LISTMANIA 2024: A LIST OF LICORICE ALL SORTS / SPONGIFORM LONG FORMS – AN EDGING OF MUSIC EXPERIENCED AND AN (KIND OF) UNRANKED LIST OF 2

 LISTMANIA 2024  No Responses »
Dec 312024
 

(It’s fitting that the last installment in our main LISTMANIA series comes from one of our newest contributors, who made his first NCS appearance in early February of this year. Of course, this being Vizzah Harri (born in South Africa, now living in Vietnam), this isn’t a conventional list, but more like an ongoing diary of the year, which isn’t musically limited to metal nor even limited to music, though it begins with reflections from the present.)

It’s been a year of bi-polarities and absurdism. The Onion bought Infowars and Vice started writing Onion articles. The level of fakery doesn’t even matter anymore because it seems like reality has itself been augmented into a surreal hellscape. It takes but one lie to fool one man or a thousand for a lifetime; it is immeasurable how hard it is to turn back that lie. Randi and his partner once tried to prove how easy it is to fool people, and they succeeded but proved unknowingly that people didn’t want to know the truth in the end, they wanted to remain suspended in fantasy. The cognitive dissonance was too tough to reconcile.

 In brighter news, there will be new music from our favorite caterpillars in öOoOoOoOoOo and the teaser they dropped way back on April 1st is alluring as fuck: Continue reading »

BEDSORE: “DREAMING THE STRIFE FOR LOVE”

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Dec 302024
 

(Our South Africa-born, Vietnam-resident, contributor Vizzah Harri wrote the following fascinating essay. It includes a distinctive review of Bedsore‘s new album, but also uses it as a springboard to other connections and reflections.)

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” –Ursula K. Le Guin

“This means that every person brings themselves to every piece of art. It means we all experience a different piece of art. Each time we return to a story we are creating a different story. Rereading is good actually.” – saxifraga-x-urbium (from Tumblr)

If you didn’t know anything about this album prior to clicking on this article and did not want to go into it entirely blind, then I can attempt to sum it up for you sonically in 34 words: This band’s waking dream of an album is like Hail Spirit Noir alchemized with giallo; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; the most serene Italian chamber orchestra; and a few doses of the holy trinity of proggy-death in Skeptic, Cynic, and Atheist. Continue reading »

FINITE BUT SACCHARINE — GLASS BEAMS, VAELRAVYN, JEAN MARAIS, SKALLABRAK, TUMBLEWEED DEALER, DAX RIGGS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Dec 182024
 

(Our South Africa-born but Vietnam-resident NCS contributor Vizzah Harri decided to wade into a batch of seriously ear-worming music that generally isn’t as harsh on the ears as much of what we, and he, typically traffic in. We hope you’ll still enjoy what he presents here, as well as the enthusiastic presentation.)

If you follow this page diligently and try keeping up with each post and release, you’ll have more diotic islands of dreams at your disposal than the hours you delude yourself of having woken. Here are 6 new(ish) offerings of divergent persuasions.

I’ve got an authentically fiendish cornucopia of un-listened content in my meta saved folder as well as other bits I haven’t gotten even a second’s worth of ear-time towards because for a long time the only solace I had was the receding sound of foam expanding in the acoustic meatus neighboring my eardrums. Earplugs to drown out the near-constant barrage of construction, horns from flower delivery drivers, and the steel factory next door that works odd hours of the night. I moved recently though, and plugging in the external hard drive full of ‘golden oldies’ has really helped. As well as an insane YouTube wormhole researching a highly acclaimed album from them retrogressive prog ‘upstarts’ of death that I’m yet to finish writing. Continue reading »

PUTRID VOMIT CHRIST: “PERPETUAL INTERCOURSE”

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Nov 272024
 

(What follows is our Vietnam-based contributor Vizzah Harri‘s distinctive review of a distinctive new demo by the Vietnamese death/doom band Putrid Vomit Christ, which will be out in December on the House of Ygra and Godz Ov War labels.)

“The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life’s intimacy does not reveal its dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out.”
― Georges Bataille

Doom and its iterations mongrelized with the wails of the departed are not my usual fare, but I gave a demo a spin that might be of interest to death-doom adherents.

If you stare in the mirror long enough and repeat phrasal ministrations of deification, you might be able to channel some putridity; that’s if you practice your guitar and get some friends who know their shit to join your band. Continue reading »

A TRIP ON THE WAYBACK MACHINE: SIX MORE ALBUMS FROM EARLIER THIS YEAR YOU PROBABLY MISSED

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 062024
 

(After a bit of a break our Vietnam-based writer Vizzah Harri returns to our miserable halls with reviews of six albums that struck some chords in his head, and may have damaged them.)

On the 9th of October ominous news surfaced that a group of hackers decided to lay siege to an internet institution that can generally be considered as a universal good. It was universally seen as a dick move. The Internet Archive is a library of audio, visual and textual resources as well as old website archiving with the mission of providing a library with omniversal access to all knowledge.

Flummoxed at the stupidity, because 99.9% of hackers love this site, and unable to use the Wayback Machine (it is back up now so this link is not compromised as of this writing), I simply had to take a hard stare at my ‘Catching Up’ list. October has been another stacked month for releases and November still has some serious offerings before the end-of-year bonanza. The list of what we weren’t able to get to is not always a question about quality or subjective – or even objective – partiality, it’s the sheer volume of content out there.

With the year almost over, I took it upon myself to go on the ‘way back machine of metal’ and jump back 282 days to January 26th. On its own an insane day for metal releases, two of the releases below fell on that same day. Continue reading »

FIENDS OF EASTERN THEATERS — PART 2 (SHORTER FORMS)

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Oct 042024
 

(Following up on yesterday’s Part 1, today our Vietnam-based contributor Vizzah Harri brings us Part 2 of an article focused on Asian bands, narrating the effect of four EPs released this year.)

Having succeeded in subverting the norms with not-so-subtle subterfuge in an article containing very little metal in recent weeks – a tactic learned from Waylander of David Gemmell’s fantasy was that of hiding in plain sight — here we have four offerings that are connected to Part 1 geographically, but also aesthetically, albeit genre-wise we’re dealing with offerings of a more mongrelized persuasion. Anything suffixed with ‘core’ is a curse word in some circles, I prefer to spread the mycelium- and spongiform-afflicted ear holes of mine in myriad directions. Continue reading »

FIENDS OF EASTERN THEATERS – PART 1 (OBSCURIAL / FECUNDATION)

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 032024
 

(Our Vietnam-resident writer Vizzah Harri has prepared a two-part sequence of reviews focused on albums released this year by Asian bands, and this is Part 1.)

A defenestration, crashing through a hearse straight into the coffin. Curtains augured in, joining the choir invisible. A sewer-slide into the glue factory. A first-class ticket out of corporeality to meet sleep’s cousin. Off the hooks and un-alived, a veritable shuffle off this mortal coil via toaster bath. And if that overbearing slew of gammon-appendaged analogies didn’t make it clear, we’re here for death served with a touch of supremacy. Continue reading »

NEBULOUS OBFUSCATION OF ESSENCE (RELEASES THAT STRAIN CATEGORIZING)

 Album Reviews, Off Topic  No Responses »
Sep 192024
 

(We will let our Vietnam-based writer Vizzah Harri explain in his own words what he did in selecting the records reviewed in the following article, and why they are here now.)

What follows are other obscurities and arcane esoteric mysteries of the abstruse. If a more redundant sentence exists as title, I’m obviously ignorant of its existence. It’s almost October, I know, but my brain is still stuck in the heretofore, so the next few writeups will contain releases that happened at the end of the year of the rabbit (cat in Vietnam) and the beginning of the year of the dragon (earlier in 2024).

In signs of the times, it is easy to become but a whisper of grace wrapped in a facade of putrescence in the absolute cacophony and unceasing mass of new sounds. In this era of mass consumption, it is the underground at times where some of the truest art hides. Especially of the underground metal kind if you are so inclined. Only one of the releases to follow can be described as metal, though they all dabble in extremities in different senses. Continue reading »

WANDERING INTO BLACKENED REACHES — 4 CRITICAL BLACK METAL ALBUMS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 172024
 

(In this article our Vietnam-based contributor Vizzah Harri brings us four reviews of four unusual albums from blackened realms — albums created by Skeletal Augury, Cemetery Trip, Conifère, and Xw​î​n.)

The following 4 albums have been on my to-do list for months. You won’t find a slew of reviews on their Bandcamp pages sharing the praises from bigger media outlets. I couldn’t even find many reviews of the albums themselves out there. And partially this could be because of it being one hell of a year for black metal, but isn’t that just every year?

If you like black metal, you’re bound to love at least one of what I’m sharing with you today. The only order here is chronological because I don’t have a favorite amongst them and their styles diverge violently. There were more albums which I will hopefully be able to get to soon, but 4 is a nice number for its tetraphobic propensities in East Asia. The number 4, you see, signifies shaking hands with Elvis (I only learned that slang phrase for death today). Continue reading »

VULVODYNIA: “ENTABENI”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 042024
 

(Our distinctive contributor, the South Africa born and Vietnam resident Vizzah Harri, is back at NCS with his review of a new album by the South African death metal band Vulvodynia, which was released in July of this year by Unique Leader Records.)

Click play with caution, because there is a real danger that your attention might be shanghaied for a full forty-one minutes and 8 seconds, the runtime for Entabeni, Vulvodynia’s fifth, released by Unique Leader Records (that’s if you’re not counting 2015’s Finis Omnium Ignorantiam ‘EP’ which clocked in over 34 minutes). Continue reading »

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