Autarkh Archives - NO CLEAN SINGING

AUTARKH: “EMERGENT”

Oct 272023

(In the following review our writer DGR takes a deep dive — a very deep dive — into the strange musical worlds created by the Dutch band Autarkh on their new album Emergent, which is set for release on November 10th by Season of Mist.)

One would suspect that a band like Autarkh are going to feature on heavy metal websites more due to their ethos of being as experimental and unapproachable as possible than their particular chosen instrument configuration. The wildly artistic group were founded on blurring multiple genre lines, and that includes the world of heavy metal, with large handfuls of other things – difficult to describe as they may be.

The group’s sophomore album Emergent walks further down that pathway, metal not just because the band like themselves a distorted guitar, or their history as being a branch budded off the tree that was Dodecahedron, or the fact that they’ve done a drone/doom set at the more high-minded world of Roadburn under the name Autarkh III – as far as I know, there is no Autarkh II: Autarkh Takes Manhattan out there just yet – but the band will also likely grab ears among metal’s crowd due to their usage of it as a style to further accomplish whatever strange and haunted otherworldly goals they may have had in mind. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: MORNE, BEYOND GRACE, AUTARKH, PYROLATROUS, NÁSVELGR, CONVOCATION, BLUT AUS NORD

Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Oct 052023

September 16th was the last time I was able to assemble one of these roundups of new music and videos, partly due to my missing four days at the site while attending a recent wedding in California. Needless to say, the backlog of new music that interests me swelled to enormous proportions in the interim.

In deciding what to recommend today I defaulted to the most recent releases. Prowling back through everything of interest that emerged over the last three weeks was just too daunting a task, which tends to be Sisyphean even when I’m not missing in action. Hope you get a kick (in the ass or head) from what I chose.

MORNE (U.S.)

Morne’s 40-minute new album plays out across only four songs, which tells you that they’re all substantial in length. One of those premiered this week, along with a very good video, and when I heard it the first time I felt both emotionally and physically crushed. Of course, therefore, I liked it immediately. Here’s what Morne‘s Polish-born guitarist/vocalist Miłosz Gassan said about it: Continue reading »

AUTARKH – FORM IN MOTION

Album Reviews 5 Responses »

Mar 102021

(Here’s Andy Synn‘s review of the debut album from Autarkh, set for release this Friday via Season of Mist.)

Metal’s relationship with electronic music – in all its various forms – is a long and fractious one.

For every artist who wholeheartedly embraces the fusion between the two genres there are a thousand more simply going through the motions, adding a few half-hearted glitch effects and booming sub-drops in a desperate attempt to be “down with the kids” or because they think (incorrectly) that it will somehow make them sound “futuristic” and otherwise make up their complete lack of vision (I think we all know who I’m talking about).

Still, the number of successful hybrids (from Godflesh to Fear Factory to Author & Punisher) can’t be dismissed, and Black Metal in particular has a remarkable history of combining pulsing electronic beats and pounding industrial rhythms with ear-scraping riffs and throat-scarring shrieks.

Into this tangled tradition steps Autarkh, the new project from former Dodecahedron guitarist/composer Michel Nienhuis, whose debut album aims to build on that group’s short but impressive legacy – with all the untapped potential and weight of expectations that implies – while also further blurring the lines between the organic and the metallic, the animal and the artificial.

And while Form In Motion is neither the direct sequel to Kwintessens that some might have (erroneously) expected, nor the paradigm shift that it perhaps could/should have been, it is certainly one of the most unique and unorthodox albums I’ve heard so far this year, with a distinct voice and vibe all its own.