SHADES OF BLACK: CHRISTIAN NECROMANCY, ЗАРЕЗНИЦА, FRAGDA, INOMIATUM KALOUNAPTHRAH, MIDRYASI’S KULT, ALDAARON

(written by Islander)

I hope you’re having a good day. I hope the following music will make it better.

I used roulette-wheel and craps analogies yesterday, and it’s even more fitting today. Without exception, I had never heard the music of any of these bands before, so picking them was a spin of the wheel and a roll of the dice. I did also land on some songs that didn’t bring much payback; those aren’t here, only the winners.

 

CHRISTIAN NECROMANCY (?)

I’m going to start with a couple of real screwballs, so if you need to keep your head screwed on, you might want to skip down to the third entry.

Ron Ben-Tovim‘s latest new-music roundup at Machine Music tipped me to this next debut album (among other things he recommended). I’ll start with what he wrote, and follow with what Christian Necromancy wrote at the Bandcamp page for The Pederast (the name of their debut name), because I read it before listening and then couldn’t resist giving it a shot.

From Mr. Ben-Tovim regarding the song “The Leistae“:

I’ve seen this kind of around social media with some Jute Gyte comparisons so I had to check it out. And the Jute Gyte thing is warranted. I mean, I’m not mister smart, but there’s a good chance of some micro-tonal fuckery going on here. But the real comp, I think, would be something like Mastery. Which might be splitting hairs, but as long as we’re splitting them puts this weird-ass album into a very rare grouping of albums as crazy and as good as Mastery. Pretty intense shit, but worth the headache.

And now from Christian Necromancy:

This music was played on acoustic 10-string lyre (tuned in free intonation, amplified via a piezo and run through guitar distortion), fretless electric bass guitar, and electric drums, plus vocals. No electric guitars besides the bass are heard on this recording.

This album describes in great detail the horrific extent of organized child slavery and sexual abuse that had become a rampant issue by the time contemporary with and including the person known as Jesus Christ. The lyrics are almost entirely derived from classical Greek source texts of varying nature, including iambic and lyric poetry, medical journals, historical documents, biographies and scriptures, especially the Septuagint, which is directly quoted and referenced throughout.

This is not a work of fiction. Everything lyrically stated in these songs is based on historical fact, with only slight artistic embellishments.

In order to divert maximum attention to the urgency of the subject matter at hand, the parties behind this project have chosen to remain anonymous at this time.

Special thanks and acknowledgement to Lady Babylon for the outstanding translation work and undying dedication to the texts.

LET ANYONE INTERFERING WITH THE TRANSMISSION OF THIS INFORMATION BE PUNISHABLE BY A VIOLENT DEATH.

Not wishing that kind of punishment, or any other kind, I am not interfering! To the contrary, I am facilitating!

I will say upfront that my Jute Gyte mileage varies. It depends on my mood and the particular Jute Gyte release. Sometimes it gives my head a pleasing kind of spin; other times it gives me… a headache (thank you Ron). Mastery, on the other hand, now that’s a more appealing reference point, especially since we haven’t heard from Mastery in a decade.

My takeaways from this freakout of an album are difficult to sum up. On the one hand, the music is undeniably violent — a function mainly of high-speed percussive obliteration, berserk vocal blood-spray, and magma-like bass permutations. On the other hand, the frantically deployed lyre tones, shrill, dissonant, and piercing in their sound, are thoroughly macabre, a mind-fuck of a high order.

The drum programming also turns out to be a mind-fuck. It’s pummeling and punishing but also rapidly veers and bounces like boulders in an avalanche, or like hyper-active chimps bashing on trash-can lids — though, just often enough, it also locks into compulsive grooves.

I can’t think of many live drummers who could do what we hear on this album, but I also can’t think of many programmers who could cook up something this ingeniously crazed. It seems exactly what’s needed to accompany the mad glitter of all the high-frequency darting, skittering, and screeching tones, and the thoroughly throat-ruining vocal vitriol with which the classical source material is rendered.

The lyrics, btw, are on Bandcamp. The final song, btw, is almost 13 minutes long, just to ensure that any final un-cut threads of a listener’s sanity are sliced away — though the haunting penultimate phase of the song reminds us of the ecclesiastical origins of the abominations against which the album is so furiously directed.

I couldn’t really distinguish the songs from each other (putting aside the lyrics), but I really didn’t give a fuck about that. It’s the non-stop wildness that counts. I bought this without a second thought just as soon as I got my head screwed back on.

https://putrefactiverecordings.bandcamp.com/album/the-pederast

 

ЗАРЕЗНИЦА (Russia)

Miloš linked me to this next debut demo stream. I didn’t recognize the band’s name (believe it or not, there are a tiny number of bands with Cyrillic names that I do recognize), so I took a look at the Metal-Archives page for Зарезница. It lists four members for the band’s lineup, one credited with “bugle” and a second one for “saxophone”. I would have listened to the demo anyway, but that confirmed the decision.

I also ran their name through a translator and got “Notch” in English. That didn’t seem quite right, so I searched the name more generally and found that it seems to be pronounced “Zareznitsa”. It also seems to be the name of both a river and a village in the Pskov Oblast in the far west of Russia, a region that borders Lithuania and Estonia. I translated a Russian-language Wikipedia article which says “The population of the village as of 2000 was 2 inhabitants.”

Well, I don’t know for sure if the band’s name has any connection to that village or river. However, the description beneath the YouTube stream for this song at the Rites of Pestilence channel says: “From the heart of Russian motherland, rises this new horde from the insidious and fertile Pleskau circle.” I searched that and found that Pleskau seems to be a rendering of Pskov (that oblast where the Зарезница village and river are located), and that the Pleskau musical circle includes a few different bands, including this one.

The name of the demo is Помиральные сказки (Pomiralnye Skazki). My online translator says that title means “Fairy Tales of Death”, but I’ve seen their label refer to it as “Mortal Tales”. Here’s some descriptive verbiage from beneath the demo’s YouTube stream:

5 tracks of frantic, energetic, stomping madness. Energetic, passionate and intrepid Raw Black Metal, mixing the primitive darkness of bands like Nosvrolok, inspired by dark tales of russian folklore, with Punk-ish grooves and irreverency and the utter slimey and rustic madness of Brainbombs-ish trumpets delivered with absolute insanity. Absolute scorcher from a scene that keeps on giving, released on tape via Horrible Room and New Era Prods.

We all take that kind of promotional verbiage with a shaker of salt, but as an independent observer I’m here to tell you it’s spot on. The five songs on this 13-minute fly-by are built around roiling and writhing riff-swarms that churn, groan, heave, wail, and sweep with high-grit abrasion, and with fracturing screamed vocals that are even more raw and abrasive, backed by beats that are indeed punk-ish but also variably bizarre.

The relatively clear and piercing tones of the trumpet and sax contrast with all the other soiling and scathing sensations. They sound eerie, demented, even scary, in line with the idea of musical fairytales of death (at one point the sax also reminded me of Klezmer music). But really, everything about the music sounds supernatural, and perilously so, except for the vocals — which just sound shockingly insane, except for the samples used in the very quirky final track.

The EP is out on tape (see below). It doesn’t seem to have been released digitally.

https://new-era-productions.nl/shop/cassettes/14774-zareznica-pomiralnye-skazki-demo-tape.html
https://www.facebook.com/new.era.productions.nl/

 

FRAGDA (Hungary)

Okay, I lied, this next song is pretty screwball too — or at least quite varied in the gauntlet it will run you through.

“Limbo” includes mortar-fire drumwork, dense whirlpools of feverishly writhing riffage, and hair-on-fire screams. It also includes episodes of immense, cold-blooded pounding and filth-coated slashing, as well as roiling fretwork swarms that sound desperate and devastated.

It further includes malignant bellowing and impassioned near-singing, as well as popping beats and a funky bass-led interlude that leads into a vast, almost cinematic expansion of the music into moods of deep sorrow, with painful cries of agony at the end.

I suppose you could call this blackened deathcore, or deathened blackcore. The song is available as a digital single. It’s from an album named Glorification of Witchery, which will be released on April 6th.

https://linktr.ee/fragda
https://www.facebook.com/FragdaOfficial
https://fragda.bandcamp.com/track/limbo

 

INOMIATUM KALOUNAPTHRAH (France?)

I’m now going to spin backward on the freakishness dial, going back closer to the first two selections in today’s column — not closer in terms of styles or instrumental escapades but closer in terms of its devotion to assaults on sanity.

Inomiatum Kalounapthrah brands its music as “kaotik & anticosmic Black/Death & Harsh Noise for fans of PORTAL…”, or perhaps its French label Managarm Productions provided that. Either way, the music on the project’s new EP obsilumium mvrtvmis is monstrous.

It spends a fair amount of time using a variety of nightmare electronics and uber-lo-frequency vibrations to create tension, dread, and the frigidity of voids — an audio rendering of the primal fear of the abyss — and the guttural vocals are about as low as you can find, but they also explode in terrorizing howls.

The songs also spend a fair amount of time showing you the gnashing horrors that wait within the abyss — in contorted tremolo-picked convulsions of dense, distorted, and dissonant fretwork, jet-like flurries of machine-gun drumming, and bomb-burst detonations, occasionally augmented by stratospheric cascades that enhance the vastness of the terrors. Those violent sensations are sometimes dismal, sometimes sadistic, always deranged.

Those are the two ends of the album’s monstrous spectrum. The songs move between them, often without warning and therefore shocking, and also mash them together. The ambient phases (for want of a better adjective) are always different, but always blood-freezing. The violent phases also provide twists and turns, some more nauseating than others, some more ruthlessly jarring, some more creepy or unhinged.

You’ll either be fascinated by this nightmare or you won’t. I was. Another raid on my wallet.

https://managarmproductions.bandcamp.com/album/inomiatum-kalounapthrah-obsilumium-mvrtvmis
https://www.facebook.com/ManagarmProductions/

 

MIDRYASI’S KULT (Italy)

At this point I really felt I owed it to you to provide something more likely to be in more people’s comfort zones, something that rocks in front of a big devil-horned pentagram banner. And to do that I’ve inserted “Mountain Devil” off a new EP by Midryasi’s Kult.

Now I will have to be honest and say that I’m not a top fan of the kind of high-flying (and sometimes falsetto) occult doom singing that prominently features in this song, but I’m also honest enough to admit that I found it very good.

Moreover, the song’s big thumping and bounding grooves are compulsive, and the braying and flickering guitar work, in tandem with the vocals, very effective creates a conjoined atmosphere of sinister menace and witchy seductiveness. This infernal and infectious old-school ceremony will move your bones and likely fashion your fingers into horns.

The song is the title track from this band’s debut demo, which will be released by Caligari Records on March 7th. The label adds this info at Bandcamp:

The power-trio features scene veterans from Italian doom legends Doomsword, the idiosyncratic Cultus Sanguine, and the cult Agarthi, who became Fiurach. Indeed honoring their nation’s longstanding doom tradition, on their three-song / 15-minute Mountain Devil demo, Midryasi’s Kult meld an exciting and idiosyncratic mix of Pentagram, Celtic Frost, and the dark Italian sound – kicked off, of course, by legends like Death SS and Black Hole – all blended to form something obscure, hypnotic, and utterly alluring.

https://caligarirecords.bandcamp.com/album/mountain-devil

 

ALDAARON (France)

To close, I chose something that I think is more likely to be in the wheelhouse of most visitors here than everything else up above. Of course I obviously have many wheelhouses, but this is in one of them.

This song, “Antediluvian Prophecies,” creates the kind of awe-inspiring musical wonder one might expect from the album’s cover image. It glistens and rings, like glacial ice in the sun and the thin air of high elevations, and begins with a flute-like melody that haunts like old mountain folklore.

But following a magnificently swirling guitar-bridge, the music also takes off in a blast-driven storm, flashing with even more vividly swirling and gleaming melody, and fronted by cut-throat howls and raw yells.

Mid-range riffing, wailing tones, and distorted spoken words also create more grim and beleaguered moods, but Aldaaron continue returning to their creation of ravishing musical spectacles through frenzied fretwork, cloud-high synths, and high-octane drums and bass — ferocious but also sweeping in scale. The song digs under the skin and stays there a while.

The song is from this Grenoble band’s new album Par-delà les cimes. It will be released on April 4th. It is in line with the band’s description of what inspires Aldaaron:

In this mountainous universe, a glacial cold reigns, preserving the purity of the landscape, both desolate and majestic. The nature here is wild and untamed, governed by its own laws, while the snow-capped peaks stand proudly, bearing witness to the passage of ages.

https://aldaaron.bandcamp.com/album/par-del-les-cimes
https://linktr.ee/aldaaron
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100087843489257