Maud the moth & trajedesaliva: Bordando el manto Terrestre
Out 26th May on Time Released Sound, Woodford Halse
This collaboration between the dark ambient outfit trajedesaliva and Maud the moth – a Spanish born/Edinburgh based neoclassical musician – sees the creation of an idiosyncratic exercise in genre alchemy, one that is put in service of a sonic tribute to the surrealist painter Remedios Varo. Combining elements of drone, neofolk, dark ambient, and sound art, ‘Bordando el manto Terrestre’ (‘Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle’) narrates the life of this artist in three parts. The first follows her initial exile from Spain following the rise of fascism in interwar Europe, the second focuses on her work and the humour and warping expression of transition it sought to convey, before finally reaching a synthesis between the reconfigured identity of a political refugee and the recreation of the self atop the experience of uprooting.
Despite the explicit and fully realised conceptual packaging of ‘Bordando el manto Terrestre’, the music is open ended, allowing full immersion into a choose-your-own-adventure listening experience beholden to one’s disposition. The compositions are minimalist at the molecular level, but the arrangements and instrumental selection evince a breadth and nuance that is anything but, delivering a richness and depth that invites persistent study.
The album flows like glacial waves of energy. Drones incrementally build, moving from comforting embrace to latent menace. Gentle staccato instrumentation rides atop each swell of noise, laconically populating the sparse landscape. Haunting vocals are a recurring character, imitating the shape of traditional folk ballads and lullabies, but here the rhythmic and tonal centre is eviscerated, leaving a ghostly visage of lyrical pieces that adopt the shape of something that should be comforting, but strike us as uncanny, warped, only half real.
Between this, and the choice to use analogue synthesizers and discarded acoustic instruments highly susceptible to shifts in temperature and atmospheric moisture, ‘Bordando el manto Terrestre’ approaches us as a work of hauntology par excellence. Elements of the past return to us as spectres of lost futures, possible realities that were never realised, here expressed through this liminal, barely solidified threnody of loss. A continuous drone emanating as lost moments just beyond the reach of living memory, the import of which has been forgotten to time, now circling back to haunt us through these pulsing drones gradually tapering off into incoherence.
‘Bordando el manto Terrestre’ is the intersection of neofolk’s wistful nostalgia for fictional histories, dark ambient’s frail finger forever and desperately pointed at an absence, and the merest hint of musicality through the lens of neoclassical’s reworkings of historic forms, all placed into the macro structure of wavelike drone. This album therefore has something to offer a breadth of listeners populating a peripheral space where contemporary music meets the murky category of sound art. The point where program music attempts to express the non-musical through sonic manipulation is melded to the totally abstract arena of modern experimental music, resulting in this singular moment of eerie hauntology from a long forgotten future lost to time.
The Kryptik: A Journey to the Darkest Kingdom
Out 2nd June on Purity Through Fire
In a frankly unexpected move, Brazil’s The Kryptik flirt with crowd pleasing commercialism for their latest outing ‘A Journey to the Darkest Kingdom’. Unexpected because their intuitive brand of hyper fast melodic black metal in the style of Dawn or Vinterland has always sat at the more accessible end of this style, thus making it all the more surprising that they would dare to address the elephant of mass-appeal-madness in the room head on. The Krypik are not ones to shy away from sugarcoating their music, certainly. But the underlying architecture was always such that it lent cinematic gravitas to their work. And let’s face it, this brand of black metal is wont to indulge in candyfloss theatre from time to time, The Kryptik merely embraced this more than others whilst retaining a grandiose, substantive edge within their deck of calling cards.
But here we see all fetters removed, and those desirous of a risk free, neutered foray into intuitive, symphonic black metal are fully indulged. Well, maybe that’s a little unfair. The Kryptik are still ruthlessly efficient composers, cycling riffs, synth harmonies, and sequenced hooks in just the right chronology to achieve sui generis melodic content, granting the otherwise linear flow of each piece depth and nuance. Equally, the fluidity of these pieces remains a wonder to behold, as they weave their way through competing moods, intensities, thematic material, and dramatic stakes with ease. Jarring transitions serve an important role within extreme metal, even those styles as naturally flowing as epic black metal. The Kryptik insist on begging to differ here, allowing their music to gush forth with the grace of a waterfall.
Equally the production, arrangement, and instrumental choices are perfectly suited to the task of immersing the listener in this quest of dark romanticism. Guitars function more like a string section in an orchestra. Individual riffs bleed into the whole, serving more as accents to the harmonic flow, dictated by the meeting of rhythm guitar and layered strings.
Yet for all the activity, the content, the embarrassment of riches we are treated to, this is music that functions by mood and hint over fully articulated coherence. Whilst a scorched earth technique may have worked well for The Kryptik in the past, overwhelming the listener with the sheer power and scope of their offering, here a “conventionality” creeps through the cracks, seeing the mask slip somewhat. Rock rhythms, catchy “hooks”, crowd pleasing emotive payoffs. In themselves far from damning, but combined with the fact that The Kryptik forever fall short of “completing” the expression of an idea through their music, it leads to an oddly unfulfilling experience.
As a work that tells of the glory of symphonic black metal, the boundless space with which the genre wishes to walk if we would only let go of our inhibitions, dictated by commonplace metrics of what “good taste” looks like, ‘A Journey to the Darkest Kingdom’ is a fine addition to the annuls of the genre. But for those looking for a substantive dialog with the form, an attempt to introduce a new opinion, reaffirm a preexisting view, or drag it into a completely novel direction, all will be disappointed by The Kryptik’s latest offering.
Suffering Quota: Collide
Out 26th May on Tartarus Records
Slick, bouncy, vibrant grindcore resonates through the speakers on the latest outing from this Dutch outfit. Although ‘Collide’ reaches for the full breadth of the genre’s history, weaving in death metal riffs and some substantive melodic content, the chosen orientation is very much of a crust and hardcore lineage over deathgrind, politically charged lyrics and all.
Despite the brief lifecycle of each track and the album as a whole, Suffering Quota manage to pack in an array of ideas and styles into these tracks without ever cluttering the terrain. The mix is clear yet raw. A meaty guitar tone naturally dominates, exercising the mechanistic precision of post-power violence crust. This allows for great leaps in tempo and theme, from atonal hardcore barrages to menacing tremolo picked melodies of minimal yet effective melodic content.
Drums supplement this precalculated barrage with machinelike precision without sacrificing depth. Vocals are the most explicitly hardcore aspect of this album, exercising strained barks, screeches, and animalistic shouts of desperate urgency. This humanises the entire project, bringing it down to a ground level realism, distinguishing it from metal despite the obvious gestures made by individual riffs in that direction.
Ultimately the success of ‘Collide’ rests on the ability to martial a tight, fluid package of creativity whilst retaining the simplistic directness of a punk ancestry. Where the majority of the music we deal with in this information space trades in metaphor and inuendo, Suffering Quota come at us with a one dimensional, explicit message, leaving no room for duality of meaning. But within this direct package they have managed to work in an impressive breadth of ideas and quotations from neighbouring genres. In doing so they retain the urgency, the manifesto demanding our immediate attention whilst refreshing the packaging, shining new perspectives and novel outlooks on an otherwise familiar strategy. This is still the music of activism, but here granted new significance and therefore greater impact thanks to the intersection of the compositional virtues of imagination and efficiency.
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