experimental rock/ post metal / sludge metal

Ambiance is an album released in November 2, by Swiss experimental post metal trio Ølten. Forty minutes long, the record has eight tracks: Igelkott, Raus, Klark, Lied, Gover, Sludge, Popoutro and Pope. An interesting album, that presents to the audience a colorful, eccentric mixture of post metal and sludge with a varying degree of experimental tenacity, the music is elaborated in concentrated layers of consistent vitality and synergy, with continuous grooves of expansive densities, intrinsically worked over the lethal placidity of its exceedingly abrasive harmonies. 

The style of the group – despite its opaque premises –, is very flexible and cohesive. They engage in a salutary degree of experimentalism, without any fears, but without extremisms or exaggerations either. Moderate and proverbial to a certain extent, their melodies dilacerate its own rhythmic devices, flirting a little with repetitiveness, but they do it in a very dynamic and lucid fashion, never becoming monotonous nor tedious. The know how to genuinely provoke the organic fuel of their harmonies, and definitely knows how to maintain vivid the mostly ecstatic densities upon which their music is made. 

While Ambiance is not a fantastic nor fabulous album, it has major qualities that reveal – to a certain extent –, how original, audacious and inventive these skilled musicians really are. With embracing tonalities that circumnavigates their slow paced harmonies, working exponentially, beautifully and existentially with somber, but discreet elements that makes their music to be a little bit sinister and mysterious, but inadvertently fragile at the same time, Ølten knows how to transform music into a more surreal, dispersive and quintessential form of art. They are definitely a sensational band, whose stylized sound departs from a distinct, plural level of creativity.  

Despite all of their qualities, though, they definitely have to reinvigorate their music with more unpredictable components, something to make them sound more tempestuous and exhilarant. Nevertheless, they are definitely in the right direction – elaborating a sound of their own –, that doesn’t appeal to a particular genre. Ølten is an interesting group that deserves to be followed closely, and Ambiance is an intelligent and very nihilistic experimental ambient rock album, that oversees the gracious and sensible development of a genre, yet to be fully understood and defined. 



Wagner

indie rock/ experimental rock

bandcamp

ok seas is an album released by an eponymous indie rock British musical act, from Portsmouth, in early October. Only forty-three minutes long, the record has twelve relatively brief tracks: sad synth, huh, chime guitar, organ bells, short #15, clap drum, tremolo robot, player piano, yamaha sigh, sure sure, big spiel and bow arp. With simple, but charming songs – despite some limitations – ok seas is a decent album, fluid and somewhat melancholic in tone, majorly influenced by the poignantly affluent commonalities of slow and sentimental indie rock. 

While definitely not fabulous nor original, the work certainly has decent qualities. Departing from a conventional layout – with some passages clearly looking as fragments arranged to compose a mosaic of dissonant cadences –, the virtual elasticity of the harmonies is a common resource constantly inserted over its intuitive latent sequences, agglutinated in the downward periphery of its sensitive sonorous contingencies, worn out by some restrictions. It’s also easy to perceive a concentrated, tough soft melodic structure, and a very cohesive sonorous identity, that is delicately tied together to propitiate a sensible artistic unity to the work. With a musical technique that is gracefully efficient, the dilated harmonies fulfil its colorful dispositions with sincere and profoundly melancholic exasperations, as the melodies walk away throughout the axis of its linear platform exposing the solitary sensibility of its ordinary fugacious splendor. 

Definitely, the album is more strictly valuable by the stability of its precise technique, than anything related to its creative elements, that are drastically more limited and predictable, resenting itself to a composite layout of sameness. Nevertheless, ok seas is a listenable album, good, decent, emotional, that will not aggregate too much on your personal musical universe, but has some qualities that extracts in the calmness of its musical atmosphere a discreet level of beauty, that has produced a handful of songs, good enough to please enthusiasts of soft indie rock.

A modest album with good melodies, ok seas – as a band – needs to become more versatile and audacious. They have demonstrated some good qualities on this album, but they have to learn how to expel monotony, and efficiently, to surprise their audience with more pungent and unpredictable tunes. They already proved with this record that they are good doing calmer and flavored sentimental cantilenas, but an entire album of emotional soft songs can be too tedious to hold it out for forty-five minutes. Definitely, they have to aggregate other elements into their music, as they have talent and potential to convert their work into a more dynamic and versatile art.  


Wagner

drone / ambient / folk

After the breathtaking new album from Jet Plane, here is another one of my Merchants Of Air favorites returning with a new album. Ukrainian duo Gamardah Fungus has been featured on this website several times in the past, exploring the regions of dark jazz, ambient, acoustic folk and experimental music. 

Like its predecessor, 'Fairytales', 'Crossing The Wasteland' has been released by Flaming Pines. The album contains five tracks, loaded with drones, soundscapes, guitar melodies and heaps of atmosphere. With these elements, Gamardah Fungus further explores their sound.

The music is inspired by a trip through the Thar desert in India. The duo wanted to explore the desert's mysterious dry atmosphere and translate it into their music. In that, they certainly succeeded. Musically, 'Crossing The Wasteland' walks away from the dark jazz atmospheres of the earlier efforts and into searing hot desert blues. In away, it brings images of Dylan Carlson and Ashtoreth jamming in the Californian desert, and I think that's a pretty good compliment. With your eyes closed, you can easily picture yourself there, between the cacti and the vast plains of sand.

The overall feeling is one of solitude, displayed by bluesy guitar plucks over immense drones. The elements are pretty similar in every track. In fact, the whole album feels like one long jam session. A jam sessions I would love to witness live someday and I'm sure I'm not the only one. This is music for fans of everything between Aidan Baker and Brant Bjork. Guitar ambient meets gloomy desert rock, somewhere in a gargantuan area of sand and nothingness. This is a remarkable piece of music, one I will definitely recommend to all droners, stoners and doomers out there.


​Serge

blackgaze / blackwave / electronic / black metal / experimental

Back to Reality is an album released on October 29, by a musician of an undisclosed location, known only by the alias Abstract Void, that does an “experimental blend of blackgaze and synthwave”, according to himself. 

With flexible harmonic grooves and a very electro-dance mood, Back to Reality is a groundbreaking and majestic album. An electronic stalwart with melancholic, but resolute black metal vocals, the level of sagacious, creative and fearless experimentation done on this album goes beyond any extraordinary measures, and the result is simply magnificent. With beautiful harmonies that traverse horizontally uninterrupted waves of colorful and tempestuous sounds, the rapid, though somewhat lugubrious tendencies of the harmonies display a very atmospheric black metal vibe on the surface of its gracious style, although the anatomic consistency of the music, in general, is very electronic, with the soul of its imperative nuances deeply resounding oceans of volatile densities from within its organic sensibilities.    

The album is very concise, though. Thirty-six minutes long, Back to Reality has seven tracks: Wind of Reminiscence, As I Watch the Sunset Fade, Back to Reality, Disconnected, Joy Night, A Reflection of Dying Past and Sigh. Its dilated vivaciousness makes it appear sometimes a very electronic techno dance album, and certainly evokes – in the epicenter of the most abrasive elements of its gracefully splendid mosaic of diluted electricity –  influences from these genres too, that are properly absorbed into the sensible vastness of the artist’s style. Exceedingly listenable and glorious, Back to Reality is a marvelously creative sonorous experience, and the most formidable and natural mixture of black metal and electronic music that I’ve ever heard.  

Evidently, an unlimited, cohesive and audacious creativity plays an important role in the majestic graciousness of its sonorous vitality. With virtually no boundaries to his wonderful artistry, the artist delivers an empire of virtuous and diligent musical cadences on this state of the art work, that lives by the monumental scale of its original standards.

A very dynamic, lucid and proverbial album, that is as much an experiment as a musical statement about style and versatility, Abstract Void has perfectly crafted Back to Reality as an uncontestable and fundamental masterpiece, that deserves to find its audience. With an unbelievably ascendant and primordial degree of originality, that feels as natural as well as carefully dilapidated, Back to Reality is a pleasant and emotional masterpiece, that will leave on by the grace of its astute and glorious level of authenticity. Definitely a wonderful accomplishment, Back to Reality is a joy of consistent grace.


Wagner

post black metal / black metal/ death metal/ experimental

Oasis is an album released on November 2, by New Zealand experimental/ atmospheric post black metal duo Súl ad Astral. Almost one hour long, the record has ten tracks: In Dreams Reborn, Float, Pennies Down The Infinity Well, Last Regret, Inaction and Consequence, Hindsight, This Broken Ideal and the title track, Oasis. A beautiful album, impregnated with a formidable level of organic fury, dramatic energy, dynamic synergy and an ostensibly explosive level of creative originality, Oasis is a lucid, expressive and very cohesive work, abundant on rapid harmonies, aggressive tonalities and distinct musical vigor. With a genuine and consistent signature sound, the album – from the beginning until the end –, reveals itself as a primal and whimsical musical work, that displays on the layers of its proficient salutary qualities an excellent and brutal performance.  

With the amazing and joyful intertwining of clean and guttural vocals, and discreetly flirting with power metal devices, the style of Súl ad Astral is very fluid, gracefully dynamic, dense and proverbially virtuous. Most of all, is impeccable and sensibly peculiar, with a very distinct grace floating over its very colorful, yet heavy notes. With some latent melodic death metal tonalities being amazingly prevalent over its distinct rapid sequences – nurturing the unlimited atmosphere of its boundless musical glory –, the sound is perfunctorily creative and fearless, and never renounces to its majestic harmonious and composite grandeur, that seems wisely dilapidated over the dimensional tapestry of a dense, but perfectly consecrated melodic expansion. 

As a sensational conjuncture of symphonies that departs from an entirely new universe of passionate and sagacious musical possibilities, Súl ad Astral has conceived Oasis as a masterful, rapturous and beautiful mosaic of marvelous splendor, whose wonderful style is definitely singular, and will hardly find a similar parallel in the history of underground music. 

Crossing over several distinct genres – post black metal, melodic death metal, post grunge, metalcore and even pop rock – in varying degrees, in a wide and creative range of intricate sonorous possibilities, Súl ad Astral is a fantastic and proverbial musical act, with no boundaries or restrictions whatsoever. Merging altogether the most predominant elements of several apparently disparate genres, this fabulous musical act conceives an entirely different level of greatness very cohesively, without any disruptions nor dysfunctions, whose splendid results can be categorized as a creative statement of talent and authenticity. 

With a splendorous shape, and an extending musical diagram, the energetic and powerful creativity of the duo is very compelling and graciously vivacious. They are obviously not bounded or limited to a particular genre, but definitely are fully compromised in developing its own insightful, organic and highly original musical style. 


Wagner

ambient / experimental

Rapoon is the long running experimental ethno ambient project of English audio-visual artist Robin Storey, co-founder of industrial pioneers :zoviet*france:. Offworld Op1 Equs is the second part of the Mercury Rising Triptych in celebration of 25 years of Rapoon. The album was released through the Dutch quality label Winter-Light.

The theme on this recording is about an alien android world facing a six month cold period on their inhabited planet Offworld Op1. Too cold even for androids to survive. So they need to move to the farthest moon Celios and wait for the sun to rise again. The seven tracks on Offworld Op1 Equs is a the soundtrack inspired by this tale. It is advisable to read the short introduction inside the digipack before you take on to the listening trip.

Offworld Op1 Equs sets off with a repeating piano melody that will be used in the first four tracks. Rapoon uses jazzy vibes and ethnic sounds that give a light drama in the music. The nervousness of the android community was remarkably made detectable. Unearthly voices and tones are mixed in the ambient atmosphere. In the third track, We Beat Our Drums, beats appear and the piano sounds more anxious and hollow. Android communication resonates now and then in the distance. This track has a roving Harold Budd mood.

Part four, The Crystals Form Along The Edge has still this repeating piano melody where soundscapes and alien talking are melted into a bizarre desolate mood. Can androids dream too? The fifth part, The Processing Of Flowers, has an ethnic chanting that sounds too ordinary to be connected with the extraterrestrial storyline . Saxophone and flute tunes turn up conceiving a jungle tendency.

A Sequence Of Lights We Travel In Darkness drones with noisy rumble. Strange vocal sequences give this sixth track a very dark an industrial character. You can feel the androids are impatient to leave their nightmare.

The last track is an eighteen minute long revival and celebrating piece. The sounds of relief and freedom bathe in beautiful spacious soundscapes. Enlightenment arrives for the conscious machines with overmodulated noises and choral synths. This part ends with beautiful and peaceful ambient of android consolation.

Rapoon manages to construct a fabulous trip into an alien machinery world, drenched in perfection. Use headphones to listen to this beauty and be aware that humanoid life forms will appear in your dreams after this journey. Cd comes in a full colour 6-panel digipack and is  limited to 300 copies. 
 

Patsker

progressive rock / experimental rock

Blasphemy Alley is an album released in early September by progressive rock group Bienwolf, from Pune, India. A marvelous and thoroughly sensible album that catches the listener from the beginning, this is an unbelievably strong, marvelous and gracious rock album, energized to the fullest by a deeply inspirational and creative authorial sound. The first song, Vampa's Lore, begins with a wonderfully dense piano, that immediately takes over the melody by storm, and you feel inherently compelled to listen to the whole work until the end. Despite being excessively concise – with only thirty one minutes, that feels like only five –, the album has a powerful musical strength, that becomes evident by the solid cohesiveness of the songs. The exceedingly majestic originality of the music, with a smooth, reflexive and serene sound that grows from the sincere, but lunar melancholy of its notes, makes every song on this record a treasure with its own charismatic flavor.   

Probably one of the most marvelous albums that I’ve ever heard, Blasphemy Alley is humanely poetic, and the melodies flow naturally, like the rain after a hot afternoon; you just expect it to happen, but not with such a vast, tempestuous and astutely atypical grace. With fragility, patience and a rational flavor that adds a sensational splendor to the musical surface, the group really has made some simple songs, with a glorious level of creative sensibility, that really strikes the listener at an emotional level, with a genuine, reliant and formidable sense of artistry, that reflects a superb level of audacity, that keeps modest and discreet at the insight of its own unquestionable greatness.   

With only five songs – Vampa's Lore, Catch 22, Masquerader, Descent and Simbelmyne – the only bad thing on this album is the already mentioned conciseness. Nevertheless, this is easy to solve, after the album was finished, I’ve started to listen to it again. It’s easy to notice that the general style of the group is simple, but the eagerness and objectivity of its melodies contrasts highly with the astonishingly marvelous level of profoundness and fearless, unbound and gracious creativity of its rhythmical procedures. Penetrating the human graces of the heart without being overtly romantic nor sentimental, Bienwolf has really conceived one of the most glorious and inventive albums in modern independent rock history. 

A fantastic album that opens and understands new possibilities for the genre without disrupting its basic premises, nor exhausting the fortunes of its artistic sonorous signature, Blasphemy Alley is a wonderful, sincere and splendorous work of art, that deserves and has all the necessary qualities to make history.   


Wagner

rock’n’roll / hard rock/ noise rock / experimental

Loss is an album released on October 26 by British hard rock act Pijn. Sixty-six minutes long, the record has eight tracks: Denial, Detach, Distress, Blanch, Blush, Unspoken, Squalor and Squander. With a very flexible degree of artistry, the musicality of Pijn goes to both extremes: it can be furiously aggressive and dangerously brutal, as well as expressively calm, melodic and majestically virtuous. This is already noticeable in the first two songs: Denial is a virulent anthem of hazardous and protuberant aggression, while Detach is a serene and soft serenade of introspective melancholy. The album in general has a proverbial density that speaks for itself, although it is very accessible on the sensibility of its methodic and direct easiness, as well as playful and modest on its scale of ambitions.

While the album seems redundant at first – at least in the longer songs –, the musicality of the group, though appears to be simple, is profoundly rooted in a coherent style, that explores systematically the fugacious elements of the melodies, while delivering a deliberately generous and cosmic flamboyant eccentricity to the more dispersive virtues of its placid tonalities, formally engraved in a graceful nostalgia, that easily comes out of sound. Trying to recover lost time in the primordial vicinities of a life that is no longer there, the occasionally almost minimalist style of Pijn is a free deliverance of joy. In the course of this fascinating musical journey, it becomes more than that: a vivid celebration of life, that personally undertakes a realm of sincere melancholy to rescue the genuine golden elements of rock’n’roll, with the firm resolution to compose in a singular piece of paradise the purity, the liberty and the glory that became lost in the sands of time, though they are never restricted to this genre in particular. Their creativity is limitless and boundless. So much so, that in the process of delivering the sound, they develop their own eccentric, playful and peculiar style.   

While the heaviness of the guitar lines is the element that mostly stands out, the adherence of precise notes extending its anesthetic poignant devices in the occasional reverberations of latent melodies never divides the sensibilities of its dramatic soul. They patiently, but anxiously highlight the proverbial qualities of the album: as Loss evolves, the salutary epicenter of the music becomes more philosophic, serene, diluted and dense, although the music itself becomes lighter, digressive and effectively dispersive. 

Occasionally, you will hear awesome screaming vocals, in slow passages delivering the color of agony and despair, in the style of post-hardcore and straight edge; although the album is mostly instrumental. Given its extensive length, the record is somewhat subjected to a certain redundancy; but the sound in general is very sober, somber and delightful, able to satisfy anyone who is expecting the unexpected, with a very clean dose of melancholy, anger, hostility, despondency, acceptance, conformity and exhilaration. Not in this particular order, of course. But be positive that you certainly are going to deeply enjoy Loss.  


Wagner

alternative rock / indie rock / experimental

Death Spells is an album released in mid-September, by American alternative/indie rock group Holy Fawn. One hour long, the record has ten tracks: Dark Stone, Arrows, Drag Me Into The Woods, Yawning, Seer, Two Waves, Take Me With You, Vespertine, Same Blood and Sleep Tongue. A formidable album with a very dense and melancholic tone, Death Spells is a musical study on deliberative melodious introspection, with no clear boundaries between genres, flirting sometimes – very discreetly though – with genres like metalcore, atmospheric black metal and indie rock, albeit their general musical compass is mostly engraved on an alternative rock sphere, radically indebted to post rock. Without any fear to experiment, the band delivers a secure, but volatile sound, that virtually exposes a very mature style. With an audacious, but sensible level of originality, that is deeply intertwined in their inherent musical abilities, Holy Fawn consecrates a very lucid and serious work on Death Spells, departing mostly from slow harmonies, that elaborates in the epicenter of its majestic beauty a solid grace between sorrowful serenades of philosophic serenity and aggressive thunderous downfalls of mordacious agony. 

With latent, soundscapes that appeals to very sentimental harmonious propensities, the sound of the group is generally elegant and profound, though they mostly abuse on slow rhythmical devices. Nevertheless, it is possible to feel a very surreal, but dormant fury discreetly positioned at the core of each song, which vehemently adds to the genuine folklore they gracefully elaborate in the vast expansive diagram of their music.

In Death Spells, beauty is everywhere, and strikes with such a peaceful and serene charisma, that is impossible not to feel enchanted by the lucid, delicate and captivating musical tonalities they perfectly expose. Creativity here is transposed as the most excellent device for authentic artistry, and evaluates in an ever aggrandizing sonorous panorama the possibilities exposed by its ostensibly virtuous, but despondent harmonies. Even their hardest passages – some of them remembering metalcore act We Came As Romans – seems to disclosure a deep sense of tranquility, although also delivers, paradoxically, a disturbed hemisphere of afflictive, deceptive and lucid sense of reality. 

Although the album is somewhat very long, their general musical anatomy remains cohesive, and their creative greatness is free of any sentimentality and generic passages. Holly Fawn easily flows between genres, in a fluid ocean of sonorous synergy, delivering a very appreciative and peculiar sound, that becomes quite characteristic, as one can hear the album entirely as only one long track, without any disruptive feeling of impatience or monotony. Emerging as the marvelous result of an energetic and meticulous musical confluence, Death Spells has ardently evolved from the sophisticated standards the group established themselves to follow.  


​Wagner

ambient / drone / experimental

It's strange how an album can evoke a range of different thoughts and associations. The most obvious thing that came to mind when I first listened to this epos was Halloween, and more specifically the music we used in our self-built haunted house. Back then, we frightened children with Elend, now we could use this album. Second, I can easily imagine hearing this music when I see images from the latest video game hit Red Dead Redemption. Pictures of vast deserts and dark landscapes, pictures of solitude but also of violence and mystery.

'Redemption' is the latest effort of Ashtoreth, in cooperation with No-One, released on the prolific Consouling Sounds label. For fans of decent drone-ambient and gloomy experimentalism, those reasons should be more than enough to get their hands on a copy. 'Redemption' is one track, lasting over sixty minutes. It is not a mere song, but an enigmatic narrative of strange worlds, eerie rituals and deep meditation. The track was born from an improvisation by Ashtoreth. No-One de- and re-constructed the soundscapes, rearranged the shamanic chants and added his  own murky magic.

The result is a perfect horror movie for the blind. This thing is loaded with atmosphere and it's easy to imagine your own tale while listening to the music. In my personal imagination, the story begins with a biker, driving off into an overgrown forest and entering ancient, mystifying lands. Drones, soundscapes and noises create ever changing tales, overwhelming and fascinating the biker/listener. Of course, the story can be different for any listener and also vary with every listening session. Like any decent adventure story, there is suspense, there is angst and there is beauty. All of that is present in this lengthy composition. 

In a way, this album is a modern version of classical compositions like 'Ma Vlast' by Bedřich Smetana. Here, music is not used to rock-out, to dance or to bang your head. Here, a vast array of sounds are being used to create alternate realities, and that is the beauty of 'Redemption'. Two talented and skilled sound-puppeteers guiding the magic of music. So undoubtedly I will recommend this album to anyone out there. It's one of the most enigmatic collaborations in today's ambient scene and a unique experience. 


​Serge