Leeches of Lore - S/T

A band hailing from New Mexico. They play a blend of stoner rock fused with 'western music', thrash, psychedelic, etc.

These guys are everywhere when it comes to genre, almost like they wrote several separate stoner, country, thrash, and psychedelic albums then cut up the music and pasted it back together. Except it works, and sounds great.

MF

Igor Wakhevitch - Docteur Faust

It's really hard to sum up an album like this. The six tracks (excluding the intro) range from Throbbing Gristle-esque passages overlaying spoken word segments, to progressive psych-rock with tribal chanting, to bone-chilling modern classical reminiscent of Krzystof Penderecki or Gustav Holst. Overall it's a superbly constructed mindfuck, so give it a shot.

When - Death in the Blue Lake (1988)

When - Death in the Blue Lake(1988)
experimental/post industrial/psychedelic

When is a solo project of Norwegian musician Lars Penderson. He began the musical project under the curious name "Hospital Blimp" in 1983 before settling on the bands current enigmatic moniker in 1987.

Death in the Blue Lake is Penderson's sonic answer to André Bjerke's pschological thriller novel of the same title. Although I haven't read the novel (it appears to be difficult if not impossible to find in english) Penderson's work definitely caries a foreboding and schizophrenic atmosphere that wouldn't be out of place in a tale of murder and madness. The album being Norwegian and from the late 80's also has the significance of enjoying quite a bit of popularity among the country's second wave black metalers. Perhaps the album inspired Varg to flirt with dark ambient? That's just conjecture on my part though. What I do know is that Satyricon sampled the title track of Death in the Blue Lake to use as the intro on their debut full length Dark Medieval times.

So forget all of that, what does the album sound like? Well the album ultimately carries many pop sensibilities. They are however obscured by the dark atmosphere and dissonance that create a patina of decay above everything else. The album begins with a grueling journey through a 20+ minute sound scape. All hope seems to be lost, but when the next track begins the album reveals it's true colors as catchy hooks and melodies begin to surface. The album works best as a cohesive whole so I recommend listening to it all the way through. Otherwise you will miss the contrasting elements.

peace

Vediog Svaor - In The Distance (2001)

Vediog Svaor is this one-man psychedelic/progressive/avant-garde/whatever black metal project from France. The whole project surrounds themes such as space, coldness, abstract bullshit and eldritch horrors from the 11th dimension. Actually, I’m not sure about that latter part, but there’s like a multitude of metal bands out their with a hard-on for Cthulhu and the Old Ones, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some sort of reference to Yog-Sothoth in Vediog Svaor’s “In the Distance”. I can’t really tell if there is, because I can’t understand French for the life of me, but man, I am just going to assume this album has something to do with Yog-Sothoth, the Old Ones…and like the coldness of space or something.

Even if it has nothing to do with Lovecraftian horror, it’s still probably my favourite discovery of last year. It’s considered progressive black metal but it has nothing in common with its kin. The album has this sort of retro-ish, melancholic vibe while still maintaining a very bleak yet almost mystical atmosphere. The best way I can describe it is imagine Les Legions Noire, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin all get into this wild free-for-all knife fight and kill each other in a frenzy of blood, guts and inverted crosses; then some insane Lithuanian scientist, with a degree in blowing the fuck out of everything, decides to harvest their corpses and creates some sort of gold-plated omniscient kvlt mecha-god out of their body parts; but of course it rebelled and escaped the insane scientist’s underground lair because it is a whiny bitch who doesn’t want to rule the world with a golden fist but would rather pursue his own ‘creative endeavours’. Yeah, whatever. Anyway, it meets up with Ved Buens Ende in their early days and asks if they want to jam out, but something went very wrong during the jam and it ended up consuming their souls instead.

So yeah, what I’m pretty much trying to say is Vediog Svaor is that gold-plated omniscient kvlt mecha-god…composed entirely out of musicians’ body parts, and it consumes souls and stuff.

Maybe it’s best if you just listened to the damn album.