After Womb Eater Wife Beater and Somewhere Over The Painbow, 30.000 Monkeys, hailing from Beringen, Limburg, Belgium, and named after a band that did clearly inspire them, Lightning Bolt, return with another piece of total yet enthusiastic absurdism, called I Ate Myself To Grow Twice As Big. It gets released by our own Consouling Sounds on both compact disc and vinyl (12” long player) and it lasts for just over forty minutes.
Das Lächeln, Deinerseits is the third collaboration on Consouling Sounds that was created especially for this Flemish label’s inception celebration (their self-developed so-called Consouling Split Series). After a co-operation in between Gnaw Their Tongue and Alkerdeel, and Vanessa Van Basten with Hemelbestormer, now it’s time for Viscera/// joining forces with N.
Flamen are a young outlet by Italian instrumentalist Bartlett Green, whom you might know from his co-operation with Warnungstraum especially. Bartlett wrote some material which he would record professionally, and since he was looking for a ‘singer’ that would vocally fit to his ideas, he contacted Aryan Art’s Alexander Ivanov.
It would be a waste of time, taking too much energy from my laziness, to introduce Raison d’Être, which is probably the best known outfit by Peter Andersson. I am sort of possessed by this project as from the release of Prospectus I, though not every release that followed could totally please me. But in any case, Raison d’Être are highly influential (so are many of Peter’s outfits).
One year after the debut, French duo Cepheide (Gaetan and Thomas) returned with a new album, which consists of two (extremely) lengthy tracks: seventeen and nineteen minutes respectively. The sophomore album was an independently released digital record (July 2015), which was followed in September 2015 in cassette-edition. And now we can enjoy the CD-version too, which has been made available at the very end of November 2015 by Ogmios Underground.
I have to admit that I did pleasantly enjoy the split album in between Wigrid and Sunshine & Lollipops, called Split The Indifference / Geteilte Gleichgültigkeit. In case you’re interested, you can find the review on this label’s update of December 2nd 2014.
Aurum Solis is a new outfit by Siberian born Sergey ‘Thanataur’ Andrievskikh, part of e.g. Tahatoc or Eisflammen, and the guy behind projects such as Without Dreams, HexenHammer’s Flame (the review for Ad Fines Nivis Aeternae, by the way, was published on this site’s upload of February 14th 2016 by undersigned) or Психоз 4.48.
The French label Distant Voices did surprise me every time for both the sonic result of each release, as well as the devotional artwork involved. This time it is not different, for the CD-version of the sophomore Scars From A Dead Room album has been designed by the Distant Voices team once again. It’s a cold, totally black edition with two cards inserted, containing quite mysterious artwork (which does fit the philosophy of both label and artist).
ProtoU are quite a young project from Ukraine, led by Sasha Cats. Only recently she entered the realms of the Drone / Ambient / field recordings scene; before Sasha was known as violinist and choir singer especially.
Well, I was enormously surprised, the positive way, when I received a message from Cyclic Law telling that there was a new Sophia album coming up. For more than a decade we did not hear anything anymore, at all, about this project by Arcana’s Peter Bjärgö. And indeed, it was true that there was a new work in the making.
