For those with a taste for the raw uncut flavour of death and doom, here are two CDs which compile a number of stray tracks from his catalogue – be they cassette contributions, split LPs, digital-only emanations or unreleased items. This format is a real winner for people like Clay Ruby or Maeror Tri, or indeed any such prolific noisesters who seem to leave a trail of dead scales wherever they go, like so many reptiles. Today’s CDs are both called The Totality of Death, except one is subtitled Alpha (COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR335CD) and the other Omega (CSR336CD), and the artworks are near-symmetrical mirrors of each other printed in different colours (created under Thomas’ Nullvoid alias); and for those who savour the esoteric gesture, there are plenty of runic inscriptions to convey the idea of “ritual” that seems so important in this context. Naturally, collectors and devotees will need to own both volumes, assuming they can endure this much nihilistic desolation in one sitting.

Besides the hideous groaning and churning sounds, the titles are laced with imagery sure to induce horror among the unwary – pagan rites, esoteric and supernatural symbols, anti-Christian sentiments, violence (those ‘Nine Glistening Daggers’ aren’t designed for use by a manicurist, lemme tell ya), and even hinting at a possible “lost” Tarot card with ‘Two Crescent Moons Embrace The Sun’. Of the two, you might find the Alpha set slightly more approachable as it has a few quiet passages, but that slow intoning voice – wrenched from the backwaters of Hades – is far from comforting. The Omega set is the one to pick if you want to spend 40 mins encased in a nightmarish coma; you can virtually feel your own body slowly decaying into corruption, as you listen.

As usual, my “strong meat” warning applies; approach with caution. On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for Ekelund purging himself of these negative tendencies in an artistic way; perhaps it’s arguably healthier than enforcing the suppressions of an Online Safety Act, as our government is currently doing here in the UK. (29/07/2024)

Shift’s music, though – and I can’t recall if I ever heard any before – is surprisingly approachable, at least if compared with your average “power electronics” album from Joe Shock-Value dressed in his black leather uniform and his table of effects pedals powering an irresponsibly loud amplifier feeding back at loud volume. I would broadly characterise Abandon as a series of intense, heavy drones that remain incredibly focussed and fixated on their goal, and as they proceed, the careful accretion and movement of additional layers is executed with a degree of skill and sleight of hand that even a contemporary electro-acoustic composer would envy. This is especially true of the very abstract cut ‘Nothing – No One’, some eight minutes of suffocating anonymity. Only Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who also happens to be of the Swedish persuasion, could be reckoned a match for Shift in terms of the unblinking stern drone and grim intent.

In the final analysis though, Shift still probably wants to align himself with the Industrial lineage, which may imply a flirtation with unwholesome subject matter and dark themes which are, thankfully, not foregrounded too much on Abandon. Then again, there’s the matter of Shift’s “logo” – at one time it seemed like every grim Industrial act had to have one of these geometric designs alongside their name, and the controversy came when they looked to military regalia for inspiration. Shift’s bleak monad, perhaps depicting seven pennants arranged in a circle, is unlikely to refer to European unification, methinks. There’s also the hideous vocal additions to the punishing last track ‘Armed, Disturbed, Hostile’, which continues for 19 merciless minutes with its grisly electronic growl, its doomy drumbeats, and a vile electric guitar that’s like a parody of all that’s good and enjoyable about heavy metal. Given that this track dominates about half of the total playing time, it’s probably the most reliable indicator of Shift’s inclinations and intentions. Gulp. From 30 May 2017.

Three lengthy tracks of desolate windswept gloom will reinforce this miserable view of life, and give you something to contemplate as you walk the long mile by yourself on a pathway to nowhere. Matter of fact, the album even supplies a visual roadmap for such an expedition, as can be seen on the cover art, and the opening track ‘The Wanderer’ gives more than enough clues as to what your next step should be. Unlike some wanderer from classical mythology, such as Diogenes seeking a man, the Wanderer of TenHornedBeast is a forlorn and despairing soul who meanders a lonely stricken world with his shoulders bent under a heavy burden. Then there’s ‘The Lamentation Of Their Women’, a vacant non-tune filled with world-weary sighs in the form of wispy synth blasts which pulsate their plaint across empty plains.

Lastly, ‘In Each Of Us A Secret Sorrow’ seems to contain in title the key to understanding TenHornedBeast’s philosophy of introverted, self-pitying melancholy. For nearly 24 minutes, the creator wills himself into this cold and friendless condition, completely denying the possibility of human contact, compassion, or charity. This strain of “cold ambient” music, and its miserabilist underpinnings, have I think a lengthy history as a sub-sub-genre of Black Metal, and it is evidently informed by the same anti-Christian anti-humanity sentiments; effectively the music is telling us we’re on our own, there is no hope, and no redemption. In short, the message is there is no God.

Press notes for this monumental downer don’t give us much in the way of hard facts about its realisation, although there are allusions to “discordant piano chords” and “shimmering blizzards of feedback”, and the writer likens the music to snow, frozen landscapes, and “bitter winds”. From 30th May 2017.

Deathward, To The Womb has a six-part structure which is somehow pleasing in its symmetry…you can imagine it working very well on the original vinyl or cassette…a sequence which is slightly marred by adding the bonus cut. As “doom” music goes, Ekelund’s brand is highly distinctive in an over-crowded field, and he never resorts to the heavy-handed clichés of feedback, plodding drums, and lower-register throaty growls. The six tracks crawl with morbidity and creeping pain, emerging in the form of threatening and deadly black drone music, alarming percussive blows, and hideous vocal emanations…as with many releases in this “genre”, the words “invocation” and “ritual” spring to mind, and the satanic symbols, mystical images and skulls confirm the malevolent nature of these unhealthy experiments. The press notes here don’t provide much in the way of factual data, but allude to obscure figures named Babalon and Frater T.O.P.A.N., as though we were all familiar with the doings of these mythical wraiths. On the other hand, after 20 minutes of listening, you’ll feel on first name terms with Belial, Leviathan, and other arch-fiends from Hades, so it’s clearly an effective chunk of darkness that does its job.

The murkiness continues with ‘I Remember When I Was God’, which eventually floats off the disc like a grim phantom after several programmed moments of silence. This piece is a new work recorded some three years after Deathward, and once again is intended as a ritualistic summoning of The Old Ones…they even performed it on the same day as an old pagan festival. It features a number of guest players, many of whom like Thomas are probably miserable loners who release their ultra-black doom records in monochrome sleeves which favour nihilistic imagery…there’s the Romanian Alone In The Hollow Garden; the Finn Antti Litmanen, appearing here as A.I.L.; the German death metal vocalist KzR; Michael Idehall, who has collaborated with Thomas and put out a few cassettes on his Belaten label; the Dutch composer Nyland II; and Æther, whose work on Edifice Of Nine Sauvastikas we have noted here. “To destroy and give life” was the avowed aim of these seven spooksters as they met by moonlight inside a charmed circle. The resultant piece is strong on atmosphere and terror, yet somehow not as purposeful as the solo Trepaneringsritualen concoctions, where the creator proceeds like a sorcerer or Magus wrapt in concentration, working without interruption to follow his diabolical aims. From 20 January 2017.

‘The Feast Of Saints Peter And Paul’ is a work that in title at least must be understood as evidence of the “eerie religious allusions” noted in the press release; it’s not quite as violent or aggressive as some of the other punch-fests on this CD, and even allows the listener some room to breath in amongst teeming blocks of steel noise…but once you do inhale you will find the air is actually poisoned smog from the chimneystacks of Hades. Buried in this ingenious layered mix of shapeless black noise, we hear the pale echoes (the ghost of a ghost) of a celestial choir singing mangled hymns, as if Burial Hex were striving to portray the utter annihilation of all religious endeavour, yet still mourning its demise, and attempting vainly to reconstruct an entire church from the fragments of a charred and broken icon. A very bitter-sweet 19-minutes of angsty despair, chillingly beautiful in its abject visions…this was the A side of From The Rites Of Lazarus, released in 2010 on the Italian Urashima label.

‘Armagiddion’ was also rescued from Italian vinyl, the 2009 release Bagirwa Hymn on Von Archives. This is even more subdued and atmospheric and with its ambient tones, guitar sketches and exploratory drones, it’s almost like a zero-gravity stroll around what’s left of the scorched globe after a nuclear holocaust…Ruby once again finds a strange beauty in the horrors of the void, staring intently into dark corners where few men dare to peep. The esoteric artwork for the cover is by long-standing collaborator Nathaniel Ritter. From 30 November 2016.

The title track is on Side B. This is slightly less horrifying than the dismalness of ‘Derive’, and in places one’s ears can make tenuous connections to more familiar tape-based experimental music, in the way that sounds are apparently processed and manipulated. Much effort is put intro creating a wonky, unnatural effect. Much distortion arises in the process, and futile meandering drones are the main output, drones which are highly abrasive and nasty in their intent. As with the A side, I sense a near-complete lack of humanity, as if DeRaadt’s plan were to efface every trace of anything recognisable from the finished product. This may all be part of a supreme effort to alienate the listener, leave us high and dry and thrown back on inner resources if we wish to survive this depressing onslaught of rubble, bad weather, and hostile machinery pounding away at the core of our being.

The cover art may continue some of these themes. The imagery is almost all abstract, with few concessions to printing a clearly identifiable image, or even allowing for simple clarity of shape. Murky reproduction creating shadows and fog further advances the notions of ambiguity and uncertainty. The front cover is a miniature art gallery from the imaginary museum of Russian Death Art from the 1920s. Inside is a collage of treated photo which may represent the aftermath of an unpleasant murder or suicide, with a barely-recognisable torso being dragged by the feet. None of this is especially brutal noise, but it is truly depressing, verging on the insufferable in its sullen opacity and determination to remain grim and impenetrable. From 14th March 2016.

Malevolent, turgid guitar art-rock from La Morte Young on their eponymous album (DYSMUSIE 002 / UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHERFUCKERS! UATWM 005), which we’ve had here lingering on the vinyl casements since 23rd December 2013. The band are a hideous amalgamation – given the music, one might say a Frankensteinian monstrosity – of three French bands, to wit Nappe, Talweg, and Sun Stabbed, all of them operating more or less in the area of grim guitar drone or Black Metal-ish diabolerie. Sun Stabbed from Grenoble are the only ones I’ve heard of, and I still reckon their album for Doubtful Sounds is worthy of your investigation. On these 2012 live recordings, the band literally crawl their across the first side, most of which is occupied by the long track ‘You Must Believe In Spring’, with a nauseating mix of over-amped guitars, indigestible feedback, ugly chord shapes, and drumming that belongs at the bottom of the ocean or inside a whale, so ponderous and slow it be. After that point, they receive an injection of adrenaline straight to the heart that enables them to perform the first track on the flip, a stormer which is eccentrically named after a jazz LP by Roland Kirk (all the track titles have their origins in jazz LPs, for some reason), and amounts to a lively assault on the forces of lethargy and torpor, the band springing into action like armoured warriors ready to battle the massed armies of anti-life. Thereafter they follow a course which leads them to the outright anguish of the closing track – called ‘Brotherhood Of Breath’, but there the resemblance to Chris McGregor’s pan-cultural jazz big-band aesthetic ends – where I seem to hear screaming vocals in the midst of an almighty and painful guitar roar. La Morte Young are explicitly paying homage to Michael Morley and Gate / The Dead C, a player now revered as an important innovator in this particular stream of slow and heavy formless and tuneless rock noise. They’ve even commissioned said Morley to provide the cover art, with its cosmic and hieratic flower-star shapes hinting at a distant cosmos, where (judging by the lumbering music) each planet in the solar system has a gravitational pull that exceeds a million Jupiters. I should add that La Morte Young don’t wallow in misery, and clearly use this form of music to purge themselves of despair. As such, it’s potentially a very healthy listen. It’s also distinctly European somewhere, just ever so slightly intellectualised and over-thought, regardless of how many Sonic Youth namechecks the label may make on their behalf. Not bad at all. A co-production between two labels, with press notes provided by the curiously-named Merzbo-Derek. Has since been reissued on cassette by Ba Da Bing! in the US.

For an album titled “Silence”, this recording turns out to have plenty to say over some 49 minutes. This is atmospheric and creepy black metal from Russian duo Echo of Emptiness. It can be an ideal record to play late at night if you’re in the mood: it has a very dark and intimate feel and you can easily think yourself the only human existing on this tiny planet as you listen to this music of melancholy and loneliness. The band’s sound is distinctive: the guitars seem to have a very compressed shrill and steel tone almost reminiscent of very reedy woodwind instruments even when playing tremolo. The texture of the music is furry and crispy at the same time. The vocals are a mix of grim BM style and clean-toned and the members sing in English.

The album consists of seven tracks but the ones that will be of most interest are tracks 2 to 6 as these are a mix of black metal and ambient. The other tracks are purely ambient tone pieces: wintry, cold and minimal, with no more than a bass melody or ominous sub-bass drone being audible, they perhaps take up more space on the album than listeners might like but I suppose their length is in keeping with the album’s themes of hopelessness, depression and shuffling off the mortal coil.

While they have a good sound, the black metal tracks tend towards slow and plodding in pace. There’s not much energy in the songs and for a good part of the album they drift in the grey zone between comatose and barely sitting up. A big part of the problem is the limp drumming, thin and soft in sound and not featuring much variety in playing, let alone power and speed. The vocals carry all the emotion and anguish and veer dangerously close to melodramatic hysteria. Songs like “Melancholy” resemble mini-operas in the way the voices alternate between BM and clear, as though a conversation in a dark cave is in progress. The band’s potential is revealed on “Exhausted by Life” when at long last the music speeds up but even here this has the unfortunate effect of revealing how much EoE misses out on not having a strong, focused and driving rhythm section.

I realise the album aims to recreate the feeling of suicidal depression, the lack of energy and motivation that accompanies it, and the fragmentation of identity but EoE have a lot of work to do to convince us listeners that their work is worthy of our time. The guys have atmosphere down pat and a good sound, and they show ability in experimenting with sound and mood. They need to work on developing a more powerful sound with forceful percussion that pushes the rest of the music and inspires them to create and play urgent music with a large range of emotional expression.

I don’t get much sense of the angst and pain of living with depression, and the torment it causes to sufferers. That is something the album should have tried to capture.

Contact: Depressive Illusions Records

Brander’s an able painter as shown by the symbolist cover art [3. It depicts a cathedral blighted by a witch in the guise of a black spider with multiple arms.] he produced for Verfver‘s tape which is Animi / Animus (NPR24). A solo tape by Johan Gustafsson who is also associated with Tsukimono, Blessings, and Scraps of Tape. We like him well as Tsukimono, under which name he produced the memorable title ‘Moan Jar’ for a compilation. This tape doesn’t quite produce the desired chilling / pessimistic / bleak visions however. Distortion and lo-fi recording are the guiding lights behind this scrapbook of musical episodes, pages and cuttings torn from the eyes and mind of a restless soul. Verfver does manage some pleasing moments in this eclectic array of ambient, drones, tunes, piano fugues, and rhythmic avant-rock tunes, but there is too often a deficiency of conviction or weight behind his musical utterances. I’m sure there is a way to turn these wispy tones into the sort of plangent and heartfelt melancholic wails to which he aspires. He has certainly managed as much in his Tsukimono guise.

Lastly we have Crystal Crypt‘s II (NPR21). Crystal Crypt is another alias for Johannes Brander, and again the package is adorned with clippings from National Geographic magazine to form the collage cover art. The titles here certainly indicate a more “cosmic” Pink Floyd type outlook on man’s existence, with ‘Beyond’, ‘Worlds Apart’ and ‘Future Past’ pointing to his aspirations to journey into the metaphysical zones. Realised I think mostly with an electric guitar, feedback and an echo unit, though there is also percussion and other things going on. Works best when it wallows in maddening repetition and remorseless exploration of raw guitar tones. The music he makes here can also appear lonely and isolated, so perhaps at one level these tunes and their ponderous titles are metaphors for an inability to communicate [4. At times the music put me in mind of another Göteborg depressive, Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, who likewise despairs of making himself understood by the rest of humanity. In that instance the creator suffers from borderline personality disorder.]. Although still formless, woolly and self-indulgent in places, this cloudy and clanging music does have the same sort of “Roman wilderness of pain” vibe as the Skogar tape, a mental state which Brander would do well to cultivate and explore even more fearlessly on future experiments with his psychological axe. A 2011 recording which the creator wishes to associate with ‘Heart of Darkness’, the Conrad novel which was one of the texts which fed into Apocalypse Now, still the movie of choice for all dark-hearted outcasts and pariahs of society. I often think a lot of these musicians wish they could remake the soundtrack for this film, and this tape may represent another entry in that ongoing catalogue.

I found more substance for my shredded eardrums on the self-titled “double-album” (LF012) released by Menschenfleisch, two long cassettes of ugly grind produced by the trio of Anton Maiof, Greg Godwin and Nick Talbot. Hot weather, alcohol, sweat and vomit all seem to have played a part in the realisation of these four scorching sides of abrasive electrical sewage, where the pumping devices are working overtime to dredge foul substances up from below the surface of the earth and numerous crystal radio sets are tuned to inhuman stations on planet Mars that are fit to disrupt clear thinking. Fuzz, distortion, shrieks and feedback are clogged together in such thick clumps it’s a wonder they were able to breath in that foetid swamp of a studio. However, it’s not a totally remorseless set, as the simpatico trio have found inventive ways to give each other space to unleash their respective table-top horrors, and the music offers strong dynamics while still remaining true to the chosen aesthetic of the coarse and stinky. Ian Watson (Phantomhead Recordings) drew the visceral cover art of a flayed man stoically accepting his intolerable situation; a visual motif which has been inseparable, it seems, from industrial and noise records since about 1980 onwards.

Greg Godwin (who also happens to run this excellent label with its tiny hard-to-get editions) also records as dsic, whose corrosive noise records have never failed to elicit enjoyment in this writer’s neural capacitors. His Roman Birdhouse (LF016) is a mini-CDR packed with five short stabs from his acid-filled fountain pen, and the hyperactive and tuneless noise delivers such weight and volume that it’s hard to conceive these grumbling beasts were put together inside a computer. Maybe they weren’t, and instead he uses his laptop in magical ways to subdue supernatural forces (semi-human imps and demons) which beset him as he seals himself inside his private performance space to realise these growly scrawls. There’s a plausible theory about prehistoric cave paintings that suggests they could have been executed by artists retreating into a private, visual world of their own and conjuring visions; which is why many of them are located in very hard-to-reach places, such as at the back of a narrow cave. On recordings like these, dsic resembles a modern cave painter wedged in just such a tight space. Will he emerge alive?

Similar sympathies are elicited by the self-titled CDR by Sixteen Fingers (LF014), which exists in an edition of 20 copies only, and is deliberately intended as a prime example of irredeemably hopeless electronic despair. Some tracks are angry and fragmented, like a blind and infuriated teenager smashing his head into a television set, but my favourite tracks are those which exactly resemble the thought processes of chronic desperation, all interiority and inevitability, where sheer futility is all that can be gathered in one’s mental fingertips as you feel your very brain unweaving itself like rotted fibres. Whoever made this ultra-edgy record is seriously up against the barriers; proof that noise like this can be truly therapeutic if left in the right hands. Let’s hope the creator exorcised at least some of his two thousand inner demons. An essential blast of true mental sickness!

Gnar Hest is Matt Loveridge, crediting himself with synths, programming and “muck”, always an essential ingredient in the compositional process. His Tracts On How Severe I Welcome Nonexistence As Harsh As Is (LF 017) is another mini CDR, and oddly enough turns out to be the most “melodic” of this batch. Sequenced layers, drones, rhythmical throbbing and restless knob-twiddling coalesce for twenty minutes to create a very thick wodge of analogue electronic meat, which Gnar Hest slices into huge hefts with his sword while ladling heavy gravy from his free hand into your slop bowl. I’m sure it wasn’t his intention, but this comes across as a kind of wonky and drunken Rick Wakeman record, or some forgotten out-take from the Mo Wax vaults fed through a fourth-dimensional blender. The creator is apparently quite young and fresh-faced and the label is touting this record, partly tongue-in-cheek, as a species of avant-garde underground dance music. Expect to see a heavy 12-inch slab from Gnar Hest in BM Soho any day now.