Ivan Tibos.

[shorter review, but a fairly required necessity for sure!]

This is a very special release for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s the first one that I will write for Sado Rituals since this webzine resurrected recently. What an honor for this project, isn’t it? Being mentioned (once more) on Concreteweb, isn’t that a satisfying thought, a veneration beyond imagination, reverent worship-worthy?

[since I did promise to write a review once in a while for bands and / or projects and / or artists and / or labels and / or distributors (etc.) that I do adore (personally and / or musically), I will finish this older one, which I did prepare a while ago, but which never got finished. This one is for Bart, this one is for Mark, this one is for you!]

For any introduction about this outfit by our dearest Mister (bleak), I invite you to check out any of the former reviews I did for this specific project (even-though I did write down my thoughts on some of his other projects too in the meantime)…

Official note from the writer of this article (indeed, the beautiful me himself…), and mentioned a thousand times before: Concreteweb exists to promote different styles of (Underground) Music, and in extension, to support the artists, projects / bands, labels, distributors, promotors etc. involved. Concreteweb is not a forum to discuss politics from any scope.

It was written in the stars: Centipede Abyss and Apothecary were meant to join forces sooner or later. I am glad that it is not that much ‘later’, even though ‘sooner’ would have been nice too. But I won’t complain, for here we have it: the first (…and hopefully not the last) result of this unholy marriage…

Mirroring eyes with a hollowing moth…

Bereavement ravages the mind, and time promises to blunt its strength. A pale wasteland may recover one day, but the guilt that comes with fading memories takes root instead. And here, time only strengthens it.

Well, the joy of ‘excitement’ and ‘happiness’ is a rare and specific experience to me, but when Mister Sina Winter let me know that a new From The Vastland album was about to be released, I went through those strange stages of emotion, of arousal, and of impatience. …so glad I did put my concerns about affective sensation and vivid ebullience aside, because I have always been sort of a ‘fan’ of what From The Vastland did came with before. Check out, beneath, some more (links to) reviews I did for this combo in the past.

Greek outfit The Black Monolith is, dixit the act, ‘a conduit for the forces that lie beyond the veil of existence’. The project deals with archaic and / or celestial entities, ‘primal energies that stir within the earth’, dwelling around in the deepest and darkest corners of the universe, and of the (archetypical) psyche.

This was quite a nice surprise. Very recently I got in touch again with Dutch act The Shiva Hypothesis. I wasn’t sure, to be honest, whether these guys were still active. I was truly impressed by their promo-EP from 2015 and their sole official release, 2018’s full-length Ouroboros Stirs. However, as from then on, things went extremely silent.