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harsh noise walls.
seven acts.
seven different approaches.
seven different results.
one disc by each:
seven 3″ cdrs packaged in a hard plastic binder box with a 12 page booklet, vomir’s manifesto, and a 1″ button.
soon…
The 1″ buttons have arrived. Assembly will commence.
I hope to have the Brick by Brick sets (more details and images on that very soon) and final degenerates done in the next week.
vestigial limb – teeth collection – i am seamonster
http://antigravitybunny.blogspot.com/2009/04/locrian-drenched-lands-at-war-with.html
Locrian – Drenched Lands (At War With False Noise / Small Doses, 2009)
Locrian’s first full length of (mostly) new material, Drenched Lands, has been written about on many blogs, some high profile (lookin’ at you Brainwashed) and others only slightly bigger than I. Normally when something gets too much exposure, I tend to pass on writing about it for (hopefully) obvious reasons. Unless said record is that good. Good enough to warrant another review on another blog in the hopes that maybe even one more person will hear about it. Drenched Lands is more than worthy of another post. In fact, it demands it.
Drenched Lands is a very very special record that dances along the lines of drone, noise, doom, and black metal and it does it so well without ever actually being really metal. At most I’d say it gets to being dark and heavy but never quite metal. It opens with “Obsolete Elegy In Effluvia and Dross” and has a melancholic guitar riff that sounds like a doomed out Americana. Definitely no metal here. Then “Ghost Repeater” shows up with it’s haunting buzzing blackened ambience that drones on for over 10 minutes in the most glorious way possible. And there’s a gong! Like one of those giant ones you see in ancient Tibetan monasteries. “Barren Temple Obscured by Contaminated Fogs” starts out straightforward enough, with some creepy droning synths and guitars but then Terence Hannum comes in, wailing over the discordant static with his best BM vocals. Totally fucked. Totally awesome.
“Epicedium,” one of my favorite tracks, is mostly guitar, all echoes and feedback, with a synth core that creates a frightening yet laid back atmosphere. And “Obsolete Elegy In Cast Concrete” is probably the most metal track out of the bunch, with relentless strumming and more BM vocals that end up conjuring the same riff from the first song. Somehow they manage to make it edgier, making it one of the best slow moving metal riffs I’ve heard in a while. It’s the kind of riff that’s mournful and beautiful at the same time (aka my favorite kind). This is seriously one of the best songs I’ve heard all year. Fucking dramatic as hell, so epic and gorgeous.
One of the best parts of Drenched Lands is also the only song that’s not new material. The last track, “Greyfield Shrines,” is a 30 minute masterful monument that is easily one of the best songs on the album and could have a review all for itself. It’s labeled as a “bonus track” because it was released as it’s own 12″ last year. As awesome as this probably sounds on vinyl, I’m sure it’s nice to be able to listen to the whole thing uninterrupted, without having to flip the record over. So thanks for that, guys.
I feel like Locrian have really channeled all of their energy into Drenched Lands and it absolutely shows. This is a fucking stunning album that deserves all the praise it’s been getting. Now that Locrian have made this ridiculously amazing album, I hope they haven’t tired themselves out. They better have something up their sleeves for the follow up.
http://www.bagatellen.com/?p=2320
Locrian – Drenched Lands
By Al ⋅ April 13, 2009 ⋅
Small Doses
Doom at its most effective will make the impression upon listeners that relief is a matter of hitting the ‘pause’ button’. With song titles like “Obsolete Elegy In Effluvia And Dross,” and “Barren Temple Obscured By Contaminated Fogs,” one might guess that the latest from Chicago’s Locrian (Andre Foisy, Terence Hannum) seeks the gloom and ruination common in the music among avant metal musicians of late. Even the disc’s artwork suggests too much time indoors with a corresponding dour view of the world. But metal is maturing, and sludgy power riffs picked in a haze at low idles are becoming conventional, and only partially meeting requirements. Locrian forgoes spitting on the baseboards for something a little more cogitative.
Drenched Lands moves vertically, avoiding the aberrant inclinations that can come out of too much feedback and not enough melodic foresight. At its most complex (”Obsolete Elegy in Cast Concrete”), Locrian allies strained, reverb-heavy vocals with guitar crunch and ethereal drone. It’s something far more cohesive than the post-processed minimalism that’s becoming increasingly customary. The short, sweet anti-metal opener, “Obsolete Elegy In Effluvia And Dross,” suggests restraint while acting as the first step in a record that is ultimately knottier, and more discerning, than the masterful earlier release, Rhetoric of Surfaces. The duo uses synth rumbles, organ and tape in a manner fully accommodating heavier instrumentation, yet elsewhere keyed melodies take on a primary role as thematic motifs. At the risk of entertaining afterthought, Locrian includes a 30-minute storm as the final track on Drenched Lands. Released only months ago as its own LP, “Greyfield Shrines” makes a fine capstone, morphing from near-noiseless to furious drone-heavy energy and is highly compatible with the range of moods in the accompanying tracks. The record’s ultimately absorbing and Locrian is able to effectively evaluate new boundaries for the genre, doing so without staring at their own shoes.
The three new releases and a bunch of new distro stuff is up in the shop.
it’s 2am.
i’ve been wrestling with my website and some ftp software for the last two hours. three support people at my webhost later and I finally got some real advice.
I know you probably think I do little more than wait for Locrian reviews to come in (Do you have that disc yet? Why not?) but I’ve actually been working on a new batch. I’ve got three releases ready for you, and they should be up for sale this weekend at some point. In the meantime, there are release pages up for each of them with samples and info. Click on the name or pic to go there. Check em out:
silas ciarán: happy songs for happy children
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scarcity of moments: lucid dreaming
http://www.adequacy.net/2009/04/locrian-drenched-lands/
April 10, 2009 by Joe Davenport
Category: Albums (and EPs)
Locrian’s Drenched Lands begins with “Obsolete Elegy In Effluvia And Dross,” a piece that could easily throw first time listeners off considering the vast difference between it and the rest of the album’s tracks. The group usually traffics in the kind of music that straddles an increasingly thin line between black metal, power electronics, and drone. The particular track in question here sounds kind of like a black hole with a Kraftwerk keyboard melody trying real hard to climb its way out before succumbing to the immense power of the album’s second track, “Ghost Repeater.” Picking up here, Drenched Lands reveals a sound that could sit just as easily next to SunnO))) as it could with something like early Cluster.
The bulk of Drenched Lands pairs the burnt out shells of factory noises (hinted at in the album’s overgrown parking lot artwork) with downtuned and downtempo sludge and occasional tremolo picking, slathering it in spectral keyboard tones. The way the album is recorded there is dramatic space between the higher and lower registers creating a dynamic work where the gutteral distorted bass is never actually locking in with the higher pitched guitar notes, instead sliding past one another like loosely arranged tectonic plates. Some of the strangled guitar mangling even manages to give off the awkward vibes of Harsh 70’s Reality-era Dead C.
During the course of Drenched Lands there are occasional vocal snippets which seem to echo the harsh sentiments of groups/artists such as White House, Prurient, and Deathpile but buried further in the mix and much less obtrusive. The main focus here still seems to be the music which seems far too carefully balanced to allow the vocals to reach into the truly horrific agonized screeching and bellowing achieved by those artists. And yet, for being somewhat concerned with subduction, Locrian achieves a beautiful stasis. It’s one that’s well worth revisiting.
Soon to be posted at http://www.judaskissmagazine.co.uk/
Locrian – Drenched Lands CD
(At War With False Noise / Small Doses)
Reviewed by Simon Collins
Locrian is a Chicago-based duo consisting of Terence Hannum and Andre Foisy, who’ve been busy since 2005 releasing quite a number of CD-Rs and cassettes. Drenched Lands, though, which is co-released by Scottish label At War With False Noise and American label Small Doses is their debut full-length studio album, and it convincingly demonstrates that Locrian’s years of honing their sound have not been in vain, as it’s a formidably powerful yet subtle piece of work. The album’s opener, ‘Obsolete Elegy In Effluvia And Dross’, is a short and gentle induction into Locrian’s harrowing realms, with strummed reverb guitar accented with minimal synth melody and very distant vocals to create a wan and morose atmosphere, vaguely reminiscent of Sonic Youth in its dissonant cadences. However, when this abruptly segues into ‘Ghost Repeater’, it’s like falling into a mineshaft. All the melody is cut out, leaving only a low, minatory tone which expands into an all-engulfing, epic drone, with guitar work confined to isolated strums, seeping whines of feedback and atonal walls of shriek. Percussion is confined to flat, compressed cymbal crashes. The effect is almost unbearably suspenseful and oozing with dread. Locrian’s sound undoubtedly has affinities with drone / doom merchants like Sunn O))), Earth or Marzuraan, as well as more guitar-based ambient projects such as TenHornedBeast, Keplers Odd, or even some of Nadja’s heavier material, but at the same time, it’s distinctive and once heard, not easily forgotten. ‘Barren Temple Obscured By Contaminated Fogs’ (Locrian do seem to have a predilection for black metal-style titles, even if their music doesn’t really have much to do with black metal) is initially organised around the same kind of synth drone / guitar strum pairing20as the opening track, but this is swiftly subsumed with Terence Hannum’s bloodcurdling howled vocals. There is a text given for this track in the album insert, but whether this is intended to be the ‘lyrics’, I have no idea – the vocals are atmospheric rather than intelligible. However, the imagery of ‘stagnant pool [infinite depths] / among the pylons’ does fit in well with the barren, desolate vistas of urban decay and industrial wastelands that Locrian evoke. By this point, it’s more than obvious that Locrian are accomplished at conveying horror and negation, but ‘Epicedium’ allows a tiny ray of light to penetrate their Stygian gloom, as the track’s delicate synth chords and chiming guitar arpeggios bring space and light where before all was trapped and claustrophobic. The second half of the track introduces fuzzy, growling guitar power chords, but these are carefully controlled and run as an abrasive undertow to a rippling, dulcimer-like melodic line that reminds me a bit of avant-garde composer Steve Reich’s work with guitarist Pat Metheny’s – repetitious and minimal yet very evocative. It’s easy to envisage this being used as soundtrack music. The final track ‘Obsolete Elegy In Cast Concrete’, however, is more firmly rooted in doom metal territory, with a funeral tolling bell underpinning expansive organ drones, churning, distorted guitar bleeding feedback, along with more anguished vocals. This is easily the most metal-sounding track on here, but even so, it’s far from traditional in structure or effect, even when the guitar settles into a slow, lamenting riff around the four and a half minute mark. There’s some resemblance to bands at the outer extremities of funeral doom, like Nortt or Celestiial, but Locrian really resist easy genre categorisation. Just in case you’re not feeling drenched, drained and devastated enough after ‘Obsolete Elegy In Cast Concrete’ grinds and shudders to a halt, the album is rounded off with a half-hour bonus track, ‘Greyfield Shrines’, which is a live recording previously released in 2008 as a limited-edition vinyl LP by Diophantine Discs. The baleful low-end rumble on ‘Greyfield Shrines’ is very noticeable, in contrast to the tracks which have preceded it, which are rather lacking in heavy bass. The track builds slowly with synth buzz and gentle fragments of guitar, gradually gaining in density and tension, becoming a torrential barrage of guitar-driven noise at around 13 minutes and maintaining this onslaught for most of the rest of the track. Locrain have built up a considerable reputation for their live sets, and it’s easy to see how this would be totally devastating as a performance – I hope we’ll get a chance to see them over here sooner or later. It’s notable that whilst Locrian work in the same kind of emotional register as a lot of doom and black metal, it does so without resorting to clichéd structures and well-worn imagery. There’s not a forest, rune or Nordic deity in sight. Instead, Locrian’s music is a sustained howl of anguish for the dirty, decaying world we live in – urban, gritty and condemned. As debut albums go, this is the best and most original I’ve heard in quite a while.
http://www.hellridemusic.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=19706
Locrian – Drenched Lands (At War With False Noise / Small Doses)
By Chris Barnes
April 4, 2009
Locrian is comprised of two Chicago area cerebral types, Andre Foisy, and Terence Hannum. Both fellas have a penchant for dark, heavy music – everything from Black Sabbath, to Nortt, to Einsturzende Neubaten to Cathedral and some stuff I’ve never heard of before. That’s saying something because I’ve looked under a lot of rocks in my day for the dark, weird stuff. Andre and Terence play a cinematic type of aural ambiance, instantly calling to mind the great Godspeed You! Black Emperor in its epic scope, albeit visiting some darker areas along the way.
Honestly, atmospheric stuff like this is hit or miss with me, most of it miss because I’m close-minded and curmudgeonly in my old age. Truth be told, I went into Drenched Landscapes with a fair amount of skepticism and came out the other side an hour later having a ton of respect for these guys. It’s definitely mood music, great stuff to listen to while I pack orders late at night but not the kind of thing I’d spin with the top down on a sunny day. Or on any type of psychotropic drug. One misfire of a synapse and the whole world could tumble down on you.
I like the way the guys balance texture and structure – every change is subtle, they didn’t take the obvious “loud/soft/loud/soft” approach that often comes with stuff like this. “Obsolete Elegey in Effluvia and Dross” (yeah, they take the Moss approach to plenteously ridiculous song titles, but stick with me), lulls you in with discordant strumming and electronics and then abrupt silence. It definitely caused a physical reaction, making me look back at the CD player to see what caused the interruption in my little sonic world. Thus, it forced me to reflect a little bit on the song that came before before the sudden silence. “Ghost Repeater” illicted tangent-oriented thinking about the different sounds being used – together, the electronics and guitar were unsettling, but separated from each other, each sound would have a null effect on me, probably wouldn’t even think about it. The fact that I’m taking the time to even think about innocuous minutia like this tells me that these guys are quite good at painting a sonic picture. They use subtle strokes and shades instead of going in with friggin’ paint roller.
The pleaser (or the alienator, depending on how you feel about this stuff) is the 30 minute “Greyfield Shrines” which is such a slow-burning slow burner that once it’s over, you may realize you never saw the spark. This is a monster track that is, funny enough, not unlike waiting for a teapot to boil, being totally present in the moment, noticing the shades of the flames in the burner, the chip in the lacquer on the stove, the graceful curvature of the spout and the slow boil and the cresendo of the pot’s whistle. It’s another very unsettling track, I kept getting the vibe rolling in my head that it sounded like a soundtrack for magick gone south… very south, on a very large scale. Like looking at a Bosch painting closely from either end and going toward the middle.
The packaging also deserves mention, a nice digipack design that opens from the top and contains a four page booklet, sticker and patch. It doesn’t have your typical Black Metal or Doom Metal imagery, just a black and white photo on the front of a highway that hasn’t seen traffic in awhile and the resulting decay and overgrowth. Nice symbolism for the music inside, the whole package ties in very well together. I look forward to hearing whatever else Locrian puts out in the future. Hopefully the Locrian project doesn’t stop here.