Tagged: folk

Fyodor’s Wild Years

A real one-of-a-kind record is Russian Canon (FROZEN LIGHT FZL 037), a record credited to Fake Cats Project, a trio featuring Kirill Makushin, Igor Levshin, and Alexei Borisov, which they only started in 2015 yet they’re already produced four records, of which this is one. Can’t find out much about the project or the band, although Alexei Borisov is well known and respected on these pages, and is probably my favourite avant-garde Russian musician (along with Kurt Liedwart and Ilia Belorukov).

Russian Canon is a bizarre suite of songs and instrumentals which may amount to an opera, a song cycle, a parodic comment on modern urban society, or simply a series of surreal poems set to music. All is sung (and lyrics printed) in Russian, so I’m at a bit of a loss, but at least the titles are printed in English. You might be able to piece together a scenario from titles like ‘Falcon Theme’, ‘Clouds Of My Memory’, and ‘A Kitten Looks At Soldier’s Eyes’, but it’d be a pretty wild and hairy screenplay that you’d be submitting to your editor. The music is kind of all over the place too. I can discern tunes and ditties that might be Russian folk songs (a wild guess though; the accordion backing is my one and only clue here) and likewise songs that more resemble the sort of proletariat anthems that appear in my worst nightmares when I’m inventing newsreel footage from the days of Kruschev and Sputnik and screening these buy kamagra online next day delivery imaginary movies in my brain. Particularly the opening blast, ‘Everything Is Fine’, a fractured every-which-way composition whose waywardness makes it perfectly clear that whatever else is going on, everything is not fine. But that’s just my warped imagination.

The trio also play electronic synth drone tunes; a very distorted form of easy-listening jazz with the help of guest trumpeter Konstantin Sukhan, acting as the reverse Herb Alpert in this context; broken, minimal post-punk songs; and even on one track a song built on a famous Erik Satie tune, so that’s their classical music credentials also checking in for duty. Fake Cats Project perform in all these styles effortlessly, and are not attempting a mannered pastiche…and they play with utter conviction, maintaining a serious and slightly gloomy mood throughout the whole off-beat performance. Street singers and “baggers” – hopefully that’s the local slang for bag-men – are also sampled and their voices join in the rollicking fun in places.

It’s a remarkable tour de force, packed with much drama and musical invention. Now that I think of it, the nearest Western equivalent to this might be Tom Waits, but even he would probably hand over his last bottle of brown-bagged bourbon if he could produce something as cinematic, noirish, and unhinged as Russian Canon. Wish I could decode more of this, so I may just have to send a message to the band through their Bandcamp page. Very high recommendation for this lavish, layered, musical oddity. From 7th September 2016.

Long-Winded Small Talk

The Dwarfs Of East Agouza
Bes
UK / USA NAWA RECORDINGS NAWA005CD CD (2015)

A recent chapter in ex-Sun City Girl Alan Bishop’s saga of map-hopping exploits catches him in Cairo-based cahoots with like-minded lunatics Sam Shalabi and Maurice Louca for a turbulent turn in team-building. At the risk of selling it as Bishop’s thing, The Dwarfs of East Agouza sound like they might have been distant cousins of the Sun City Girls, had they grown up in post Arab-Spring Cairo instead of Phoenix. But it’s very much an egalitarian effort; blending distinctively non-western percussion, rambling microtonality and the awkward/irascible brand of echo-peddling psych-rock the Girls would lapse into now and again. And as per efforts such as Valentines From Matahari, there’s an assurance that the music’s charms will not be immediately evident.

What’s quickly clear however is that all sense of restraint has been canned: jams ring out in all directions for up to thirty minutes and ain’t about to stop for your peace of mind, nor mine. Or else they ramble on in muttered tones like Bishop’s Uncle Jim in caustic toad mode. In few other conditions could ‘Baka of the Future’ fake it as a sampler track, where itching beneath a bouncy bassline and narcotic organ riff we hear the signature scrapings of Alvarius B’s Jackson Pollock guitar. Skip through the 10-minute excursion and witness the trio almost suffocating in its own smog; the boys getting their groove on where most of us experience mental problems. Yet despite this airborne aggravation, their initial aimlessness achieves lucidity in all cases, and after repeat playbacks their sounds soak deeper into the nervous system.

For all the music’s purported lack of polish, there’s also a sense that the Dwarfs are trying hard not to sound like they’re trying hard. They want not for impish mischief nor discipline, and were it not for poly-musician Louca’s rhythmic chops and unseated tonal stylings, Shalabi and Bishop’s jagged and disgruntled string manipulations would be on much shakier ground. His horse-powered hand-drumming brings calm cohesion to the same chaos his shape-shifting keyboard modulations help to create; encompassing the whole nine yards between Arthur Russell-style organ stabs on ‘Hungry Bears Don’t Dance’ and opiate-drowned dream imagery in ‘Resinance’, both of which aim to resituate us in less defined modes of being. I will take this opportunity to remind you to buy his excellent solo album, Salute The Parrot.

The 30-minute ‘Museum of Stranglers (I-III)’ is everything you’d expect from a cosmic, side-long closer: A climatic creatio ex nihilo in dead air of echo pedal guitars; flutters of Alan Bishop’s recent post-skronk saxophony; the wooziest, most Lovecraftian electronics to manifest thus far; psych-rock tropes unleashed in full force; long stretches of little evident interest; time folding between threadbare lows and celestial highs where oblique and charged power lines soar, bestial purrs and gurgles taper to zero and an inverted, no-wave reprise (of sorts) of the opening theme marking our return to the point of origin. Even for a group with such avowedly irrational proclivities this lurching epic is a perversely gratifying patience-tester; the longer one listens, the stronger the sense of dissociation. A worthy debut to be sure!

Bird Song

Gudrun Gut
Vogelmixe
GERMANY RUN UNITED MUSIC RU18 2 x CD (2016)

As part of Heimatlieder aus Deutschland, an initiative funded to shed light on the ethnic and musical diversity of modern-day Germany, producer Gudrun Gut has been commissioned to set up symmetrical, speaker-friendly setlists of eight re-recorded ‘traditional folk’ songs for the magpie-minded Vogelmixe; going on to give each a rhythmic makeover into the bargain. While first impressions suggest this pan-global melange is more vapid-minded cocktail bar than boudoir, Gut’s choices are apparently as informed by history as by personal taste: each of the songs tracing its ancestry as far back as the 15th century to nations to have immigrated to Germany and which can thus be regarded as contributing to the country’s current ethnic identity. Each nation (Turkey, Cameroon, Morocco, Croatia, Cuba, Portugal, Transylvania and Bulgaria) is also represented in the pool of musicians to perform the ‘original’ songs; the streamlined format of which ensures that such ‘confusing diversity’ will in fact prove pleasing to listeners with and without a studied interest in the multi-coloured purview of the much-loved ‘world’ music label.

While this visible striving for authenticity might seem at odds with the remix disc’s aesthetic of electronic beats and textures and melodic extrapolations, it’s just as easy to reflect on the ‘cover tune’ simulacra nature of the pieces themselves. These aren’t preserved in amber, but subject to the prerogative of whomever happens to bring them into the present moment, though by all accounts a good deal of care went into sourcing musicians as part of ‘an extensive research and recruitment process’. The underlying theme of ‘unity’ putatively runs through all songs as expressions of a trans-continental ‘melting pot’, bringing dynamic equilibrium to which must have been a task for the compiler, but who better than the DJ to effect such a transfer?

One further motive of the remix treatment is to address the supposed lack of representation of traditional folk music in modern German electronic music. Qualifications regarding cultural appropriation aside, Gudrun’s remixes are both inventive and light of touch, making adroit use of dub, club and electro-pop motifs. Her poly-stylistic subtlety is not completely removed from that which made Honest Jon’s Shangaan Shake selection such an interesting event, though it does lack that collection’s the producer headcount advantage. Under Gudrun’s watch, generic 4/4 beats collide into thorough deconstructions, tightly-wound Thomas Brinkman-sized samples loop-based rhythms and an almost hymnal resonance that bleeds from the past into the present. While not every piece is likely to please every listener, it is nonetheless a tasteful arrangement that can be enjoyed from many a distance.

A Raga Called Nick

New solo album by the Nottingham guitar player Nick Jonah Davis. House Of Dragons (THREAD RECORDINGS THR004) contains ten tracks of consummate acoustic guitar craft – melodic, rootsy, folky, performed with confidence and uncanny accuracy. All that I wrote about Split Electric – his fab teamup with C. Joynes from earlier in 2016 – continues to apply, except that this record is pretty much all-acoustic, so less of the spooky noise effects we heard on ‘Sigil Eyes’ this time, apart from the opening seconds of ‘Double Peace’, which uses a scrapey flourish to set the mood on this, one of the darker pieces on a mostly upbeat and sprightly record. Cam Deas, who sent us his amazing Quadtych album in 2011, did the production on House Of Dragons, and friends C. Joynes and Karl Townsend play on the last cut, ‘The Illumination of Nelson Fortune’. This piece has a rather Fahey-esque title and a Ry Cooder feel in the shimmering slide and drone effects, conjuring up a cinematic desert vista in short order. I might add that the press release points out he has kept the company of two other TSP heroes, i.e. folk iconoclast Richard Dawson and radical song interpreter Alasdair Roberts, which earns him automatic wine privileges in my house. He’s also managed to perform alongside Max Ochs at a New York guitar festival, which is a pretty big deal…there aren’t that many records by this Greenwich Village hero of the 1960s, although if you get a copy of that Takoma sampler Contemporary Guitar, you can hear a couple of ragas by him. I have enjoyed House Of Dragons enormously, although with its title and cover artworks, I was hoping for something slightly more sinister, perhaps with added fairytale or supernatural undertones and themes. Instead we have this, with its generally rather cheery and bouncy tunes and melodies. I would like to think Davis has it in him to turn in a downbeat, pessimistic set of Richard Thompson cover versions, all played as instrumentals on the blackest guitar in his collection. From 2nd August 2016.

An Insect on the Other Side of the World Climbing up a Table Leg: a quirky and charming stream-of-consciousness work

Matthew Revert, An Insect on the Other Side of the World Climbing up a Table Leg, Caduc CD #CA17 (2016)

A beguiling work composed of spoken word monologues, field recordings, samples, occasional acoustic guitar noodling and off-key singing, “An Insect …” heralds a growing body of experimental music by Melbourne-based absurdist novelist / graphic designer Matthew Revert. This recording nods in the direction of improv, drone, light noise and neo-primitive folk without being captured completely by any of these categories. It’s quite a busy release with hardly any pauses or lapses in the continuous free-form patter of sound and I marvel that Revert is able to keep up the brisk pace without losing a beat. (Of course there would be have been a lot of cutting and pasting but any joins can hardly be heard.) All the sounds appear to be completely natural with very little processing and they are right at the forefront of the mix.

Listeners might feel a little too close to the action for comfort – there’s a phone conversation that they’ll be eavesdropping into, and Revert (I assume that Revert does all the monologues) mumbles under his breath and almost appears to drift into sleep – and possibly much of the intimacy feels too forced. Towards the end of the recording, sounds from the external environment – radio song, a soap opera soundtrack, half of a conversation – intrude into the musical narrative and turn it into something more forbidding and impersonal. It’s as if Revert’s private space which he has deigned to share with us is being invaded and torn apart.

Not too long for the stream-of-consciousness novelty value to turn kitschy and stale, and not too short either, this quirky work has much charm and many surprises. TSP readers need to hear it for themselves as to what meanings or messages (if any) it may have – but I need to warn you, the more you listen to it, the more you’ll wonder what it’s meant to be about. At least the cover art (done by Revert) is easy on the eye and looks as if it means something … or does it when you see the blank face and read the strange messages?

Necessary Monsters

The American duo of Hollow Deck turn in a peculiar album of songs and sounds with their Hobson’s Choice (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR239 / WEIRD EAR RECORDS WER-011), recorded in Massachusetts. Mia Friedman and Andy Allen are Hollow Deck. Allen has also appeared as Friendship Ceremonies, and is associated with other New England free noise acts, such as Guerilla Toss and Arkm Foam; both players also appeared in Survivors Breakfast, playing on a big-band jazz project of some sort by Anthony Coleman called The End Of Summer.

The present record might be described as a later strain of the “free folk” genre, admittedly a highly loose and contentious definition, but Hollow Deck’s approach is extremely fragmented and off-centred. Friedman will perform a song with the banjo and her angelic soprano voice, but the singing is extremely tentative, the melody purposefully kept vague, the lyrics are unintelligible, and the performance arrives very haltingly. I suppose it’s “folk” in as much as it’s acoustic music, and she plays a banjo, but beyond that I can’t connect the music to any known Appalachian roots, for instance; and genuine American folk singers of the 1930s, full-throated belters such as Darby and Tarlton, Grayson and Whitter, or Charley Poole, would probably be baffled as to why Mia Friedman is so hesitant about delivering her message.

Andy Allen’s contributions shift Hobson’s Choice down an even more avant-garde pathway, and he uses woodwinds, percussion, guitars, electronics and found tapes to create free-noise backdrops which are delicate, imaginative, and in places quite unexpected. On ‘Hurrah’, he uses a drum machine and some electronic pwoops to do all he can to disrupt the expected flow of Mia’s song; it’s like a mashup between Karen Dalton and Erikm. The duo also work together on more extended free-form noise scapes, such as ‘Montana Lite’ or ‘Here Is My Home’, where the emphasis is on generating something as alien as possible, but through simple under-stated means instead of “freaking out” like Egg, Eggs might do. As such, the record reminds me very much of the first two Red Krayola records, veering from delicate songcraft to bizarrely unstructured free sounds. There’s a concerted effort to derail common sense, blind-side the listener.

Some of the songs – or the same titles at any rate – appeared previously on a cassette of the same name from Friendship Tapes in 2014. This, from 8th April 2016.

Them!

Ants, eh…you can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em…at any rate, it’s always these six-legged bastards who show up in pseudo-scientific articles when some nincompoop author is clutching for a metaphor for human society. Perhaps it’s because we suppose these tiny black rogues have organised themselves into a hierarchical system, one with a monarch at its centre, and capable of productive activity on an industrial scale we puny humans can only dream about. Then there’s their elaborate communication system, which involves flopping their pathetic antennae about in some way, to relay signals throughout the entire colony. It’s only a matter of time before some smart alec compares that to “The Internet” and starts to make outlandish claims, for instance that “Ants Invented The World Wide Web” or some such nonsense.

I for one have never trusted the ant, and regard these crawling devils with the same suspicious eye as I do most of the smaller creatures who share the earth with us. They’re up to something, and I don’t like it. One interesting trend for many years has been the cultivation of a so-called “ant farm”, which I believe involves creating a mini-colony of these unpleasant monsters inside a glass box filled with sand or porous earth, allowing us to observe the ants plotting their nefarious schemes. These ant farms have proven especially popular among American school children, who proudly exhibit them as “science projects” when they wish to earn points in entomology. The truth is far more sinister, of course…any given ant farm is just a way of proving the inevitability of capitalism, perpetuating the exploitation of labour, and the “need” for a caste system that keeps us all oppressed; and where better to indoctrinate children with this poisonous ideology than at secondary school. It’s all there, in among the ants.

Some of my justifiable paranoia and bile has, I like to think, informed the record we have in front of us – titled Ant Farm (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR241) and credited to the players Elliott Schwartz and Big Blood. It’s a slightly creepy and weird slab of sound art and music, not without its frequently beautiful moments, but mostly issued as a warning against the rise of the ants. The music was originally the soundtrack for an art exhibit, also called Ant Farm, an event which was held in Maine to showcase the work of The Ant Girls, a visual art group including Colleen Kinsella and Dorothy Schwartz. Right there you’ve got a strong thread of “ant-ness” detectable in the genesis of this particular record. I shouldn’t be surprised if The Ant Girls knew more than they were letting on.

Colleen Kinsella is also one half of Big Blood, along with Caleb Mulkerin, and they’ve been making records since 2006, many of them issued as CDRs on their own Don’t Trust The Ruin label. Weirdly, they’re actually a four-piece but only have two members. They probably came under the influence of the ants to arrive at that point. Elliott Schwartz is a veteran American composer whose modernistic (I assume) escapades date back to the 1960s, although he also made a remarkable record with Marion Brown called Soundways, issued in 1973 by the Bowdoin College Music Press. It’s remarkable for its combination of electronic keyboard music with free jazz sax blowing, a combination which always works for me. Schwartz has no traceable connection to the world of ants, and is just guesting.

The Ant Farm record will draw you in at first by dint of its unusual sound – lo-fi, crackly, misted-up recordings as if heard through a layer of aural fog. From these gentle rumbles and purrs, there will emerge strange tunes and eerie keyboard fugues, some of them played on gamelan instruments such as the Baliphone, or other hammered instruments like the Dulcimer. There’s more atmospheric home-brew electronics than you could fit in a shopping bag, and Schwartz plays his heart out when called upon, offering near-classical tunes of intricate delicacy, many of which have a narrative vibe very fitted to telling the stories of these darn ants. For instance, ‘The Queen’s Egg’ or ‘Winged Pile’ or ‘Swarm’. All of these uncanny musical elements – plus some occasional whispery breathy songs on side two – are blended into a seamless suite of gentle, vaguely sinister music of a supreme oddness, leading the listener through that evil maze-like warren that is the tunnel system of the ants. To top it all off, it’s packaged in some gorgeous sleeve art and inners, featuring paintings of – guess what! – ants at work. These images are uncredited on the release but are possibly provided by one of the Ant Girls. Great! From 17 May 2016.

Believe in No Coming Shore: not quite the breakthrough album for US folk / black metallers Falls of Rauros

Falls of Rauros, Believe in No Coming Shore, United States / Sweden, Bindrune Recordings / Nordvis Produktion, digipak CD BR022 / NVP023 (2014)

Falls of Rauros are a Maine-based band who originally began as a duo and over the years expanded into a quartet. On this, the band’s third album, FoR have a clean sound and a melodic and mournful style that effectively pushe their music into post-BM mood territory. The combination of sharp-edged harsh BM with its wailing vocal and a clean blues-oriented sound suits the album’s subject matter in which humanity stands accused of failing to take responsibility for its crimes and sins inflicted upon a fragile planet and towards its own kind, and thus now faces extinction, spiritually as well as physically. The album holds some hope that we won’t follow blindly in our forerunners’ steps and will instead use our gifts and strengths to repair this planet and create a better future. The bulk of the album is taken up by four fairly lengthy tracks book-ended by short instrumental pieces.

“Believe in No Coming Shore” could have been a very epic work with a varied range of moods and atmospheres, and with soaring lead guitar solo pieces where appropriate and hard gritty rhythms and riffing. The musicians play as a fairly tight (but not too tight) unit. Parts dominated by acoustic guitar or urban blues playing have distinct mood and inner-oriented ambience and the switch between these and the more BM passages is smooth and not at all jarring. The major problem with the album with respect to the mechanics of the music is the style of the vocals; they are very ragged, limited in their range and expression, and set far back in the mix. As a result the music has to carry the expectations of listeners and there are occasions (especially in the middle of the album) where it seems to meander with no clear direction or emphasis.

The songs are good but not remarkable and I think longer tracks like “Ancestors of Smoke” and “Waxen Voices” could have been edited for length with some of the slower instrumental music taken out. “Waxen Voices” doesn’t quite hang together and parts of the song seem a bit disjointed. Overall the general tone of the album is even with a gradual build-up in intensity from the first major track “Ancestors of Shadow” through to “Spectral Eyes” – although the tension at this point isn’t well resolved due in part to the shouty vocals and the music’s failure to strive beyond the stars and perhaps fall over through over-reach.

At this point in their career, Falls of Rauros needed a breakthrough album that alerts mainstream and underground labels and audiences alike that here is a band with a distinct style and purpose. “Believe in No Coming Shore”, which sticks to a minimal instrumental set-up and a style of fusion music that has been done to death by others, unfortunately sets back that moment of transition.

Vinyl Seven Glom Part 2

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Vermont Singer Ruth Garbus charmed the world with her introverted song album Rendezvous With Rama for Feeding Tube Records, a remarkably withdrawn and sorrowful statement where her shy voice was barely staining the recording tape. I loved it. Her Joule EP (OSR TAPES OSR27) is much more upbeat and could be mistaken for a singer-songwriter from the 1960s or 1970s, by a young Joni Mitchell or Linda Perhacs. Very melodic acoustic pop with a good deal more confidence in the singing, her vocals are distinctive, and her understated and ingenious harmony vocal overdubs are magical, sure to please fans of The Byrds or sunshine pop records of the 1960s. Lyrical content is quite dense and full of clever sentence construction that can trip up the listener, but I sense there’s a lot of self-determination and self-expression in among the anecdotal observations of every-day life. Well-crafted, highly enjoyable, Ruth Garbus’ work is heartfelt and sincere. Recommended.

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From his Amsterdam address the singer Seamus Cater sent us his single Lunora Live (ANECDOTAL RECORDS ANEC 02). I guess this guy’s work shades into avant-folk malarkey, for instance his banjo and harmonica record with Uncle Woody Sullender called When We Get To Meeting or his records of “subterranean soul searching sad songs” with Viljam Nybacka and others, called The Anecdotes. Here on live recordings from a tour of Italy, he’s not using much more than a concertina, a harmonica, and an electric piano. For some reason Cater never really connects with me. His singing voice is distinctive, but also rather fey and mannered. The melodies he sings strike me as very ordinary, with not a single phrase that might make them memorable to the listener. Both ‘Lunora’ and ‘The Piano’ here are strewn with sad symbols in the lyrics which don’t really carry meaning across to the listener, and leave Seamus stranded alone on stage in a fixed melancholic state. Most of the folk music I like to listen to is very direct, but Seamus Cater can’t seem to get to the point. On the plus side, I suppose there is something to be said for the spartan no-frills arrangements of these songs, and the clarity of the recording. The idea behind that is something to do with presenting the “core essentials” of a song; Seamus Cater arrives here by process of subtraction. This reductive approach has presumably been applied to the cover artworks, where the lettering is barely legible and we’re left with cryptic visual riddles to decode. Arrived 5th March 2014.

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Always enjoy the intense Swedish gloom and noise from Fang Bomb Records. I wish there more of it. The single by Trepaneringsritualen (FB020) we’ve had around here since 2013. It’s a collector’s item by now. Notice the religious themes in the Bleeding Jesus cover art and the titles ‘Judas Goat’ and ‘Didymus Christ’, both of them rewriting chapters of the New Testament on their own twisted terms. Spin this little sliver of blackness to enjoy two bursts of a sort of intellectualised Black Metal, where the vocals are grisly and distorted and make their moan against a complex backdrop of non-guitar sounds. It’s a brilliantly evil way to concoct a monstrous sonic murk and highly original in the context of third-division Black Metal projects with their endless guitar thrash. Trepaneringsritualen is the alias of Thomas Martin Ekelund, my favourite Swedish depressive who also used to record as Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, and runs the cassette label Beläten. On these two sides, he finds a new way to express his despair and frustration, tying it in with naked religious symbolism to express feelings of guilt, anguish, and transgression. A superb release.

Posledni Vlci: a peek at two obscure Slovak raw black metal bands

Aeon Winds Concubia Nocte

Aeon Winds / Concubia Nocte, Posledni Vlci, Poland, Eastside, CD (2016)

As these two Slovak BM bands share a member and both bands express a common interest in Slavic mythology, you really don’t need a crystal ball to predict that sooner rather than later Aeon Winds and Concubia Nocte would release a split album. Aeon Winds contribute four songs that take up the first half of the album and Concubia Nocte fill up the second half with five songs.

The overall style of the album could be described as harsh raw black metal with folk pagan, symphonic and ambient influences that occasionally throws out some heavy atmospheric bluesy mood music. Aeon Winds mix up their brand of fast-paced raw and aggressive blast-beat BM with dark ambient and folk resulting in a cold and forbidding yet dramatic and powerful style. “The Path of Devouring Flames” rockets along at super speed, guitars sparking on fire and synthesiser barely managing to keep up with this music in full attack mode. The vocals are just barely audible above the rapid pounding and if only they had been a bit more upfront in the mix and had more rage the song would be even more forceful and uncompromising than it is. After this, the band goes straight to the instrumental dark ambient side of its personality with “In Times of Old”, a hypnotic orchestral mood piece with dreamy trilling keyboards and animated acoustic guitar melodies. Birdsong in the background adds a feeling of brightness and serenity. Aeon Winds’ contribution concludes with a cover of an Emperor song “Inno a Satana” delivered in straightforward melodic black metal style with steely grinding riffs and harsh wraith-like vocals. The synthesiser layer in this song seems completely unnecessary.

Concubia Nocte have a similar split raw BM / ambient style and the music is equally as fast. The band combines its machine-gun raw BM aggression and folk pagan elements better than Aeon Winds does but then this difference could just be a consequence of the choice of songs both bands include on the split. Concubia Nocte’s music sounds slightly more accessible and songs have a definite Odinpop feel in their riffs, melodies and general song-based structures. Of the five tracks on offer, the highlight is the very powerful and hard-hitting “Ve?ná Vô?a” which boasts huge riffs, thunderous percussion and a constant grinding bass groove. The thin vocals are all but overpowered by the huge scale of the music. Keyboards on a track like this are really unneeded but the band wants them in anyway. “S Posledným Lú?om Slnka” is a more underground and garage-sounding BM track, fiery and malevolent and threatening in its style and attitude, and offering some moody surprises in its otherwise rapid-fire spitting rage.

Both bands are good but I much prefer Concubia Nocte for their aggression and sound. The band relies much less on synthesiser and its sound is stronger, less pallid as a result. Whatever keyboards exist are really surplus to the music and the band could, maybe should, junk the synthesisers altogether. If both bands must have additional instruments, I’d much rather they had acoustic keyboard instruments. Aeon Winds have a more tinny and thinner sound which disadvantages them when they are paired with Concubia Nocte. The biggest downside for both groups is the weak vocals on all tracks that feature them. On the whole though, this split is a good introduction to both bands and provides an entry into the Slovak black metal scene.

The recording is also available through Asgard Hass.