Ixian is the prolific solo project of Daniel Shroyer from Athens, Georgia. This year alone Ixian has released two splits, an EP, and four albums. The most recent album, Vines In Time Will Coat The Gray, came out in September, and was co-released by Owlripper Recordings.
Ixian‘s releases move around quite a lot in their stylistic ingredients. Metal-Archives classifies Ixian as “Post-Black Metal”, but that’s probably because they couldn’t think of anything else for music and noise that’s so difficult to pin down.
Some of the conceptual themes of the newest album were captured in the poetry of the title track’s words:
All architecture now mausolea
Testaments to distant deeds
Nothing of note is walled within
As even the ghosts have wandered on
Overgrowth to reclaim the concrete lands
Vines in time will coat the gray
Stretching out to hold the bricks and rebar tight
Always slipping in our war
Against the hubris in our past
Creeping closer to the hour
Time’s run out. It always would.
The proprietor of Owlripper (the Owl) felt compelled to make a video for that title track, which we’re premiering today. As he has explained:
“The album was released on September 1st this year, and I knew that I had to make a video to accompany it; it took a little time to figure out which track and how, but the lyrics to this one firmly planted the requirement to have it centred around a high paced, head-melting journey around abandoned tombs and graveyards being eaten by time and trees.”
The sounds themselves in this track, an amalgam of caustic black metal and dense noise textures, are also fast-paced and head-melting. They’re ruthlessly scathing, an unceasing squall of ruinous abrasion, like a hurricane-driven sandstorm, threaded with shrill siren-like tones whose feverishness adds to the track’s aura of violent madness.
Fighting to be heard through this catastrophic assault, unhinged screams expel their own nihilistic fury and madness, also distorted to near the limits of human endurance.
In the low end, the bass and drums run riot, contributing their own maniacal turbulence to the calamity. Their variations might be most notable in the midst of the squall. At one point the drums steadily hammer, and the crazed bubbling and undulations of the bass become a dismal growl, creating an extremely grim digression before the final assault.
The vertigo-inducing video adds to the delirium of the sounds, providing a quick-cutting collage of surrealistic imagery and flashes of abandoned buildings, ruined mortuaries, and overgrown cemeteries.
We’ll also share Owl‘s own introduction to the video:
“Hallucinogenic visuals representing ‘nature retaking abandoned human stuff’, and aiming to bend the reality of what remains of your time. This is the title track of Ixian’s punishing, addictive, cathartic black metal album with an experimental, bleak, crunchy, industrial wrapping. One that pushes the boundaries of the style without a doubt.
“I made comparisons on the release to Dragged Into Sunlight, The Axis Of Perdition, Thantifaxath, Portal, Blut Aus Nord, Oranssi Pazuzu, Godflesh, Jute Gyte and that terrifying and beautiful Icelandic black metal atmosphere.”
Vines In Time Will Coat The Gray is available on digital format from Owlripper and on triple-cassette, triple-CD, and digital formats from Ixian (the cassette and CD offerings also include the two albums that preceded the newest one). A complete stream of the album is below.
https://owlripperrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/on051-vines-in-time-will-coat-the-gray
https://linktr.ee/theowlripper
https://ixian.bandcamp.com/album/vines-in-time-will-coat-the-gray
https://www.instagram.com/ixianmusic