounds like a volcanic eruption on the horizon. An imagining of hell could also explain the demonic howls and shrill quivering tones that join in.
Momentous booming tones arrive, like the start of a world-ending ritual, along with a collage of other shrieking, quivering, and eerily wailing tonalities that create harrowing sensations of utter hopelessness. Yet still, those horrifying voices go on, like the fanatical cruelty of hellspawn and the terrors of those souls who suffer under their hands. At the end, only the throbs of a leviathan heart remain.
This is indeed pitch-black sonic terrain, both hostile and haunting, an invitation to nightmares.
Black Abyss Invocation will be released digitally and on CD via Roman Numeral on January 24th, and on the following day on tape via Machine Tribe Recordings. All relevant links are available here: