NunSlaughter do not need any introduction anymore. This band, nowadays located in Cleveland, Ohio, uSSSa (you know, the land of milk-and-honey), is one of the most productive ones on our oh so magnificent black, sorry, blue planet, and this for, well, almost thirty-five earthly years in the mean-time. And their Devil Metal created an enormous fanbase, yet still NunSlaughter remain ‘low-profiled’ and ‘underground’.
[due to health issues in my family, quite some reviews have been delayed; this one too is about an album for which the review had been prepared a while ago, yet it never got finished; now I will…]
(h)ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
Alcahest are a new outfit from French soil, a mysterious duo consisting of the (human?) beings M (who wrote and performed all instrumental contributions) and J (lyrics and voices, and arrangements). The duo finished a first mini-album in Spring 2021, with Drakkar Productions taking care of this four-track EP.
I would like to refer to my review on Stasis (https://www.concreteweb.be/reviews/nihil-impvlse) if you want to investigate about the history of this great project by Francesco Di Stasio.
(older release, yet always worth being promoted and supported)
I have never disliked the Noise scene, even though about half of the (sub) genres within this scene are incomprehensible to me. However, some I do like enormously. I am not going to sum up the ones I like or dislike, but I can honestly say that Gates Of Hypnos, one of the most open-minded and darkened labels nowadays (run by Sado Ritual’s Przemysław ‘Sadox’ Grochowski), did surprise me several times before.
In a philosophic way – and hey, I am not trying to set up any discussion about it – but mankind’s ‘inner self’ is always like a travel into one’s identity, a quest to discover your own raison d’être, a confrontation with monstrous entities, nothing else but caused by your own thoughts, ideas, beliefs, opinions, and so on. Are there any supernatural powers – gods or deities, if you want – to enlighten the path we’re crawling on to reach the end? Is our inner self, being a ‘dungeon’, able to trespass the limitations, to cross the borders of our personal expectations and conversances?
Ángel Chicote is a talented musician from Spanish soil, whom you might know from his current or previous collaborations as / in e.g. Graveyard Of Souls, Mass Burial, Aural Butchery or Ad Nebula Nigra, amongst others. Ángel is also the human being behind Ornamentos Del Miedo (meaning something like ‘ornaments of fear’), a project that was formed somewhere in 2017.
Not that very long ago, I got in touch with Chris, a nice person who runs the amazing label Depressive Black Ambient Records. I was surprised by what this label did release as from the start: great works through obscure and oppressive, ominous and odious sounds from beyond the putrid abysses. Destruction and self-mutilation, hate and self-hatred, fury and nostalgia; this label doesn’t share joy or happiness…
