At the end of last decade, a new entity was born in the Netherlands: Styxian Industries. The aim was to destroy the last beliefs in mankind, and to brutally penetrate all organic structures by the post-apocalyptic industrial hammer (damn, I’m in a poetic mood tonight…). But seriously, this act created some stuff in between 2009 and 2010, with a highlight in 2012 by means of a split with Redreom, released via Total Death Records.
When I was looking for some additional information about Iconoclast’s past, I found out that this Russian band (yes, this review deals with the ‘iconoclast’ from Yaroslavl, Russia, and not with one of the hundred other bands with that very same name) was formed in 2003. It is remarkable but this album actually is the first one they did in ten years of existence. But it does not matter, it’s just an objective fact that did ‘absorb’ my attention.
Nidra are quite a young duo from the Russian city of Perm, more than 1,000 km East from Moscow, and 500 km North of the Kazakhstani border, for your geographical information.
I was extremely pleased by All Tongues Of Babel, the second full length album by Belgian experimentalists Carneia. For the interested ones, you can check out the review I did on Concreteweb’s update of November 24th 2013. Now, almost two years and a half year after that release, the four piece, including members of e.g. King Hiss, Vermillion and No More Faith, return with a four-track EP, called Symmetry Of Mind.
Well, when you name your band after a pretty guy like Edmund Kemper, you probably do not need to expect songs of love and pink dreams. Edmund Kemper was, as you surely know, a Californian serial murderer, who dismembered his victims and who is accused as well for necrophilia and cannibalism. He committed his first murders at the age of fifteen (his grandparents), and after some years of collocation, he did at least eight facts in less than a year.
For more than a decade, Spanish duo Eldar gives us aural pleasure by their several recordings, especially released via SkullLine and, in a next phase, via Old Europa Café (of course I cannot but mention Cold Meat Industry either, can I?). There has been a permanent evolution, and the very same goes for this new full length, Noûs.
I sort of ‘adore’ about everything that gets released via French Black Metal label Hass Weg Productions, simply because they do focus on true, uncompromising, qualitative releases instead of over-produced, trendy acts that try to impress with a fake image. If you click on the label’s name, you will be able to find some other reviews I did for this label (I wrote them with pleasure and devotion, let’s be sure about that!).
A couple of years ago, Consouling Sounds started the Consouling Agency spin-off, created especially to assist (new) bands, projects or artists. They offer their help in the studio, as well as for the release, promotion and / or distribution of newly recorded material. Bands can still act independently, but under the protecting wings of one of Flanders’ most prominent labels.
First Human Ferro is a solo-outfit by Old Captain’s chieftain Olegh Kolyada. In early 2016 he did create the album Heterodox at the Oda Relicta headquarters. There are some more ‘lost’ tracks from those recording sessions, which have been made available too in mean time via this label’s Bandcamp-page - FYI.
Daghraven is the name of a new outfit by Kevin Imbrechts, whom we know from the dreamy Ambient project Illuminine or Alternative Noise Rock band Mosquito. He had quite some ideas that did not fit to both other outfits, and eventually he wanted to canalise these ideas under a new moniker, which became Daghraven. Kevin did record everything at his home studio, and the result was mastered in Iceland; cf. his connections out there since his Illuminine connections (cf.
