There’s a duo from Pennsylvanian soil that intrigues me for quite some time: DD and MZ. These two entities are active under several monikers, such as Sun Wound, Infestation Ritual, Teeth Engraved With The Names Of The Dead, Desolation Swarm, Six Billion Light-Years and several more. I know that what follows right now is a purely personal, and therefor subjective, statement, but: I do adore about all of these outfits. They dwell in regions of Drone Metal, Noise, Black Ambient, Goth, Psycho-Grind, Doom, Techno, Black Metal and everything in between, but in any of these approaches, both this dude and this damsel shine bright.
Another great example of their many outfits is this one: Rot Coven, formed two years ago or so. After two demonstrational recordings, digitally released via their Rusteater ‘label’, they had a first ‘album’, officially (self) released at the very end of Summer 2023, which is called Nightmares Devour The Waking World. Next up, they recorded / gathered new material, quite comparable and somehow different, like some kind of ‘part two’, yet these pieces did not get released officially (or better: not yet).
This is where Aesthetic Death enters the story. Rot Coven decided to have that original material, now gathered under the banner of Phase I, combined with that unreleased stuff, known as Phase II, being released in a decent way. As said, this is where and when the mighty Aesthetic Death organization joins this novella. Or, in short: both Phase I and Phase II are now collected under the original working title Nightmares Devour The Waking World. These ninety (!) minutes of Aural Anti Art have been pressed on compact disc, available as a three-folded two-disc digipack with, well, mind-blowing (cover) artwork by Brainvault Illustration (Nate Vaught), known from other magisterial (read: horrific and psychedelic) visual art for, for example, the split of Thornspawn and Black Angel, or for bands like Graveripper, Witchdoctor or Occult Deceiver (amongst others). The mastering of this double-album, in case of interest, was done by Tom Waltz.
Receive the void…
Phase I consists of the five tracks that were digitally self-released (as mentioned before) in September 2023 in a pro-mastered version. A first impression of the whole quest based on the first track… Opener Blood Pours Out Of The Sun starts with an extremely obscure drone-line, oppressive and hideous – prodigious too – joined by several layers of horrific ambience and field-recorded noises. Then drums appear, rhythmic, combative, ritualistic, while the keyboard-driven harmonies expand. It’s like a preface for inevitable doom coming up, for this might be the most obvious introduction for a soundtrack of auditory abhorrence. At four minutes, that atrocious horror indeed erupts: harsh and militant drums (wonderful), down-earthed and psychotropic strings, eerie synths, and the most vile voices are gathered as a monument of apocalyptic orchestration. This is a perverted definition of musical excellence, an alienated mixture of Morbid Death Metal, Funeral Doom, Ritual Noise, Black Ambient, Doom Drone, Industrial Black Metal, Ambient Noise Wall, Psycho-Grinding Sludge, and everything in between.
So it does continue. Filthy excerpts of blackened Sludge mingle with haunting Horror Ambient passages; dismal fragments of bleak, asphyxiating Industrial organically flow over into rumbling Black Doom Psychotica; narcotic episodes get mixed with nihilistic textures; afflicting dissonance and paralyzing hypnosis attract and repel at the very same time… It’s a permanently shifting series of disturbing, uncomfortable and perplex events, drenched in skin-pealing acid, veiled in an asphyxiating haze, surrounded by obtrusive phantasms and revolving visions.
The massive sound quality does strengthen the morbific, dreary atmosphere. The production is sort of impure and insolent, yet then again this is exactly what this kind of material needs; or better: what it deserves! The sound overwhelms, maintaining a well-balanced mix of details, giving all elements their moments of fame., like mayhem meticulously constituted, and accurate arrangement deliberately malformed.
Disc two, aka Phase II, offers three previously unreleased lullabies (with two of them clocking almost twenty minutes each). This material comes close to the first phase, with that unique, somehow complex mixture of Industrial (a general statement, I admit), Ritual Drone, Dark / Black Ambient, Sludge, Black Metal (also quite open-minded in description), Noise and (Funeral) Doom. Yet the difference lies within the textures, which have been brought with an increased mechanoid / industrialized approach. I mean, it’s like that former stuff, yet ingeniously injected with a huge hint of (early) Godflesh / (early) Scorn / (early) Pitchshifter / (early) Swans; somehow comparable to a track like Roots Will Grow from Rot Coven’s second demo (yet drenched in black-poisonous fluids). Hints of that so-called Psycho-Grind approach did somehow penetrate the former recording too, yet this time it does sound more obvious in Inverted Chasm especially, as well as in Accretion Disk Necropolis. The shorter (still 06:29 minutes in duration) composition Psychological Contamination Zone, then again, is more like a piece of hypnotic, droning and claustrophobic Horror Ambient work, with reverberating pulsations, remote soundwaves, lethargic roars, industro-mechanical noisescapes, and distant yet capricious beats.
For fans of: Sun Wound, Teeth Engraved With The Names Of The Dead and Desolation Swarm, or acts like Black Earth (the Spanish one), Ancient Moon, Khost, early Godflesh, Nortt, Goatpsalm, Saw Throat, Echoes Of Yul, Ramleh, Mordor (the Swiss one), Primitive Man, Pando (the American one), Oskryf and the likes… Prepare for one and a half hours of overpowering, relentless and soul-disrupting sonority in all its elegance and dexterity.
https://www.aestheticdeath.com/releases.php?mode=singleitem&albumid=6475
https://rusteater.bandcamp.com/album/nightmares-devour-the-waking-world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0kGnrWxpGA&t=18s
https://www.instagram.com/brainvault/