An InterView with Melissa Oquendo – a.k.a. DomiBakeTrix   By Fleurette Estes (FEstes)

Melissa Oquendo is trained opera singer, voice teacher, political advocate, mother, and a baker in the Windy City. Known and beloved by many as DomiBakeTrix, when she isn’t baking cakes [..]

Source: RE:GEN Mag

  With a new album to be released in early 2025, Cyborg Amok has released “When Animals Have Guns” as its second single. Following up on the August reveal of “Cellophane Grind,” the new song presents the duo of Greg and Brydon Bullock further expanding the parameters of their synth-heavy post-punk style [..]

Source: RE:GEN Mag

Sacred Hearts, an Australian post-punk act with a sound steeped in sacrilege and solemnity, summons the ghostly echoes of a bygone religious upbringing. At its core, vocalist June Gray channels the sepulchral imagery of her youth, weaving a soundscape as reverent as it is raw. The origin story of Sacred Hearts is rooted in serendipity, a meeting of two kindred spirits—June and Josie—bonded through shared memories of Catholic schooling and a kinship born of both ritual and rebellion. The music evokes familiar shades of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, and Joy Division, but Sacred Hearts doesn’t simply haunt old graves; an ethereal shimmer à la Cocteau Twins adds new colors to the darkness. A stark drum machine pulses like a distant, broken heartbeat, slicing through their liturgical undertones with a cutting, mechanized chill.

Their debut EP, Siren Songs, is a baptism of anger, sensuality, and the turbulence of girlhood. Nearly two years in the making since their debut single dropped in 2021, the record is a celebration of loss, desire, and the burning rage of the feminine experience. Free from the confines of a single genre, it dances between influences as diverse as The Cocteau Twins, Swans, Ride, and The Gun Club. A quiet river of longing and grief courses through the EP, its waters binding every track.

A current of water ties each song, flowing through the EP like a quiet river of longing and loss. It opens with Holly Golightly’s voice from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, calling out to her brother, adrift and uncertain, setting the tone for Is it Cold?—a question laced with isolation. A frigid lament, the song unfolds with synths as icy as the title suggests, and guitars drenched in melancholy. June’s vocals pierce through the chill, stark and powerful, echoing isolation.

The Ophelia Complex surfaces as a sorrow-filled dance, where a woman’s spirit drifts between desire and duty, innocence and despair, her identity slipping into shapes others impose upon her. In the next track, Concrete Bikini, this complex is reimagined in the sunlit quiet of Brisbane’s Enoggera Reservoir, exploring the early pangs of helplessness and the silent weight of being trapped in the expectations of new love. The song wades through themes of submission and self-erasure, tracing the familiar ache of yearning for one’s own voice amidst the pull of a partner’s influence. The song is shimmering dream pop, awash in droning sounds, glistening tones, and spellbinding vocals that soar through the mix.

Godless is delivered like an And Also the Trees tune, with its spoken words buoyed over a droning soundscape. The poetic interlude offers a raw reflection, a stark pause to consider the world’s brittle state. Shaped by the weight of late-stage capitalism, where greed tips the scales, and resources are prized over human lives, the band casts humanity adrift, somewhere between salvation and damnation. It’s a purgatorial cry—a lament for a species bent on self-destruction, stumbling through a wasteland of its own making, suffering under the consequences of its own sins. The song feels like an indictment and a reckoning, a dark mirror held up to a civilization blinded by its hunger for power and profit, barreling toward collapse.

The fall of Eden is the world’s first wound—a perfect garden broken by desire, innocence splintered in a grasp for forbidden knowledge. What began in beauty twisted into exile, as man’s hunger outweighed paradise. From that fateful bite onward, Eden’s echo lingers, a lost sanctuary haunting human hearts. Blind Faith deals with the bitter angst of a failed relationship, reimagining the story of Eden in a personal context. The basslines and percussion nod to The Cure’s Faith, enveloping the narrative of innocence lost and desire’s poisonous aftermath.

With a Jazzy Western twang, evoking The Bad Seeds and The Birthday Party, Virgin/Whore seethes with spite, tangled in the relentless snare of the Madonna-Whore complex—a cruel paradox imposed upon women, twisted into words by Freud himself. The song thrashes and bites, a furious anthem for those trapped in this absurd binary. It rails against society’s fixation, where a woman is either revered or condemned, purity or sin, never whole. It’s a lament, a rage, a biting reflection on the weight of expectation, where identity is sliced and labeled, where freedom is strangled by roles designed to confine. The song rages for every woman bound by this brutal, enduring myth. “In this track, I air my grievance of never being seen as a whole person, but as either the object of desire or something small and sweet—until the veil is broken. To be a woman in a man’s world is to be objectified, commodified,” says the band.

The EP closes with Crocodile Tears, a track soaked in industrial grit, its pulse borrowed from the ‘90s club scene yet tethered to Sacred Hearts’ post-punk roots. Guitars bite and snarl as the song snaps and lunges with unrepentant ferocity. It’s a primal, unapologetic closing statement, bristling with a dangerous energy that refuses to be tamed.

Listen to Siren Songs below:

Siren Songs by Sacred Hearts

Follow Sacred Hearts:

Instagram
YouTube
Facebook
Spotify

The post Australian Post-Punk Duo Sacred Hearts Release Spellbinding “Siren Songs” EP appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Source: Post-Punk.com

Paris-based duo Echoberyl, featuring Cecilia Dassonneville and producer/mixer Adriano Iacoangeli, returned this year with “Through...

Source: Side Line

As we await the new album from the French band Dead, they earlier this year...

Source: Side Line

The New York City-based electronic band Interface has just released its seventh studio album entitled...

Source: Side Line

Out now via Metropolis Records is the single “Let The Flowers Grow” by Peter Murphy...

Source: Side Line

Arð stammen aus Northumbrien. Die Erfinder des Monastic Doom Metal errichten mit ihrem sehnsüchtig erwarteten zweiten Album "Untouched by Fire" einen weiteren beeindruckenden Meilenstein auf dem Weg ihres rasanten Aufstiegs. Sowohl musikalisch als auch textlich erklimmt Bandkopf Mark Deeks neue Höhen. Arð setzen ihre Mission fort, die Kultur, das Erbe und die Identität der alten nordenglischen Region Northumbria zu erforschen. Das Debütalbum "Take Up My Bones" folgte den Legenden und dem Jahrhundert der Wanderung der Reliquien des Heiligen Cuthbert von Lindisfarne (634-687). Die Geschichte des neuen Albums, wirft ein Schlaglicht auf eine ganz andere Art von Heiligen. Arð erzählen vom Kriegerkönig Oswald (604-642), der Northumbria mit Feuer und Schwert schmiedete, indem er die Reiche von Bernicia und Deira vereinigte. Seine Zeitgenossen bis ins Frankenreich hinein, sahen Oswald als den mächtigsten angelsächsischen König auf der Insel an. Arð zeichnen mit "Untouched by Fire" seinen Aufstieg zur Macht nach. Die Reise beginnt mit seiner Jugend im Exil. Seine Mutter war aufgrund einer Familienfehde nach Norden in das irische Machtzentrum Dal Riada an der schottischen Westküste geflohen. Oswalds Weg führt weiter über siegreiche Schlachten, in denen Oswald jene Territorien zurückgewann, die bereits sein Vater Æthelfrith beansprucht hatte. Am Ende steht die Gründung des Königreichs Northumbrien. Musikalisch bleiben Arð ihrem ursprünglichen Doom-Kurs treu. Die charakteristischen, Stil prägenden "Mönchschöre" sind weiterhin stark präsent, wie man es von einem Musiker erwarten kann, der neben seiner Tätigkeit als Bestseller-Autor, Klavierlehrer und Keyboarder bei der führenden britischen Black-Metal-Band WINTERFYLLETH auch als Chor-Arrangeur und -Dirigent arbeitet. Doch Deeks bereichert seinen Doom Metal auch durch neue Elemente, wie zum Beispiel über das gesamte Album verstreute, wohlplatzierte Prog-Momente. Die Kompositionen auf "Untouched by Fire" spiegeln die auch auf der Bühne gewachsene Erfahrung und das gewonnene Selbstvertrauen des Bandkopfs in Form eines konzentrierten Songwriting und einer größeren Dynamik wider. Diese Entwicklung wird durch die kraftvolle und organische Produktion von Markus Stock (EMPYRIUM, THE VISION BLEAK) deutlich gemacht - da Arð das Album in der Klangschmiede Studio E aufgenommen haben. Als Deeks Arð im Jahr 2019 gründete, wagte der Komponist nicht einmal in seinen kühnsten Träumen darauf zu hoffen, was alles in den kommenden Jahren passieren würde. Seine Demos brachten ihm bald einen Plattenvertrag ein und die erste Auflage des Debütalbums "Take Up My Bones" (2022) war schon ausverkauft, bevor das Album in die Läden kam. Es folgten mehrere Auflagen und auch alle limitierten Editionen waren schnell vergriffen. Die ersten Auftritte der Band, z.B. beim Prophecy Fest in Balve, verbreiteten den Ruf von Arð als hervorragender Live-Act durch Mundpropaganda wie ein Lauffeuer. Die Band wurde nicht nur in der weltweiten Metal- und Musikpresse gefeiert, sondern landete sogar im deutschen Staatsfernsehen, wurde von der renommierten britischen Zeitung The Guardian interviewt und in der BBC sowie anderen britischen Medien mit ihrem speziellen "Organic Doom" Konzert erwähnt – für die Deeks Stücke von "Take Up My Bones" neu arrangiert hatte, um sie mit Band und einer echten Orgel in Huddersfield zu spielen. Dieses Konzert findet sich in voller Länge als CD und DVD in der limitierten Artbook Edition. Mit dem zweiten Album "Untouched by Fire" legen sich Arð die eigene Messlatte gleich um mehrere Stufen höher auf. Perfekt arrangierte Monastic Doom Songs mit hoher Dynamik und unverfälschtem Songwriting finden in einer opulenten Produktion ihre Entsprechung. Es ist Zeit, die Augen zu schließen und sich von Arð aus Northumbrien in eine Zeit entführen zu lassen, in der germanische Kriegerkönige mit Schwert und Feuer und einem neuen Gott als Sieghelfer an ihrer Seite neue Reiche erschufen. Ein blutiges Fest für die Raben, ein Goldschatz für die Ohren!

Tracklist:
1. Cursed to Nothing but Patience
2. Name Bestowed
3. Hefenfelth
4. He Saw Nine Winters
5. Beset by Weapons
6. Casket of Dust

Artbook only:
Live Bonus Disc (Organic Doom)
1. Burden Foretold
2. Take Up My Bones
3. Raise then the Incorrupt Body
4. Boughs of Trees
5. Banner of The Saints
6. Only Three Shall Know

DVD:
1, Burden Foretold
2, Take Up My Bones
3, Raise Then The Incorrupt Body
4, Boughs Of Trees
5, Banner Of The Saint
6, Only Three Shall Know

Source: Prophecy

Since 2016, French artist Yannick Rault has been prolific, releasing numerous works that push sonic...

Source: Side Line

The future leaks from old springs, and everything visible is invisible. While listening to Embracing the Ruins, the newly released collabo-rative album by Márton Csókás (voice), Gabriele Tinti (words) and Mas-simo Pupillo (music), a disquieting image came to mind: a collapsed tomb no one thought they would ever be able to enter again. Moving closer to the silence and the rubble, you notice something, someone, you don’t know what or who, but as the clouds gather overhead and night falls, the movements become more frequent, more determined. Soon you’ll hear eerie sounds emanate from below, voices calling from the inside. They’re calling from the inside of a stone. And they are readyto tell you everything.

Csókás howls, cries, whispers, sings, twists, and turns Tinti’s poetry into life-forms crawling out of the debris. The cacophony of voices charges Pupillo’s spectral and dense synthesized soundscapes, reminis-cent of the analogue inventions on Zu’s Terminalia Amazonia(2019). The music lingers beautifully, roars even heavier, and forms columns, fountains, streams of water evaporating into thin air. Light upon light, a luminous lament, like the image on the album cover, Winged Victoryby Andres Serrano. It cannot last. You become a stone; Nike of Samo-thrace submerged in urine. Godlike and gloriously miserable.

“Only ruins remain in this empty light”, we hear as the music flowswith uninterrupted intensity. The unified vision of Pupillo, Csókás and Tinti is, I think, first and foremost a portrayal of the fear buried in the cold void of lost time, the crepuscular echoes of forgotten horrors, a ghost radio with no one there to listen. It is indeed a transformative ritual, a sacrifice to the broken mirror which surrounds us all.

Tore Engelsen Espedal, Rome, August 2021

Source: Prophecy

The Finnish Dark-Electro project Protokoll 19 has already released several singles and EPs, and this...

Source: Side Line

Athens, GA post-punk outfit Vision Video has launched the video for “Let Go of Time”,...

Source: Side Line

This is the release we’ve been anticipating for years! London-based Kokeshi label head Alley Cat...

Source: Side Line

Laibach have announced details of “Strange Fruit”, a three-track single release that follows their recent...

Source: Side Line

The Children’s Crusade has just released a new music video for “Confess”, which includes the...

Source: Side Line

Current 93 are an English experimental music group, working since the early 1980s in folk-based musical forms. The band was founded in 1982 by David Tibet, who has been Current 93's only constant member.

Tibet has been the only constant member in the group, though Steven Stapleton (of Nurse with Wound) has appeared on nearly every Current 93 release. Michael Cashmore has also been a constant contributor since Thunder Perfect Mind. Douglas P. of Death in June has played on well over a dozen Current 93 releases, and Steve Ignorant of Crass (using the name Stephen Intelligent), Boyd Rice, runologist Freya Aswynn, Nick Cave, Björk, Andrew W.K., Anohni, Baby Dee, Will Oldham, Ben Chasny, Rose McDowall, have also lent their talents over the years. Current 93 have released over twenty albums and many singles as well.

Much of Current 93's early work was similar to late 1970s and early 1980s industrial music: abrasive tape loops, droning synthesizer noises and Tibet's distorted, excoriating vocals. The earlier recordings reflect his preoccupation with death, Christ, mysticism, Aleister Crowley (Tibet borrowed the term "93 Current" from Crowley – the 93 Current being the current of Thelema or Agape), Tibetan Buddhism, Gnosticism, runes, swastikas, Noddy, The Wicker Man, and a variety of occult notions. The later to present-day period of Current 93's recordings increasingly reflect Tibet's interest in Christian mysticism and apocalypse.

Three years in its creation, birthing and borning, it follows on from 2018’s million-selling classic, The Light Is Leaving Us All. We are OverMoon to announce the following release information pertaining to the brand new full-length album by David Tibet’s Hallucinatory ChartToppers CURRENT 93, entitled If A City Is Set Upon A Hill.

The twilit, dreamlike If A City Is Set Upon A Hill features Channellings from:

Alasdair Roberts: Guitars, Autoharp, Synthesizer, Backing Vocals.
Aloma Ruiz Boada: Violin.
Andrew Liles: Electronics, Guitars, Keyboards.
Ania Goszczyńska: Design & Fine Wine.
David Tibet: Voice & Voices.
Michael J. York: PIpes, Whistle, Duduk.
Ossian Brown: DroneTones.
Reinier van Houdt: Fender Rhodes, Piano, Guitar.
Rita Knuistingh-Neven: Piano & Voice

David Tibet says the following about If A City Is Set Upon A Hill:

If A City Is Set Upon A Hill was given to me by YHWH G+D through my readings in the Akkadian Omen series šumma Ä�lu ina mÄ�lê šakin (“If A City Is Set Upon A Height”) and through my obsession with the story of Cain Killing Abel (Genesis IV: 8), and my endless rewatching of the same ten supernatural films.

wayyōˀmer qayin ˀel heḇel ˀÄ�ḥîw wayhî bihyôṯÄ�m baśśÄ�ḏeh wayyÄ�qÄ�m qayin ˀel heḇel ˀÄ�ḥîw wayyaharḡÄ�hû

I and the Perfect C93 Family Orgasm have worked harder than harsh to bring you this Obsessive, Incomprehensible, DreamText—which could and would and should and MUST make NO SENSE AT ALL.
Beyond that, I have nothing to say except: There Is No Zodiac. Anyway, Kids, We’re All Dust.

Tracklist:
1. If A City...
2. There Is No Zodiac
3. Joke Moon
4. Clouds At Teatime
5. A Column Of Dust
6. The Child, And Fire
7. ...Is Set Upon A Hill

Source: Prophecy

Neon Insect is the musical alter ego of Nils Sinatsch. Having already released several works,...

Source: Side Line

One of the classic Progress Productions acts System returns after more than 13 years since...

Source: Side Line

Boston-based Dark electronic band, Pneumagnosis just launched a new track, “Let The Flowers Fall” featuring...

Source: Side Line

Out now is the brand new video “El fin de la humanidad” (The end of...

Source: Side Line

Originally formed in 1996, Swedish band Scheitan began its journey blending Black-Metal with touches of...

Source: Side Line

Matt Howden returns with ten new tracks, delivered alongside his trusted companion, Kev, the violin....

Source: Side Line

Spanish artist Juan Carlos Toledo continues his prolific output under the Hiemis name. In this...

Source: Side Line

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Kraftwerk album “Autobahn”, Swedish minimal electro-pop ensemble...

Source: Side Line

“My Son of The Moon” is the latest single from Belgian IDM artist Kilmarth, paving...

Source: Side Line

hackedepicciotto (Alexander Hacke & Danielle de Picciotto) have released their new album, “The Best of...

Source: Side Line

The newest and seventh album by the German duo AD:Key, comprised of Andrea and René...

Source: Side Line

Back in March last year we presented you the Delerium video “In The Deep (feat. Kanga)”. Today we offer you "In The Deep" remixed by Clan of Xymox.

Source: Side Line

The industrial music community mourns the passing of Eric de Vries, co-founder of the drum’n’noise...

Source: Side Line

The Circle Music announces the return of Greek-German dark electro act Schatten Muse with a...

Source: Side Line

After releasing his debut album on Nadanna, MARTINÉ returns with this second opus, which even...

Source: Side Line

Sunroof (Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones) have shared a new track, “Brotherly”, from their forthcoming...

Source: Side Line

VampireFreaks have announce the line-up for the 3-day music festival Dark Force Fest which takes...

Source: Side Line

Dark alternative / post-punk project …And We All Die, based between Texas and D.C., returns...

Source: Side Line

Gildan Softstyle. 100% Baumwolle.

Source: Prophecy

Konstant is a new project and duo from Switzerland, and their debut album is a...

Source: Side Line

Helder Camberos returns with a new opus under his Red Industrie project. The Mexican artist...

Source: Side Line

Today Throbbing Gristle have announced “TG Berlin”, a box set chronicling their previously unreleased work...

Source: Side Line

Cold Spring have announced the first ever release of the legendary BBC sessions by Pitchshifter...

Source: Side Line

Monya Cperski, known simply as Monya, is a Polish artist making waves in the Industrial-Techno...

Source: Side Line

C-Lekktor is undoubtedly part of the crème de la crème of the Mexican Dark-Electro scene,...

Source: Side Line

“Arctic Esotericism” is the fourth album by the Finnish duo Miseria Ultima. Aleksi Martikainen (vocals)...

Source: Side Line

The future leaks from old springs, and everything visible is invisible. While listening to Embracing the Ruins, the newly released collabo-rative album by Márton Csókás (voice), Gabriele Tinti (words) and Mas-simo Pupillo (music), a disquieting image came to mind: a collapsed tomb no one thought they would ever be able to enter again. Moving closer to the silence and the rubble, you notice something, someone, you don’t know what or who, but as the clouds gather overhead and night falls, the movements become more frequent, more determined. Soon you’ll hear eerie sounds emanate from below, voices calling from the inside. They’re calling from the inside of a stone. And they are readyto tell you everything.

Csókás howls, cries, whispers, sings, twists, and turns Tinti’s poetry into life-forms crawling out of the debris. The cacophony of voices charges Pupillo’s spectral and dense synthesized soundscapes, reminis-cent of the analogue inventions on Zu’s Terminalia Amazonia(2019). The music lingers beautifully, roars even heavier, and forms columns, fountains, streams of water evaporating into thin air. Light upon light, a luminous lament, like the image on the album cover, Winged Victoryby Andres Serrano. It cannot last. You become a stone; Nike of Samo-thrace submerged in urine. Godlike and gloriously miserable.

“Only ruins remain in this empty light”, we hear as the music flowswith uninterrupted intensity. The unified vision of Pupillo, Csókás and Tinti is, I think, first and foremost a portrayal of the fear buried in the cold void of lost time, the crepuscular echoes of forgotten horrors, a ghost radio with no one there to listen. It is indeed a transformative ritual, a sacrifice to the broken mirror which surrounds us all.

Tore Engelsen Espedal, Rome, August 2021

Source: Prophecy

Knock, knock. The most terrifying of all terrifying nights is here, and they are back, ready to make your skin crawl.

But first, rewind exactly one year. Enter the newly restored 1920s cinema at Frogner in Oslo. Frescoed stars, cobweb, myrrh, and pumpkins. On the big screen: John Carpenter’s cult classic Halloween (1978). In the pit: Ulver, performing a reimagined version of the iconic score. A surprising and timely one-off right before the capital city shut down for real.

After the lights were turned off that evening, the All Hallows’ Eve quartet – Ole Alexander Halstensgård, Kristoffer Rygg, Tore Ylwizaker and Stian Westerhus – went full isolation in their studio below the haunted hill, fantasizing about bygone nights of slasher, exploitation, and giallo. Three or four months went by, the band returned to the living, and sent their radiophonic workshop experiments off to the Dogs of Doom, France, where friend and fellow film freak, Carpenter Brut did a razor-sharp mix before taking it to Thibault Chaumont (Deviant Lab) for the master.

Scary Muzak, on one hand a homage to Carpenter’s themes – five out of twelve tracks are covers whereas the rest comes from the outer realms – and on the other zooming out on the aesthetics of the late ’70s and early ’80s popular culture. It is perhaps the Norwegians’ most hauntological moment, whirling up themes and moods, horrors and mysteries hidden in the foggy back alleys of your youth. Imagine the gloomy siblings of Les Humphries, Gert Wilden, and their respective orchestras, armed to their teeth with synths, pads, FX. Sometimes classy and chilling, other times amusingly smooth and sleazy, and at times outright beautiful in its suspense-filled vigour, Scary Muzak is an inspired, goblinesque addition to the ever-expanding Ulver catalogue. Interior films, remember?

It’s Halloween, and everyone’s entitled to one good scare.

Source: Prophecy

Knock, knock. The most terrifying of all terrifying nights is here, and they are back, ready to make your skin crawl.

But first, rewind exactly one year. Enter the newly restored 1920s cinema at Frogner in Oslo. Frescoed stars, cobweb, myrrh, and pumpkins. On the big screen: John Carpenter’s cult classic Halloween (1978). In the pit: Ulver, performing a reimagined version of the iconic score. A surprising and timely one-off right before the capital city shut down for real.

After the lights were turned off that evening, the All Hallows’ Eve quartet – Ole Alexander Halstensgård, Kristoffer Rygg, Tore Ylwizaker and Stian Westerhus – went full isolation in their studio below the haunted hill, fantasizing about bygone nights of slasher, exploitation, and giallo. Three or four months went by, the band returned to the living, and sent their radiophonic workshop experiments off to the Dogs of Doom, France, where friend and fellow film freak, Carpenter Brut did a razor-sharp mix before taking it to Thibault Chaumont (Deviant Lab) for the master.

Scary Muzak, on one hand a homage to Carpenter’s themes – five out of twelve tracks are covers whereas the rest comes from the outer realms – and on the other zooming out on the aesthetics of the late ’70s and early ’80s popular culture. It is perhaps the Norwegians’ most hauntological moment, whirling up themes and moods, horrors and mysteries hidden in the foggy back alleys of your youth. Imagine the gloomy siblings of Les Humphries, Gert Wilden, and their respective orchestras, armed to their teeth with synths, pads, FX. Sometimes classy and chilling, other times amusingly smooth and sleazy, and at times outright beautiful in its suspense-filled vigour, Scary Muzak is an inspired, goblinesque addition to the ever-expanding Ulver catalogue. Interior films, remember?

It’s Halloween, and everyone’s entitled to one good scare.

Source: Prophecy

BOTANIST nehmen uns auf ihrem zwölften Album "Paleobotany" auf eine Reise mit, die 70 Millionen Jahre zurück in eine Zeit führt, in der Dinosaurier den Planeten beherrschten und die ersten Wälder zu Kohle wurden. Bevor der apokalyptische Einschlag des Chicxulub-Asteroiden das Zeitalter der Giganten in Flammen untergehen ließ, wuchsen auch viele Pflanzen, deren Artenfamilien auch heute noch Nachkommen haben, zu erstaunlichen Größen heran. "Paleobotany" kommt mit all jenen Markenzeichen daher, die BOTANIST aus der Masse aller Metal-Acts auf diesem Planeten hervorheben. Lyrisch dreht sich bei der Band aus San Francisco, Kalifornien alles um Pflanzen – ein klarer Bruch mit den üblichen Genre-Klischees wie Satan, Drachen und Bier. Ihre Musik ist einerseits deutlich im "Metal" verankert, doch statt 6-saitiger Gitarren verwenden die Amerikaner 110-saitige Hackbretter. Zur Verwirrung aller Traditionalisten statten BOTANIST die perkussiven Saiteninstrumente aus der Folklore mit magnetischen Tonabnehmern aus und verzerren sie mit verschiedenen Mitteln, die von Verstärkern über analoges Tonband bis hin zu digitaler Manipulation reichen. Der daraus resultierende Sound ist ebenso einzigartig wie spektakulär. Die kontinuierliche klangliche Entwicklung von BOTANIST begann an einem hörbar vom nordischen Black Metal geprägten Ausgangspunkt. Die Band entwickelte aber bald einen offeneren, avantgardistischeren Stil, der zu einer wachsenden Komplexität führte. Auf "Paleobotany" haben die Kalifornier einige der verschlungenen progressiven Elemente zugunsten songorientierterer Arrangements wieder abgelegt, die dennoch weiterhin detailreich bleiben und voller Überraschungen stecken. Dies wird dadurch verstärkt, dass das Album vom renommierten schwedischen Produzenten Fredrik Nordström (DIMMU BORGIR, OPETH, AT THE GATES) im Studio Fredman abgemischt wurde. BOTANIST bleiben eine einzigartige Band. "Paleobotany" erweitert die dunkelgrüne Klangpalette ihres Avantgarde-Metal-Sounds zu einem zugänglicheren und dynamischeren Klangerlebnis. Pflanzen bevölkerten schon weit vor den vierbeinige Giganten die Erde – und sie werden immer noch wachsen, wenn die Menschheit längst wieder zu Sternenstaub zerfallen ist. BOTANIST gewinnen ihre musikalische Zukunft, indem sie mit "Paleobotany" Millionen von Jahren in die Vergangenheit reisen!

Tracklist:
01. Aristolochia
02. When Forests Turned to Coal
03. Magnolia
04. Archaeamphora
05. The Impact That Built the Amazon
06. Sigillaria
07. Strychnos Electri
08. Wollemia Nobilis
09. Dioon
10. Royal Protea

Bonus CD (artbook only)
01. Lampenflora
02. Xerophyte
03. Terraforming
04. The Beat That Rocked the Amazon
05. Teardrop

Source: Prophecy

The future leaks from old springs, and everything visible is invisible. While listening to Embracing the Ruins, the newly released collabo-rative album by Márton Csókás (voice), Gabriele Tinti (words) and Mas-simo Pupillo (music), a disquieting image came to mind: a collapsed tomb no one thought they would ever be able to enter again. Moving closer to the silence and the rubble, you notice something, someone, you don’t know what or who, but as the clouds gather overhead and night falls, the movements become more frequent, more determined. Soon you’ll hear eerie sounds emanate from below, voices calling from the inside. They’re calling from the inside of a stone. And they are readyto tell you everything.

Csókás howls, cries, whispers, sings, twists, and turns Tinti’s poetry into life-forms crawling out of the debris. The cacophony of voices charges Pupillo’s spectral and dense synthesized soundscapes, reminis-cent of the analogue inventions on Zu’s Terminalia Amazonia(2019). The music lingers beautifully, roars even heavier, and forms columns, fountains, streams of water evaporating into thin air. Light upon light, a luminous lament, like the image on the album cover, Winged Victoryby Andres Serrano. It cannot last. You become a stone; Nike of Samo-thrace submerged in urine. Godlike and gloriously miserable.

“Only ruins remain in this empty light”, we hear as the music flowswith uninterrupted intensity. The unified vision of Pupillo, Csókás and Tinti is, I think, first and foremost a portrayal of the fear buried in the cold void of lost time, the crepuscular echoes of forgotten horrors, a ghost radio with no one there to listen. It is indeed a transformative ritual, a sacrifice to the broken mirror which surrounds us all.

Tore Engelsen Espedal, Rome, August 2021

Source: Prophecy

Cloud sparked and star fed, Michael Cashmore’s The Night Has Rushed In is a soundtrack and soundscape where each note surprises, as if elevating the ear. This eleven-piece suite of challenging and enchanting electronica fuses moments of sublime chillout with those of near anthemic inspiration. Piano and percussion align with a synthesised chorus as this unique voice heard through fingers sings to the soul, sea and sky. As the powers within rise and shift, this music masters the forces formed deep within us. Listening becomes evolution and transportation too. Each sound flies.

“With every album I make, I have always wished it to be my Greatest Work ever. Through this album, The Night Has Rushed In, I believe I have definitely achieved this aim. And I am Continuing in that Work. I have sought in this album, and through this album, to use Divine Audio Frequencies in Instinctive, Mystical, Ways, Connected to All of the Sciences to try and reach a Higher State of Consciousness through Personal Transformation. I then Instinctively Alter these Frequencies to Transform them into some New Reality, which allows me to Transform my Consciousness. I was Searching for Divine Love, The Sun, and for Home—and I Found Them All. This Work is an ongoing Documentation of my Personal Transformation. With The Night Has Rushed In I believe I have definitely achieved this aim. This Work was created Instinctively, Chaotically, Wildly, without Direction or Control, from applying Self-Taught Techniques to reach a Higher level of Consciousness. I made this album. I did not make this album.”

– MICHAEL CASHMORE 22/1/21

Tracklist:
1. The Sun Rises From The Deepest Oceans
2. Powers Start To Shift
3. You Are The Divine Center Of Vibration
4. Run Into The Emptiness Of Everything
5. The Jewel Lies Within Each Heart
6. It Is The Sacred Constellation Of Mathematics
7. Transformation Through Love
8. Reach Your True Beautiful Potential
9. Journey Through Consciousness To The Hidden Throne
10. The Night Has Rushed In (ft. vocals by Anohni)
11. Ashes Fly As Spiraling Swallows Return Home Into Night Skies

Source: Prophecy

Smoke from burning incense rises and dances, the sprawling and sensual byproduct of a thing turning to ash. The trees we amputated from ourselves threaten to grow back, the land we tried to escape from beckons us to return. We find out how to come home by running away from it. As we navigate our personal field of burdens, we imagine becoming weightless. How much space is there between a dream and a trial? In Alora Crucible there is none at all.

Biographies are apocryphal time traps. Here there is only fission and the thankfully forgotten coward's dream of photographing statues...

After we disappear, we hope to re-appear. We reach for ways to reinstate the ground beneath us – to reverse the vanishing. Old religions sought the safe passage of the life contained in the body to the nonmaterial spirit realm. That place, it was usually imagined, would be an improvement. It was, at the very least, a somewhere.

Who could foresee the future, when the abstraction of nearly everything into an intangible nowhere would drag us with it whether we wanted to go or not? We drift in liminal nowhere space, unsure which direction we prefer: final oblivion on one side, or a return to Earth on another.

At the very least, a world of things abstracted into nowhere lets us think in terms of the collapse of things into other things. This leaves the mind ripened for imagining the instrument collapsing into the musician collapsing into the idea – then all of it collapses into the landscape, and the landscape spits it back out. This process happens a billion times over every millisecond, and collapse starts to stabilize into a recognizable shape: the artist, becoming not because they are the beginning of something but because they are enmeshed in a procession.

Hands into fingers, fingers into strings, strings into vibrations collapsing into the air, and regenerated as chemical compounds, each one never having been and never to be again. There are pathways under our feet with which plants speak, just like those amongst our above-shoulder nerves. Someone must eventually find out what sound this makes. They must take it upon themselves to sacrifice themselves to it, in the hope that there will be a thereafter more worthy of pursuit than the nowhere of numbers and the empty promises of dead tyrants.

It would be wrong to say that descriptions are graveyards, though they are. The truth is they now reside in graveyards, they populate the soil as a legion of rightfully dead. Only the heft and lift of the poet deserve respiration, but the poets have been driven into a different labyrinth even further underground than the graves, breathing by halves in the darkness of catacombs waiting to finally expire. Unless some brash attempt to commune with them s쳮ds.

True divination must destroy linearity. That is its only choice. The choice which cannot help but be made forms the pathway of the humiliated and reverent saint.

– Joshua Strawn

Source: Prophecy

Knock, knock. The most terrifying of all terrifying nights is here, and they are back, ready to make your skin crawl.

But first, rewind exactly one year. Enter the newly restored 1920s cinema at Frogner in Oslo. Frescoed stars, cobweb, myrrh, and pumpkins. On the big screen: John Carpenter’s cult classic Halloween (1978). In the pit: Ulver, performing a reimagined version of the iconic score. A surprising and timely one-off right before the capital city shut down for real.

After the lights were turned off that evening, the All Hallows’ Eve quartet – Ole Alexander Halstensgård, Kristoffer Rygg, Tore Ylwizaker and Stian Westerhus – went full isolation in their studio below the haunted hill, fantasizing about bygone nights of slasher, exploitation, and giallo. Three or four months went by, the band returned to the living, and sent their radiophonic workshop experiments off to the Dogs of Doom, France, where friend and fellow film freak, Carpenter Brut did a razor-sharp mix before taking it to Thibault Chaumont (Deviant Lab) for the master.

Scary Muzak, on one hand a homage to Carpenter’s themes – five out of twelve tracks are covers whereas the rest comes from the outer realms – and on the other zooming out on the aesthetics of the late ’70s and early ’80s popular culture. It is perhaps the Norwegians’ most hauntological moment, whirling up themes and moods, horrors and mysteries hidden in the foggy back alleys of your youth. Imagine the gloomy siblings of Les Humphries, Gert Wilden, and their respective orchestras, armed to their teeth with synths, pads, FX. Sometimes classy and chilling, other times amusingly smooth and sleazy, and at times outright beautiful in its suspense-filled vigour, Scary Muzak is an inspired, goblinesque addition to the ever-expanding Ulver catalogue. Interior films, remember?

It’s Halloween, and everyone’s entitled to one good scare.

Source: Prophecy