LIGHT – ‘LIGHT DISCOGRAPHY’
When the black doom duo Light originally released it’s three full-length albums, they were put out in tiny print runs that were only available from a couple of select sources and went out of print almost instantly. I remember seeing them listed over at Aquarius Records on their website and wanted to pick them up based on the amazing things that the guys at AQ were saying about ’em, but by that point they were already sold out. It would be a while before I would finally hear these three albums, but once I did, I was immediately hooked by the strange, blurred-out sound that Light created, completely sucked in to a twilight world via the bands phantasmal bedroom blackdoom. I listed to all three albums over and over, cranking them up and filling the office with the heavy waves of droning amp hiss and plaintive chords and anguished vocalizations, and realizing that this wasn’t quite like anything else I’d heard before. Light’s music obviously had it’s roots entrenched in black metal of the most abject sort, as well as the more extreme variations of doom metal, but there’s a delicate quality to this that strips away the metallic aspects and turns it into something else. The one reference point that seems most apt to me and that I keep jotting down when trying to describe this is that listening to Light is a bit like hearing a kind of stentorian blackdoom misery being filtered through the autumnal chill of Codeine’s The White Birch. If that notion sounds at all appealing to you, then you need to hear this stuff. First released on their own in tiny self-released editions, all three of Light’s full length discs are gathered together here for this new reissue on the Crucial Blaze imprint. The three discs are collected in a dvd-style case with full color artwork, and come with a booklet of abstract photography, an insert card, and a set of four full color 1″ badges. This collection has been released in an edition of two hundred hand-numbered copies.
NEKRASOV – ‘EVER PRESENT’ 2xCD/ARTZINE
That Australian black metal/industrial artist Nekrasov incorporates the aesthetics of harsh noise into his miniature holocausts of hellish speakershred isn’t news to anyone who has been following his body of work over the past few years. From the beginning, Nekrasov’s mechanized black blasts and sprawling abyssal soundscapes have been infested with the most caustic forms of electronic abuse and frequency terror. But starting with the extremely limited disc In Solitude And Darkness, The Last Step Is Made that came out on Void Séance last year, Nekrasov has now also started to work with the rigid aesthetic of the “wall”, sculpting brutal, immersive infernos of extreme static noise that are reminiscent of Vomir. The mindset is certainly similar; going for extremely long unbroken tracks of churning high density distortion that remains unrelenting and unchanging, Nekrasov’s efforts in HNW drag me down into the same sort of depressed, lightless Zen state that the French master is so adept at invoking. This is no small feat. In Solitude was a successful first effort in the field of HNW from the artist, and now follows that with a new two-disc set called The Ever-Present that we have issued on our Crucial Blaze sub-label. This set offers more massive black walls of rushing static noise, with two half hour long pieces on the first disc, and a single monolithic track on the second disc that stretches out for over an hour. Each of these tracks is formed from varied frequency levels and different approaches to texture, shifting in tone and extremity as the listener moves from one track to the next, but it all flows together rather seamlessly as an exercise in intense, super heavy trance-blast. In addition, deep listening reveals myriad sonic events and nuked drones that swarm deep within the maelstrom of The Ever-Present, and the monolithic “III” in particular ventures into more detailed regions of noise where fragments of grinding rhythmic clank, smoldering static riffs, and howling blackened melodies can be heard buried underneath the roaring inferno.
RECLUSA – ‘ANTI-CONSCIENCE’ CD/ARTZINE
A while back, I was turned on to the band Diseased Oblivion by way of their split with Sewer Goddess, and was impressed with the filthy, fucked-up deathdoom that made up their side of that split. While looking into their other releases, I found out that one of the members of the band also had another project, this one called Reclusa, which had released a bunch of tapes on a variety of tiny underground imprints. I checked out Reclusa, and was floored by how ridiculously heavy and disgusting the music was; it didn’t even sound like metal to me, but inhabited another realm of twisted, abstract heaviness closer to industrial noise, while utilizing massive down tuned riffs and elements of death metal that were left to putrefy into noxious formless slime. Reclusa mixed together filthy sub-Godflesh / (early) Pitch Shifter machine pummel, putrescent guttural vocal-fumes, ultra bleak dark ambience, weird bits of diseased dub, deformed deathdoom, blasts of orchestral terror, & murky industrial noisescapes, and the result is hopeless, terminally nihilistic ugliness that skulks in a dark corner somewhere in between the likes of Black Mayonnaise, The Human Quena Orchestra, Aderlating, and the nastiest strains of underground gorenoise. Of course, this led to my wanting to get Reclusa on our Crucial Blaze series. And here it is, a new full length disc called The Anticonscience that offers a seventy-seven minute descent into vile, absurdly heavy low-fi mechanized horror from this cult Ohio outfit. It’s like a doomdeath album being played at half speed while someone splices in Throbbing Gristle and Wolf Eyes. Or what Dead World or early Pitchshifter might have sounded like if they had collaborated with one of the uglier denizens of the Cold Meat label. Either way, Reclusa pulls back thick, heavy curtains of dead flesh to reveal a seething, rotting world of abject horror within these suffocating, oppressive soundscapes. Released in a limited hand-numbered edition of two hundred copies, The Anticonscience comes with a twenty-page chapbook of nightmarish artwork and writing, a vinyl sticker, and 1″ badge.
Following the recent release on Aguirre Records, “Illusion Circles”, comes “Infinite Mind”. This new release from U.K. based musician and visual artist James R. Moore, features two long-form tracks of blissed out driving new age excursions fueled by synthesizers. More focused meditative and mind relaxation tones sure to open those realms infinitely inside your mind. Moore is also behind Black Mountain Transmitter, who released the great notable “Theory & Practice” cassette..
“The Process” is a series that looks at what went into the making of the WHITE HILLS album “H-p1”. Other releases in the process series include the “Measured Engery” 45 on the Irish label Trensmat, a split LP with Farflung on Cobraside Records, and a series of nine abstract paintings by Dave W. that were created during the mixing of the album. If you’ve managed to catch White Hills lately you know they’re capable of some epic splrawling jams and this tape collects 2 of those solid work-outs. I have yet to hear the new album, but if this is any indication of the solid performing that will be on it, it’ll be top-notch!
