Member Since: 24/02/2007
Band Members:
From Auarius Records:
It's a whole new world now, discovering music. MySpace, Youtube, people emailing MP3's and JPEG's. Easier maybe, but not nearly as romantic or as exciting as receiving some mysterious package in the mail, or stumbling upon some strange looking record in a dusty old bin and some tiny record store. And to be totally honest, almost all of the amazing discoveries that have ended up being big AQ faves, began life as a weird little package that just showed up in the mail one day.
None maybe weirder than the package we got from a band called, wait for it, Inh Halentropy. Yep. They had us at Inh Halentropy. It's a weird enough name, but it's two words?!? So inside the package was a cd with that classic image of Bigfoot, walking through the clearing, staring at the camera, and over the top, the band logo, very eighties metal looking, in the middle of a hand drawn spiderweb. Still we had no idea what to expect inside. But we did discover a note. Which read in part: "Dark Greetings. For your grimnatious becryptlement--" signed appropriately enough: "In ancient solemnity, none so grimm--"
OK. We were sold, now all that was left was to actually listen to the cd-r. And as with most things, certainly the most exciting and satisfying things, the music was nothing at all like what we expected--
Inh Halentropy seem to be a metal band, black metal more specifically, yet most of the disc is distinctly not metal. Or at least not typically metal. Beginning with the sound of surf on the shore, the calls of sea birds, the band crawls into action, a huge rumbling bass tone, clouds of electronic FX, a simple drawn out melody, clean guitars unwinding in an expanse of dark shimmer, when suddenly, a massive speaker destroying low end growl surfaces, and as far as we can tell, maybe those are the vocals. Church bells toll, the ambience gets thicker and more grim, the closest comparison might be funereal doom, but it's sort of ethereal. And sort of pretty. But definitely ominous and creepy. Like Low crossed with Goblin crossed with Esoteric. Elsewhere, the black clouded skies are filled with the clatter of chimes, strange harmonics ringing out, all over thick lustrous black ambience, the sound of rain, at times it almost sounds like a blackened new age, which sounds weird but is most definitely a very good thing.
"Golden Beast Altered Axe" might be the most trippy, a simple drum plod, spread out over a slowly squirming synthscape, everything wreathed in ephemeral clouds of twinkling electronic effects, a mournful melody drifts over the top, while running through the entire a track, a creepy ominous low end melody of buzz and whir, all beneath a constant sheet of rain. Very cinematic and evocative.
Our favorite track might be "A Door Is A Tomb", thee most propulsive of the bunch, but we're still talking a glacial crawl, more ambient forest sounds, water and wind, insects in the background, but here, flutes flutter over a backdrop of downtuned riffage, but smeared into a warm moaning blur, over the top, bells chime, mysterious vocals croak and growl, the drums a simple machinelike rhythm, everything eventually breaking down into a plodding bass-ic doom, wrapped in a midnight storm, and suffused with thick ropy drones and grinding minimal low end whir.
Really pretty fantastic, and totally baffling. New age doom? Black ambient nature music? Not sure what to call it, but it's completely killing us. Add to that, the fact that the date on the back of the disc says 1980, and other than the song titles and an email address (oh and a few more pictures of giant hairy beasts) there's really not much else to go on. But the music is plenty. A perfectly freaky, haunting cinematic slowcore new age black doom sprawl that should for sure hit the spot for those of you who could barely make it through that descriptor without thinking that this might already be your new favorite record. We are suitably grimnatiously becryptled. As shall you be, wethinks--
Influences: Ancient becrypted tombland, frostbitten voidian oceans, enshrouded fate of aeons, desolatious fields of fog-riddled rubble, prior and current moons, the psychonauts, the magicious mountain of stars, kneeling at the foot of Thee Enmonolithed Golden Throne of Esoteric Knowledge and Unseen Omnipotent Forces.*****************************************************
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Sounds Like: And from the bottom of this dark sea, man perceives nothing of the luminous surface of the upper world except in ephemeral forms, fleeting reflections, evanescent phantoms which are like those phosphorescent fish that alone illuminate the age-old darkness of teh great ocean depths. And our matter, because it is heavy, because it is dark - the darkest and heaviest of all - is also the least dynamic, the most immobile, as fixed and as heavy as atoms reduced to their nuclei. Immobility, the glacial cold of matter and flesh deprived of primal fire and sinking ineluctably towards that absolute zero which is the final stage of material death.
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The implications of this image of creation, split into several universes of which the last - ours - is totally separated from the others by a barrier of dense shadow, are obviously profound. Weight, cold, and immobility are at once our condition, our destiny, and our death. To surrender oneself to weight, to increase it in all senses of the term (by absorbing food, or by procreating, weighing the world down with successive births), is to collaborate in this unhappy destiny, to ratify the primordial fall which is the cause of it, to ally oneself with the work of death undertaken by the being or beings who provoked this tragic cleavage. In modern terms, it is hastening the trend towards what we call entropy. Curiously enough, the Gnostics perceived, albeit summarily and imperfectly, the fact that the destiny of the material world tends towards inertia. The task of the Gnostic, therefore, is to climb this fatal slope, in the literal and in the figurative sense, to try to cross the dividing wall, to regain, by a progressive shedding of the alienating weight of his body and his psyche, the higher world from which we should never have fallen. To discard or lighten all the matter of this wold, that is the strange end the Gnostics pursued.-Jacques LaCarriere
Record Label: Looking for a label!