Doesn't it seem like the more "extreme" a genre gets (in any direction, i.e. extremely harsh or minimal or whatever), the more it has to do to be interesting? Noise, drone, ambient... all fairly interchangeable and indistinct, for the most part. There is simply only so much you can do with white noise/single-digit BPM/holding down a C on your Korg. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy all the aforementioned genres, but it's very easy to get burnt out and jaded with it all.
My first drone experience was, as it is for most people, with Sunn O))) (unless you're uber-tr00 and listened to Earth.) I didn't quite "get it", again, as it is with most people. Not that didn't
understand, per se: I was a fan the Melvins' doomier, proto-drone, dirgey, [ominous-sounding-D-word] material, especially "Hag Me" off of
Houdini. But what the fuck was with Sunn O)))? Ten minutes long, no discernible "riff", no
nothin' as far as I was concerned. Admittedly, I was 15 and was much more interested in death/black/thrash at the time, so I probably wasn't in the best frame of mind.
A couple years later, when
Black One came out, I (
NOTE: this is not a blog about Sunn O))) and this story is indeed going somewhere, but feel free to skip this paragraph if you want to get to the meat and potatoes of this thing.) decided to pick it up and give the band another chance, especially since this album had a number of guests and seemed to be a fairly varied album. Which it actually
was. Oren Ambarchi, John Wiese, Wrest and Malefic (of Leviathan and Xasthur, respectively) doing
vocals HOLY SHIT. And it worked: almost every track
stood out. The tremolo
riff (riff?!) in "It Took The Night to Believe", the goddamn netherwordly screams in "Cursed Realm (Of the Winterdemons)", and, perhaps my favourite, the
huge harmonics in "Cry for the Weeper." Drone could be more glacial paced guitar sludge, and I'm doing my best to come up with a "it only
took me the night to believe in the genre" sort of joke, but I can't.
So with a newfound interest in the genre, I set out to see what other "experimental" drone I could find.
Boris's unpredictable, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach;
Earth's sun-baked southern doom;
Asunder's
monolithic funeral dirges. And, just recently, I have discovered, perhaps, the crown jewel of them all (ok, aside from Boris, but they're not
really drone, ya know?):
Asva.
What You Don't Know Is Frontier is absolutely
massive. Oppressive, haunting, ethereal... every buzz word you use when talking about drone applies here, the only difference being these words actually
mean those things now.
More than anything, it's the simple things on the album that are most effective. As I'm sure you can tell from the pictures, these are slightly more
mature doom merchants, but it really does show. Take, for instance, the organ (keyboard? Synth?) in the opening title track. This is what takes it beyond most other drone. It's very basic but
goddamn if it doesn't unlead this nightmare fuel.
The highlight of this album (not just for me, but for everyone, it seems, according to
Last.fm , too) is undoubtedly "A Game In Heaven, Hard Work In Hell." Words aren't going to do much for this one, but let's say it starts of very droney (surprise!), builds with some eerie, indistinct female vocals before, out of completely nowhere, fucking bulldozes you with a glacier made of onyx and hate. I don't really want to ruin the track actually, because I do hope you'll shit yourself the same way I did when I first spun this record.
Shit yourself with pure awesome.I encourage you to buy this record if you like what you hear. The band, like a lot of people, have been affected by the current economic situation, and because of lack of money had to cancel a European tour scheduled for next month.
Buy it straight from the band, cut out as much of the middleman as you can.Asva - A Game In Heaven, Hard Work In Hell
Yeah, doom-laden blacksludge. It's the sort of record you have to slowly peel and grind off your skin after listening to it - it will do everything in its power to suffocate, bruise, drown, and otherwise oppress you and if you're the kind of cat who's still around after reading that genre checklist and soaking in that beautifully bleak cover art then you're the ideal to candidate to be locked up in that shack yourself (look closer & don't come back until you see it). Luckily, Vit are a part of the movement in black metal that has, sadly, only really come around recently, wherein a) outside influences are a-okay, and b) "oppressive" and "bruising" don't mean triple-digit BPM all the way through (wait, is that a-okay? Am I being untrue? Can black metal be "a-okay"?). The draw here, and what makes this album infinitely more engaging, is the use of dynamics. The slow passages, the clean passages, the ambient passages - once the riff does kick in, it's a hundred times more brutal after being teased at for minutes at a time. Likewise, there's a huge doom influence, making this a fairly plodding record throughout (plodding as a positive thing, natch) meaning that when the tempo is dialed up it's all the more electrifying. Really, I can't remember the last time "sort of fast" was this thrilling, but it just speaks to the expert sense of pacing from start to finish. Thrilling in a "I wish I was dead" sort of way.
