Agalloch – The White EP Label: Eisenwald Tonschmiede – EISEN150 Format: CD, EP, Deluxe Edition, Limited Edition, Reissue, Remastered Country: Germany Released: 29 Nov 2019 Style: Ambient, Neofolk
Heavy embossed slipcase made of special WHITE art card stock with great haptics. Classic jewelcase with a booklet printed on uncoated paper, feat. original artwork and all credits.
Remastered re-issue with original artwork and bonustrack. Limited first press with deluxe embossed slipcase made of special art card stock with great haptics. Please see the DETAILS tab for a complete info about the package.
Eisenwald presents The White EP: a collection of dark folk & ambient work written & recorded between 2004 – 2007. Originally released in 2008 by now defunct Vendlus Records, the White is the last installment of two companion releases & the stylistic counterpart to the Grey. Remastered by Gus Elg at Skyonion in Portland, OR and includes the rare track “Where Shade Once Was”.
For over twenty years the Pacific Northwest group Agalloch had defined what it means to combine influences from a variety of musical genres into one brooding, colossal, and cinematic sound that provides the soundtrack to existential themes concerning man, nature, loss, and death.
Tracklisting:
1. The Isle of Summer 2. Birch Black 3. Hollow Stone 4. Pantheist 5. Birch White 6. Sowilo Rune 7. Summerisle – Reprise 8. Where Shade Once Was
Ulver – Drone Activity Label: House of Mythology – HOM 018 LP Format: CD Album Country: UK Released: 11 May 2019 Style: Ambient
It all happened in a haze. I am not sure everyone was prepared to obey the summons and forsake the shore in order to be pulled under by the loudness of sound. Yet the ethos on that crisp October night was clear in its wording: Drone Activity.
Upon entering the old fish-warehouse, now converted into an activity hall, on the new Oslo waterfront, the security guards barely cared to check our tickets. Even mammoths would have been able to hide in this enormous dark space, illuminated by a few logos and stalls of sugary drinks, about to disappear in a sea of smoke.
Disappearance comes in many shapes in the age of extinction. Following the Danish noise act Damien Dubrovnik, Ulver started out in a subtle manner, carefully examining the territory, vast and waste. Screeching sounds echoed distant roars from the approaching edge as snowflakes pierced the air with ferocious speed. Where to go from there?
A retreat into the sunken paradise. Half-buried misty temples, giant creatures and vaguely prehistoric figures emerged as depth and time intertwined, from the ancient Atlantis to the northernmost seas.
We stayed there for 90 minutes, of which 70 have been meticulously mixed and mastered for this release. All of them are new sounds. Darker and more dire, yet containing the vibe of their previous semi-improvisatory sessions, documented and catalogued on the “Zodiac” album, ATGCLVLSSCAP (2016).
If that Zodiac album was a free-form Ulver interpreting the signs in the stars, Drone Activity stares into the abyss, documenting those moments after the last rays of sun speckle the surface and careless subterranean streams start determining the course.
“Something murky and liminal emerged, in sound and space,” the band states in their liner notes. I can’t think of a more apt description of what, and to where, Ulver brought us that night. There is no shoreline a thousand feet down.
TORE ENGELSEN ESPEDAL, on the ferry from Naples to Palermo, March 2019
Arche-Fossil (Cønjuntø Vacíø, 2020) is Wind Atlas’ fourth record, which sees the band pushing the boundaries of their own music as genres such as post-industrial electronics, ambient, noise and popular mediterranean music merge, bringing to life a hybrid and intense album.
The gestation process of Arche-Fossil began even before the publication of An Edible Body (2018). With that record, the band changed members and ventured into more electronic territories by using drum machines and synths that still fit their ritual post-punk sound. After two years spent working on this new record, these electronic landscapes have taken over their music.
Arche-Fossil was almost entirely recorded by themselves at their home studio and finished at Maik Mayer’s recording studio with Sergio Pérez. It collects the songs that represent the band’s work over the last two years and that best reflect the issues that weave the whole record regarding the relationship between human beings and reality. Is it possible to know an uninterpretable reality? What is knowing? How does the relationship between human beings and reality work? These questions inform a series of songs that produce a voice that continuously muses on what it perceives and the ways in which it does.
Hunger opens the record amidst a thunder of abstract sounds and a viscous bass loop. By using samples from M. E. S. H.’s “Optimate”, which forms the noisy basis of the song, Hunger approaches more experimental electronic terrains. This song revolves not only around an insatiable and uninhibited hunger for finding new ways of saying and being in the world, but also around an enormous emptiness.
The monumental track Where Nothing Happens explores empty spaces and everything that happens within them when something–a step, a voice, an object–interrupts their eternal being, thus generating new meanings between these spaces and that which suddenly inhabits them.
In Dos Ojos, the band continues navigating electronic landscapes, this time through Spanish traditional and oral literature. They follow this path further in Esta Despedida, where the vocals use one single sentence to unsay: “Todos los nombres van a morir a ti.” (“You are where all names go to die”) From then onwards, the vocals employ a form of glossolalia as a tool to continue uttering after the death of meaning that they have previously announced. Likewise, Days of Sadness, a free adaptation of Galician poet José Ángel Valente’s poem “Latitud”, pays homage to the language of the unsaid, which has heavily influenced Wind Atlas’ discourse over the years.
That Mouth emerges as a dramatic effect when the record has managed to hypnotize us. Trance and an industrial sound meet amidst MS20 roars and a beat going over 140bpm. Metallic blows and the sound of chains burst in, creating rhythmic patterns over a bass drum that pushes forward.
The eeriest and most beautiful moments appear on the record’s B-side. Such moments come to life in tracks like Oceanic Sexuality or the closer Do You Have a House?, along with the experimental Nada, in which, by only utilizing noise, Wind Atlas create a sonic collage poem that draws from power-electronics. Here, some of the band’s recurring themes reemerge: emptiness, water, and the body.
In Arche-Fossil, Wind Atlas continue exploring some of the paths they began mapping with their previous record. This time, however, they manage to approach the heterogeneous in a much more certain and lucid manner, without ever stopping wondering about their own voice.
Andrea P. Latorre: vocals Sergi Algiz: electronics and guitar Raúl Q. de Orte: Synths Raul Pérez: drums
Recorded by the band and final recordings at Maik Maier Studios (Barcelona) by Sergio Pérez. Mixed by Sergio Pérez and mastered by Stephen Quinn at Analogue Heart (UK). Art photos by Àlex Sardà. Artwork by David M. Romero.
