AN NCS INTERVIEW: VOIDOATH

 Interviews  No Responses »
Oct 062022
 

(Costa Rica’s VoidOath have recently released an album inspired by John Carpenter‘s “The Thing“, and the music is a match for its terrifying concept — deeply unsettling, but so well-made that it’s relentlessly immersive. And today Comrade Aleks has brought us an interview with the band that reveals further insights into their history, their conception of the music, and what may come next.)

Did you see the artwork of VoidOath’s album Ascension Beyond Kokytus? Something familiar, isn’t it? John Carpenter’s The Thing is a cult movie, there’s no doubt, but I don’t remember a band who would build an entire album around this story. Now we have VoidOath and this world seems to be a little bit better place.

VoidOath was founded in San José, Costa Rica four years ago by Allan Salas (bass), Gabriel Ortiz (drums), Jose Rodríguez (guitars), and Christopher G. De Haan (guitars, vocals). Three of them played in different local bands, so VoidOath’s first EP Illumination Through Necromancy was recorded pretty fast, and they had 32 minutes of sludge doom madness ready in 2020.

I don’t know if this release helped the band to spread the word effectively, but the Irish label Cursed Monk Records noticed them and Ascension Beyond Kokytus was released on the 28th of September, preceded by the album premiere and review here at NCS. I think it was Jose with whom we spoke about The Thing, metal, and the underground of Costa Rica.

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AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VOIDOATH — “ASCENSION BEYOND KOKYTUS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Sep 262022
 

Some fans of extreme music are also fans of interesting album concepts and well-written lyrics, perhaps because such things are so few and far between in the great and continuing flood of new releases, like finding a scattering of diamonds in your sock drawer. Other fans could really care less about that, focusing instead on the music and the vocals (where the words are rarely decipherable anyway). But today we’re going to begin with concept and words, and perhaps you’ll soon understand why.

The inspiration for Ascension Beyond Kokytus, the debut album by the Costa Rican band VoidOath, was deeply rooted in the lore created by John W. Campbell Jr. through his 1938 science fiction novella Who goes there? and the novel-length version of that story, Frozen Hell, which was discovered and published after Campbell‘s death, as well as the 1982 film The Thing, John Carpenter’s classic adaptation/remake of the Campbell story. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: ANOPHELI, CIRCLE OF SIGHS, DRAUGABLIKK, HYPERDONTIA, INCANTATION, JUPITERIAN, KATASTAH, OTTONE PESANTE, SIEGE COLUMN, VOIDOATH

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jun 262020
 

 

On Sunday I mentioned that I had a big block of time over the weekend that I was able to spend listening to new music. Almost everything I’ve selected for the following set of recommendations came out of that listening session. I resisted the impulse to replace a lot of those selections with things that came out this week, but I did add three of the tracks that surfaced during this week. Hopefully I’ll get to more of those in tomorrow’s round-up. The music today is presented in alphabetical order by band name.

ANOPHELI (U.S.)

I’m starting with something that’s not entirely new. It’s a debut album by Anopheli from Oakland, California (and other places), that was originally released in 2o15 (and I wrote about it here at that time). But the band had the album re-mastered by the same man who mastered the original release — the veteran producer Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden. He explained the changes: “”Things to listen for. It’s less overloaded and everything is more articulate. The overall low end is deeper, the high end is clearer. The drums snap better and interfere less with the other instruments.” Continue reading »