Aug 022024
 

Images courtesy of Laura McCullagh and Slam Dank Productions

(We’re very pleased to present our contributor Vizzah Harri‘s interview of Lille Gruber from Defeated Sanity, with apologies to both of them for our delay in publishing it.)

Defeated Sanity are a jazz ensemble hiding in plain sight as a brutal tech-death band. At this writing they’re currently on their Final Impetus tour to bring to audiences far and wide one more experience of their 2020 opus, The Sanguinary Impetus. Their recent show in Cape Town, South Africa was reviewed here.

It’s certainly not easy to make time on a tour for pesky questions from a sometimes-contributor to a music blog, but Lille Gruber, drummer, songwriter, and founder of Defeated Sanity, took precious time out of his busy schedule to entertain my queries.

For those who don’t know or grew up under a rock like me, Lille Gruber started playing and growling from a really young age. Starting the band with his brother Jonas Gruber and their dad, the late Wolfgang Teske (R.I.P. 2010), it was like growing up with a literal Amadeus as a father.

With family names basically soothsaying where they’d end up seeing as the etymologies date back to people who lived in a hollow… or pit (Gruber), and to console/comfort (Teske); well, they’ve been comforting pit-dwellers since 1993 and aren’t we all the richer for it? Continue reading »

Aug 012024
 

(Our contributor Vizzah Harri has provided us and you the following interview that he conducted.)

We contacted the founder of Nächtlich and owner of Vinland Corpse records, the artist known as Ukeparaave Enviavuasan, in order to shed more light on their latest album Exaltation of Evil, which was reviewed at NCS here. (They’re also involved with quite a few other projects, Thallid, Black Kruud, Bloody Winds, Dibikimitig, Dobhar Chú, Dolmen Shrine, Eerified Catacomb, Reliquary Ash, Malphas). Continue reading »

Jul 172024
 

(Our contributor Vizzah Harri lives and works in Vietnam but is a native of South Africa, and on a recent return there he caught a great show in Cape Town featuring the bands named above. He sent us the following lively report, adorned by photos courtesy of Laura McCullagh and Slam Dank Productions.)

June 2022, intermittent light beams get blasted from the Oort cloud. 2 lightyears from Earth. In June this year the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in Sutherland receives a message from outer space. Weirdly enough, instead of the technosignatures and quantum communication techniques that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has prepared for, it was in morse code:

Lucien Rudaux – Sur les Autres Mondes (defiled by adding morse digitally)

It immediately got sent to the SAAO headquarters in the suburb of… Observatory, Cape Town. Once deciphered it baffled astronomers the world over: Continue reading »

Jun 242024
 

(Vizzah Harri wrote what follows below. It’s best that we not spoil it by attempting any further introductory words.)

Nearly 3 months have passed since Black Tides has been released. So many things in life are timebound; news, they say, needs to be relevant, timely and fresh. Nothing refreshes more than a jump into the ocean, or smelling the salty morning breeze, I mean, 3am is morning, right?

If you don’t mind, we’re going to take a trip back in time, because that’s exactly what Kólga’s sound implores us to do. And like the evening news after an emergency, it’s best to wait until the stylus revolts unto the dead wax. Continue reading »

Jun 142024
 


(Our contributor Vizzah Harri has discovered California-based Bloody Keep and their debut album released by Grime Stone Records in January of this year. He wishes to share with you his considerable enthusiasm for it today. Read on….)

You must be a selenite (inhabitant of the Moon) at this point in time to not realize that black metal is probably the kind of metal that, if not incumbent to the highest frequency, probably has the best base for coagulation and experimentation with any other genre.

Grime Stone Records have a penchant for the odd and strange and there are those who would prefer their murky darkness unspoiled with the invasion of even the faintest light (or chiptune for that matter, click on the ‘strange’ link above to take a trip down a rabbit hole you might never have had the chance to know existed). With Bloody Keep we find abstractions of the acrid and abrasive type yet subscribed purely to that which is animistic, and efficacious in its effulgence.

These acolytes of the black arts exist to zapruder the flow of that what is deemed the norm. Wormscored, engaging, fertile with ideas, and glimmering with lustral exuberance. From the bleak and near comical cover to that which can be deemed garish musically. Aberrant to the abhorrent, recalcitrant to such non-divergence. Continue reading »

Jun 112024
 

(We present Vizzah Harri‘s review of the latest album by Toronto-based Nächtlich, which was released last month by Dreadful Lust Productions.)

Nächtlich have been around for a while now, inflicting a raw, vile and infernal brand of black metal on Canadian shores since their self-titled EP in 2017. Their discography is pretty extensive already and boasts no less than 3 demos, the same number in EP’s, ten splits with various other dealers of raw black, and on May 10th this year they released their third full-length, Exaltation of Evil. Continue reading »

May 302024
 

(Our Hanoi-based contributor Vizzah Harri prepared the following review and recommendation of the latest album by Tennessee-based black metal band Saidan, which was released about a week ago.)

Realizing that my writeups are overlong in this age of mass-consumption and shortening attention spans, I attempted writing with a number in mind. I’m a simple soul, so I went for 666 words on an album worthy of a master’s thesis.

Continue reading »

May 082024
 

(Today we present the second part of an interview by Hanoi-based NCS contributor Vizzah Harri with Nguyễn Tấn Đạt, aka Nattsvärd, from the Vietnamese black metal band Imperatus. You can find Part 1 of the interview here, and Harri‘s review of the debut Imperatus album At the Mercy of the Wind here.)

This is the second instalment of an interview with Nattsvärd from Imperatus. Part 1 focused on their origins, inspiration for their sound, as well as the technical facets of recording, whereas Part 2 focuses more on lyrics, writing/composition, as well as some thoughts on the scene and what the future holds.

******

You used a quote from Anthony Burgess — “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.” Which reminded me a lot of the Avenged Sevenfold song Bat Country (I was today years old when I realized this is a quote from none other than Dr. Seuss haha): “He who makes a beast out of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man”. Together with the cover art and the sound clips, what was the feel you were going for conceptually?

Great insight and connection! I will never shy away from the fact that Avenged Sevenfold was my gateway band to metal music haha. And the said quotes do share a resemblance. Continue reading »

May 072024
 

(Today we present Part 1 of an interview by our Hanoi-based contributor Vizzah Harri with Nattsvärd from the Vietnamese black metal band Imperatus. Part 2 will follow tomorrow.)

Imperatus is the latest black metal act hailing from Hanoi, Vietnam. Their debut album that we reviewed here can be described as nothing other than a piece of music that commanded my attention from the moment the first chords struck.

I had the privilege of meeting with Nguyễn Tấn Đạt, aka Nattsvärd, to discuss their album, At the Mercy of the Wind, and this first part of the interview lights upon their beginnings, influences and the technical aspects of the recording project. Continue reading »

Apr 242024
 

(Our Hanoi-based contributor Vizzah Harri wrote the following extensive and extremely enthusiastic review of the debut album from the Vietnamese black metal band Imperatus, which was released last month. This will be followed in the near future by a two-part interview.)

Imperatus means Order or Command (‘imperiously’ comes from the Latin word imperare, which means “to command.” Other words from this same root include empire, emperor, imperial, and imperative.) In order to kick off this faux-imperious review of a band that I believe will command your attention to the max, one might be allowed to err on the side of believing that this could be the jumpstart to a new empirical anomaly not to be fucked with. Emperor’s debut has always been slated as one of the top first albums ever released and they are mentioned for a reason (aural affinity). Just like Imperatus giving recognition to a sound reminiscent of their childhood, it is this listener’s conviction that the riffs found in this here disc be epically imperial. Continue reading »