I will review two live registrations for Swedish act Sanctum, both being released via Raubbau. In a couple of days / weeks / millennia it will be a review on their performance on CBGB, but this review deals with their co-operation on the famous Maschinenfest happening in Oberhausen (Germany) on October 10th 2015. In 2004, Sanctum was part of the Maschinenfest line-up as well.
To celebrate their 30th (!!!) anniversary (indeed thirty years of raison d’être), Skullflower (finally) release the Cold Spring-successor of the magisterial album Draconis. The latter was released at the very beginning of Autumn 2014, and undersigned published a review on that material on November 10th 2014. For some biographical and discographic information, you can check out that (superb, but that’s evident) review; enter the band’s name and you’ll come to the specific page).
Time Lurker started in 2014 as a solo-outfit for Mick, hailing from the French city of Strasbourg. Intention was to create post-modernistic Black Metal, conceptually based on the nature of humanity, and mankind’s struggle with inner demons, created by our own uncertainty, fears, subconsciousness and failures. It’s meant to be a sonic travel through worlds described by both Jules Verne and H.P. Lovecraft.
At the end of the Eighties, I set my first steps within the wonderful world of Industrial as a completion to my passion for Extreme Metal at the one hand, and esoteric Wave Music at the other. Actually, I already knew quite some bands / projects, but now I was about to delve deeper into the genre.
Celtefog is an outfit by Archøn, whom you might know as guitarist of Greek act Empathy. He started this project to play a more Pagan-oriented form of Extreme Metal, often helped out by his Empathy-colleague Wolfram as session drummer.
(copy-paste from my review, posted on December 24th 2014, for Bring Down The Sky, released via the superb Belgian label Consouling Sounds, as introduction – sorry; it’s not out of laziness, and the essence remains the same):
Northumbria was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in the east of England with quite an interesting history. As from about 500 A.C. on, it was quite an important and mighty kingdom, until Danish Vikings conquered the region in the ninth century. But since we’re not an online encyclopedia…
Loud Rage Music is quite a ‘small’ label, but one I do foresee a future. They are sort of specialised in the heavier sides of Metal: Gothic / Doom, Death and Black Metal especially. I did write some reviews for them before, and there are some coming up soon as well (enter the label’s name in the ‘search’ option to find out).
I had not heard of this guy before, but apparently James Batty is a multi-instrumentalist who lives and works in London. As from his youth, he’s fascinated by music and sound compositions, and he did some studies at the known Chetham School Of Music. During his studies, he was elected in a competition for the BBC, the Young Composer Competition, which he eventually did win. Throughout his career, he did quite some solo things, including improvisations, and he did work with a huge variety of famous musicians too. That, in short, is like a brief biography.
The New Apsurd, also acting as The New Apsurde (mind the additional ‘e’), is a young collaboration by two guys I appreciate a lot within the Noise / Drone / Ambient / Experimental / Post-Rock (and so on) scene. There’s Marko Jovic, from Croatia, who’s the guy behind acts like mighty Antisocial Block and Xtematic, or Asimonde, SR90 and Re_a. The other one is a sympathetic guy I came in touch with last year: Arthur Arsenne.
‘Les Fleurs Du Mal’ is the title from a collection of works by no-one else but Monsieur Charles Baudelaire, and now it is the title for a new album by Ukrainian project While They Sleep as well. This outfit of Kvolkaldur (he acted under the monikers Ildverden and Prosopagnosia too in the (recent) past) did release a first album in Spring 2016, but due to circumstances I had not the ability to write anything down about that material (yet I did listen to it several times, and I liked it).
