http://pitchfork.com/features/columns/7790-the-out-door-2/2/

http://stereogum.com/340382/locrian-the-columnless-arcade/mp3s/

Locrian’s Territories ends with the torrentially uplifting “The Columnless Arcade.” The Chicago duo of André Foisy and Terence Hannum still create plenty of dark, crumbling, murky washes and spacious Prurient-on-Loren Mazzacane Connors noisescapes, but since their last collection Drenched Lands (and a handful of shorter 2009 releases), they’ve added a rock layer to the bleak ambiance. The assistance comes via a well-curated cast of Chicago-area metal/extreme music regulars:

On the aforementioned closer and 11-minute mid-collection epic “Procession of Ancestral Brutalism,” the guys are joined by Nachtmystium’s Black Judd on guitars (plus vocals on “Procession”), Yakuza’s Bruce Lamont on saxophone, and Velnias‘ Andrew Scherer on drums. (Elsewhere, Bloodyminded’s Mark Solotroff shreds his vocal cords and affixes dense synth drone.) Last July I booked Locrian on an intentionally weirdo bill with three different kinds of grindcore groups (Anal Cunt, Fuck The Facts, and Compremesis) and a more straightforward progressive Opeth-style crew (Gwynbleidd). At time the time, Foisy and Hannum’s electric, spacious sheets of synthesized/looped noise and dense smoke machines created a gorgeous, religious-seeming swerve from the rest of the bill. A year later they’d still be the odd-men out, but they’d also be creating blackened anthems that’d give just about anyone a run for their blast beats. You get a bit of both worlds in “The Columnless Arcade.”

Territories is out now on LP via At War with False Noise, Basses Frequences, Bloodlust!, and Small Doses. (It takes a nation.) It’ll be out on CD in August. More details on that soon. In the meantime, make room on your year-end lists.

http://www.blastitude.com/28/index2.htm

LOCRIAN Drenched Lands CD (AT WAR WITH FALSE NOISE / SMALL DOSES) For Locrian’s “first full-length studio recording of all new material,” the ingredients may remain the same (metal, noise, drone, power electronics), but they are presented in their most confident and seamless blend yet. This duo can actually play music on their instruments, and use this ability to create extended compositions. Therefore, there’s no need to hide behind drone and distortion, allowing these tactics to be used as weapons, and only when necessary. The result is a mostly quiet album that is still more brutal than a lot of today’s amps-on-11 extreme music yawnfests.

LOCRIAN Territories (AT WAR WITH FALSE NOISE / BASSES FREQUENCIES / BLOODLUST! / SMALL DOSES) Showing a continued intent to develop and reinvent themselves, Locrian augment their duo lineup with various key guests from Chicago’s metal, experimental, and experimental/metal scenes. The result is as solid and satisfying as all of Locrian’s releases have been, but given several fresh twists, which we hear right off the bat on “Inverted Ruins,” featuring Mark Solotroff of Bloodyminded doing a killer job singing bleak lyrics and Andrew Scherer of Velnias playing kit drums, I believe a first for Locrian. Other temporary members include Bruce Lamont of Yakuza on vocals and saxophone, and perhaps most notably Blake Judd of Nachtmystium on guitars and vocals. All four of these ringers appear throughout the album, in different combinations, but not on every track… though only one track (”Antediluvian Territory”) is by the original Locrian duo lineup, there is also only one track (”Procession of Ancestral Brutalism”) that features all six musicians. Not surprisingly, it explodes out of the middle of the album as the most raging and traditionally black metal sounding track on here, though I might prefer the nearly 10-minute Solotroff/Locrian trio cut “Ring Road.”

Scott McKeating interviews the boys here…

http://www.yellowgreenred.com/?p=1499

Locrian Territories LP (At War With False Noise / Basses Frequencies / BloodLust! / Small Doses)

If it takes four record labels to put out one album, so be it, so long as it’s as nicely produced as Locrian’s Territories. Continuing in the spirit of cooperation, this one features a number of guest players, including none other than BLOODYMINDED’s Mark Solotroff on vocals and synthesizer, the type of collaboration any Chicago-based freak would envy. Speaking of synths, Territories has a lot of them, practically dominating the landscape where metallic guitars once reigned. There are still some fierce black metal guitar riffs here, which make for a nice balance, but my money’s on the synth-drone mood pieces; there might be just a little too much china cymbal for my tastes on the thrashing metal tracks. Their metalwork here is better than I am recalling, it’s just that when a track is credited to Solotroff’s synth and vocals, a bass guitar and another synthesizer, how can anything top that?

It’s amazing that these are still trickling in. Locrian is also interviewed in the new issue. More info here.

http://aquariusrecords.org

*LOCRIAN* */Territories/* *(At War With False Noise / Basses Frequences / Small Doses / BloodLust!) lp 14.98*

With every single release these guys get better and better, their sound, a constantly evolving, ultra dense blend of abstract black metal and deep ambient dronemusic, the early records were more about energy and vibe than execution, still eminently listenable, heavy and atmospheric, black and brutal, but their skills as composers and arranges have definitely made leaps and bounds, arriving finally at Territories, the latest sprawling epic from this Chicago duo, here, aided and abetted by a whole bunch of guests, including Blake Judd from Nachtmystium, Andrew Scherer, drummer for black metallers Velnias, and Mark Solotroff, power electronics maestro, and man behind Bloody Minded and the BloodLust! label.

And the guests make their presence felt right away, on opener inverted ruins, a smoldering doomic plod, more power electronics than black metal, with Solotroff ranting over a sea of swirling buzz and skree, glitched out electronics, and some simple stripped down drumming. Over the course of the track, it begins to coalesce into a more ominous creep, shedding noise as it goes, before finally slipping into a deep shimmering drone, which introduces the next track, a lush, slow building cinematic dronescape, constantly shifting layers, drifting through clouds of cymbal shimmer and blackened buzzing strings. It’s not until nearly the end of side one that black metal rears it’s ugly head, a flurry of manic riffing, and they’re off, a pounding midtempo blast of raw feral blackness, insane shrieked vocals, chaotic drums, muted riffs, all blurred into a blackened haze, lo-fi and muddy, but also epic and intense.

The flipside opens with another bout of power electronics, dueling synths unfurl undulating layers of wheeze and warble and buzz, laced with shimmering overtones and fragmented melodies, a churning black sonic sea, that eventually fades out leaving, a smoldering stretch of shadowy guitar, of blissed out ambience, a short stretch of crystalline chiming guitars laid over a warm whir, shoegazey and blissed out, which finally leads into the closing track, the weirdest of the bunch, with organ and saxophone, acoustic guitars, and pretty much all the gusts present and accounted for, a bleak buzzing driftscape, sort of post industrial, keening melodies over fractured buzz, and deep rumbles, creaks and skree and groaning low end, finally explode into full on melodic black metal, martial drumming, epic riffing, more tortured vokills, cool tangled woozy minor key melodies, a swirling druggy ambience, weirdly catchy and otherworldly, but still heavy and psychedelic, maybe our favorite track, and the perfect way to wind down this serpentine blackened outsider drone metal journey…

http://www.stereokiller.com/newsreviews/article.cfm?Review=Locrian-Territories%20&intarticleid=9108

Locrian – Territories

Posted: 03/24/2010 Comments: 5

Staff Rating: (4.00/5)

User Rating (6 votes):(5.00/5)

Eventually, it all comes back to noise. Every peak, every height, every genre inevitably gets broken down and reduced to its most primitive and minimalist essence, allowed to start anew, begin again, rise from the ashes… whatever. Proven time and time again, it’s the noise factor that allows for creative growth, its foundation suitable to build something cohesive.

It makes sense, once you consider this, that the first decipherable statement to screech from the analog slump of “Inverted Ruins,” introductory track from ambient metal duo, Locrian, is “Tradition has failed.” Although more of an indictment of conventional wisdom, or the human tendency to allow habit to automatically dictate behavior, it’s also reason enough to create something unusual. Obviously.

As constructors of their own brand of Avant noise metal, Locrian members André Foisy and Terence Hannum spend a lot of time fashioning aural dwellings, the amps kicking out less a form of music than a form of abstraction. Last year’s Drenched Lands was essentially a cassette playing back some nightmarish creations, bookended by six-string sorrow. Their new album, Territories, brings more music to the creepscape, “Inverted Ruins” a slow and steady blender of industrial squeal, garage percussion and synthesizer. The swelling science fiction tone of “Between Barrows” leads into “Procession of Ancestral Brutalism,” which is probably the album’s most straightforward moment. Guitars blaze, drums shatter, screams are buried under the weight of static and other obscuring noise pollutant.

Stormy avalanches, industrial catastrophe, perpetual pulsations… “Ring Road” essentially breathes as guitars grind their way through the sonic murk, a hissing valve the suitable backdrop for loose guitar play in “Antediluvian Territory.”

With “The Columnless Arcade,” Locrian generate a four-minute chorus line of machined drone before turning to their instruments for the song’s remaining length. Screams are cold and far off, the music itself surprisingly passionate. Melody gets some attention, Territories an attempt at building more out of Locrian’s dark expanses while not completely abandoning that part of their persona.

http://evpzine.blogspot.com/2010/03/reviewed-locrian-territories.html

Locrian

Territories

(Small Doses)

Similar Sounds: Sunn O))), Earth, Ministry

File Under: doom metal, electronic sludge

The dark recesses visited by Locrian are all too familiar to those who have grappled with their inner demons with accompaniment by doom metal and industrial acts for the past quarter-century. The dark cloud that looms over Territories, the latest LP from Locrian, finds the group delving into the bottomless abyss of uncertainty.

Album opener “Inverted Ruins” straddles the line of between industrial’s past and doom’s present. The vocals are gnarled and venomous, scratching out their story into the ebon ember melody. The slow and heavy pace is counterpointed by sharp, high-pitched screeching; the clawing of our hapless victim desperately attempting to dig his way out from under the endless layers of dirt in which he is buried. The trip into darkness is one Locrian has taken many times, yet one that will leave listeners deeply affected by the scorched tones in which they are repeatedly baptized.

It’s this fearlessness that drives André Foisy and Terence Hannum’s vision. The combination of white noise, variable static, low-end tunings, and spatial arrangements turn Territories into a viscous mix of tar, oil, and mud that is unwashable. The machine gun guitar of “Procession of Ancestral Brutalism” mimics the frantic scrubs of Lady Macbeth unable to rinse the blood of her evil deeds away; the anguished screams represent her confrontation with her sins; the crashing cymbals the thunder claps of the gods passing their stern judgment upon her. Territories is all these and more. An album as complex and theme-heavy as classic literature and as technologically integrated as human flesh meeting cybernetic parts, Territories captures the malaise of modern living in its onyx-tinted Petri dish. As we swim around, confused by the blackness of our surroundings and confounded with how to clear up our messes, Locrian hovers in the disconnected netherworld capturing every emotion in its medieval ooze to cast us in plaster for ever more.

http://blog.kexp.org/blog/2010/03/12/agitated-atmosphere-locrian-territories/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+KexpBlog+%28KEXP+Blog%29

Agitated Atmosphere: Locrian – Territories

By Justin Spicer | Published: March 12, 2010

As major labels continue to exist behind the times, artists and labels with little capital and lesser reputations are producing some of the most innovative, interesting, and inspiring music. Whether it’s creating a new niche in digital technology or looking to once obsolete formats, Agitated Atmosphere hopes to pull back the curtain on a wealth of sights and sound from luminaries such as Locrian.

The dark recesses visited by Locrian are all too familiar to those who have grappled with their inner demons with accompaniment by doom metal and industrial acts for the past quarter-century. The dark cloud that looms over Territories, the latest LP from Locrian through Small Doses, finds the group delving into the bottomless abyss of uncertainty.

Album opener “Inverted Ruins” straddles the line of between industrial’s past and doom’s present. The vocals are gnarled and venomous, scratching out their story into the ebon ember melody. The slow and heavy pace is counterpointed by sharp, high-pitched screeching; the clawing of our hapless victim desperately attempting to dig his way out from under the endless layers of dirt in which he is buried. The trip into darkness is one Locrian has taken many times, yet one that will leave listeners deeply affected by the scorched tones in which they are repeatedly baptized.

It’s this fearlessness that drives André Foisy and Terence Hannum’s vision. The combination of white noise, variable static, low-end tunings, and spatial arrangements turn Territories into a viscous mix of tar, oil, and mud that is unwashable. The machine gun guitar of “Procession of Ancestral Brutalism” mimics the frantic scrubs of Lady Macbeth unable to rinse the blood of her evil deeds away; the anguished screams represent her confrontation with her sins; the crashing cymbals the thunder claps of the gods passing their stern judgment upon her. Territories is all these and more. An album as complex and theme-heavy as classic literature and as technologically integrated as human flesh meeting cybernetic parts, Territories captures the malaise of modern living in its onyx-tinted Petri dish. As we swim around, confused by the blackness of our surroundings and confounded with how to clear up our messes, Locrian hovers in the disconnected netherworld capturing every emotion in its medieval ooze to cast us in plaster for ever more.

Justin Spicer is a freelance journalist who also runs the webzine, Electronic Voice Phenomenon. He writes the Monday News Mash-Up for the KEXP Blog. You may follow him on Twitter.