MONDAY MEANDERING: SATURNIAN MIST, BRYMIR, DODSFERD, HERETOIR, SQUAREPUSHER x Z-MACHINES

Saturnian Mist (photo by K. Lehto)

Happy fucking Monday. Here’s a random assortment of music I discovered over the last 24 hours. The key word here is “random”, but all of this suits me quite well. Mayhap it will suit you, too.

SATURNIAN MIST

Saturnian Mist are from Tampere, Finland. Because they are from Finland, I figured the odds were high they would be worth hearing. Candlelight Records thinks so, because they just signed them and will be releasing the band’s second album, Chaos Magick, later this year. When I saw that news this morning, I went in search of recent music and found a demo version of one of the songs that will appear on the album — “The Heart of Shiva”.

It’s thumping and grinding, bone-scraping and body-moving, ugly but hooky. I’m now thoroughly infected by that jumping repeating riff, my head bouncing like a bobble-head. Digging the unexpected drum fills, too, which sound almost like congas. Listen:

https://www.facebook.com/saturnianmist

 

 

BRYMIR

Brymir are also from Finland. I last wrote about them (here) almost three years ago after coming across an official video for their first album that caught my fancy. They have a second album coming, and yesterday (thanks to yet another winning Facebook tip from our supporter Brimberloo) I checked out a lyric video for the first single from the album, “The Black Hammer”.

It got my blood pumping. It’s thundering, symphonic melodic death metal, with pulsing riffs, sweeping orchestration, double-bass that will ride you down, a combo of cracked howls and soaring cleans, and some Latin lyrics. I also enjoyed the pencil drawings in the video by Claudio Bergamin and Jouko Alapartanen. It’s below.

https://www.facebook.com/Brymir

 

 

DODSFERD

I really, really like that album cover. I have to find out who did it. It’s for The Parasitic Survival of the Human Race, which is the latest album by a Greek metal band named Dodsferd. The album has recently become available for order on Bandcamp. Only one song is streaming there at the moment, but I sure as hell like it.

“Breeding Chaos” begins with the sounds of a riot in progress and then moves right into a wrecking romp that matches black metal and punk and sounds like… a riot in progress. D-beat and double bass, stomping riffs and tremolo storms, throat-shredding screams and… rioting: You can’t sit still to this one.

There’s another track from the album — a cover of the Misfits’ We Are 138 — now streaming over at DECIBEL. That’s well worth hearing, too.

http://razorbleed.bandcamp.com/album/the-parasitic-survival-of-the-human-race-cd-rb11-2013
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dodsferd/186841848015396

 

 

HERETOIR

Now for an exception to our Rule.

Heretoir are a band from Augsberg, Germany. Their most recent release was a 2012 compilation entitled Substanz. Northern Silence Productions recently released a vinyl edition of Substanz, and it comes with a bonus track that was recommended by one of my Facebook friends. The bonus is a Heretoir cover of a song named “Just For A Moment” by the late lamented Austere.

I can’t get the song out of my head. It’s performed almost entirely with acoustic guitar, bass, and synthesized strings (except for the ghostly post-metal guitar instrumental that comes at the end). Yes, the impassioned, high-range vocals are clean, but they’re emotionally piercing (there’s also one harsh howl that will catch you by surprise), and the music is entrancing.

http://heretoironlineshop.bigcartel.com
https://www.facebook.com/heretoir

 

 

SQUAREPUSHER x Z-MACHINES

Squarepusher is the pseudonym of a long-running UK recording artist named Tom Jenkinson, whose work appears to be primarily in the field of drum and bass, jazz, and electronica. Thanks to a link to this page from our supporter Old Man Windbreaker, I discovered that Squarepusher developed music to be performed by a robotic music-performing system named Z-Machines, which was developed by Japanese engineers under the direction of Kenjiro Matsuo.

Z-Machines includes the equivalent of a guitarist with 78 fingers and a drummer with 22 arms, both of which can play at speeds and with dexterity beyond human capability. Squarepusher’s first composition for Z-Machines was named “Sad Robot Goes Funny”, and director Daito Manabe made a video of the performance that came out last year. The music isn’t metal — although the performers are — but it’s a cool piece, and the performers eventually do get going really fast.

This proved to be such a success that Squarepusher has created more music for Z-Machines, which will be released via iTunes on April 7 (April 8 in North America) under the title Music For Robots. Pre-orders will come with a download of “Sad Robot Goes Funny”. Here’s the video:

https://www.facebook.com/squarepusher