More than a decade ago the founding two members of Abstracter came together in Oakland CA under the influence of such bands as Amebix, Godflesh, Blut Aus Nord, Corrupted, and Disembowelment, with the objective of creating “dark, bleak, and suffocating music as a vessel to channel their obsession with the apocalypse and other nihilistic end-time visions”.

So say the press materials for Abstracter‘s new album, and those materials further expose the animating environments and philosophies that spawned such hopeless and harrowing visions: “…the world’s unravelling, ruin, darkness, annihilation, nuclear devastation, war, plague, and mankind’s fundamental existence as a plague and as a deeply flawed species….”

In the years that have passed since the band’s inception they have been on a continuing quest for ever more astonishing, cataclysmic, and authentic ways of expressing the most abominable aspects of human existence, drawing upon elements from black, doom, death metal, crust and drone/noise, and making their music increasingly more difficult to classify. That quest now reaches its apotheosis (so far) in Abstracter‘s latest album Abominion, which will be released by Sentient Ruin Laboratories on October 1st. Continue reading »