monno

A black hole, that’s what this record is: a huge black hole that sucks out life and light and everything even remotely good or happy or… Leaving behind an emptiness so unthinkably vast that it will crush your soul and leave you a husk, drooling nullified. MONNO is the quintessential “not for everyone” band. Their music in “Ghosts” is a deconstruction of what even the sickest doom is supposed to be. The ambiance of the record is not just bleak; it’s downright scary. No ray of light – even of the proverbial oncoming train – pierce the darkness of the music. The fact that these guys don’t come from metal background probably explains the fact that this record is so uncompromising: their vision is outside of the metal norm. So, they do whatever they like and here lies the brilliance of “Ghosts”: it’s a record that’s so reformist as to become a landmark of the genre. 9 on 10, Global Domination, Sweden. ------------------- Hail the dawn of the new era. Although the human soul was sometimes symbolically or literally depicted in ancient cultures as a bird or other animal, it was widely held that the soul was an exact reproduction of the body in every feature. MONNO have come a long way, extending their malignant nature through thick layers of fog. Collecting the footprints they've left to musically outshine the past. For this new burial they've built a soundtrack like creeper with traces of gargling glass and atonal spheres that swing through the tracks like unidentified floating objects in the sky. At times you get the feeling your brain is attached to a mechanical beehive suffering various degrees of degradation resulting from the ingress of water and salt attacks. Without doubt their most brutal and menacing album to date, etheric yet droning vocals covered in doom frost. Gradually moving into uptempo black metal waters, than backdropping in sludge mystery like a bat in the night. Every time catching the listener by surprise and pushing them in warped directions. Like the legendary Kraken, they come out of the blue and in the blink of an eye drag you down in the storm. A globbering beatdown, difficult, dense and heavy on details. No rocket science but heavy riffs, laPtop monstrosity and drastic saxophone stabs for folks that have a little black in them. An impaired psychomotor as troublesome as the stars that hang above us, with the reeking odor of a thousand corpses. Carlo Steveen. -------------------------------- "GHOSTS by Monno is a superb late Doom album, and another real spiritual aid in the mega-meditation department. It sends me under every time as the drummer leads proceedings in a highly ritualistic manner (...) There is at the heart of each track a supreme turbulence that crashes through the psyche of the listener like an Ur-fart from the sphincter of the Lord". Julian Cope -------------------------------- "the band butter their sandwiches with blood, replenish their thermos with Black-Death whiskey and set out on a trudge through the muddy swamps of sludge, doom and drone. Equally capable of developing the gyrational power of a stoically repeated riff until it develops a mantra-like pull in one moment and confident enough to rely on the field-character of a single, distorted Saxophone chord for what seems like forever, Monno draw the listener in with an album which is as insistently immutable on the level of individual tracks as it is remarkably eclectic and open as an entity". Tokafi --------------------------------- "Le bruit de la fin du monde, et le silence qui s’en suit. Phillip K.Dick en partitions, Norman Spinrad en notes musicales, Jim G. Ballard en vibrations de basses. Avant et après. Mental et musical, Ghosts impose définitivement Monno comme l’un des groupes européens avant-gardistes les plus innovants et intéressants du moment. A écouter les neurones ouverts et l’esprit en paix". Cryptic madness ----------------------------------- "Monno fait mal. "Ghosts" ressemble à une dégradation soudaine du substrat vital. Messe noire. Rituel. Tout le son est confiné, sourd et mat. Le collectif germano-helvétique a quelque chose d’"inatteignable". Comme si cette procession que le son projette en esprit se déroulait hors du monde, loin de tous regards. Obsküre -------------------------------- "A new record by Monno is always a tectonic event in the world of avant rock. And like all tectonic movements you can only judge them by the rifts and clifts they leave open after some time, but it is almost impossible to judge them as they work and even more to predict them. Monno – not to be mistaken with the japanese soft-flow instrumental group Mono – have left their marks on many music fanatics skin by being unpredictable, consequential and without compromise. Their third album “ghosts” leads them deeply into doom-impending, dark landscapes. Gone are the weirdness and asylum-like noise erruptions and sound collages of “Candlelight Technology” and the live destruction brutality of “errors”. This record has five big tracks of structured and dark heaviness, grinding slowly at your backbone and skull. Yes, that great. Deep in the territory of Sunn0))) and other booming doom adepts with low hanging basses, Monno carve out their special niche by forging a soundtrack that spells impending doom better than most others. The record starts off slowly, then gets faster, turns into a beast of noise and then returns to slower yet equally dark waters. There are only few artists and bands able to make a whole album of this kind of sludge listenable, in the sense of really sitting down to listen to it. Ulver, Bohren and the Club of Gore, some in this vein of Boris, Earth, the aforementioned and in this ressort inevitable Sunn0))), are amongst them. A lot of the others are also great to listen to while doing something else, like reading, surfing the internet, playing a round of Wolfenstein or flogging your special someone. But this one is really listenable in the real sense of the word, mainly because of the – now take this – variety of the songs. They are all heavy, evil and bass-ridden, true, but they make for something special each time. Finally, and if nothing else, then it is the feat of Monno to have invited the saxophone into the range of instruments fitting to play Black Metal.". Cracked " ------------------------------------------------------------ ----------------------- Ghosts commence comme une mise en abîme, un repli sur soit, un isolement. La seule issue ? Un interminable sentier brumeux, serpentant au milieu de nulle part ("Negative Horizon"). Sur les bas côtés ? Le vide, le noir, le néant. Au bout ? L'inconnu. Monno forge une chape de plomb. La leur, pas celle d'un autre artisan nocturne. Car Monno use toujours d’outils bien particuliers dont ce saxophone relié à un ampli guitare par la volonté d’une force méphistophélique. Ce dernier souffle un chant des sirènes fantomatique et glacial ("Mérule"). Même Ulysse y aurait succombé, tel un humain prisonnier de sa pauvre condition, jeté dans un mouroir capitonné sous l'impulsion d'un rythme tribal ("Troye"). Prisonnier. Chaque beat est un coup de boule contre des parois cloutées ou un pieu qui reste ancré dans le thorax, baigné dans le sang porté à ébullition par les palpitations cardiaques. Toujours plus fortes, jusqu’à "Hull". La punition. Un passage à tabac administré par un Monstre. Violence inouïe, maladive et bestiale nourrie de râles déshumanisés. A l’agonie, c’est avec une perceuse que Monno dévisse la cervelle et l’aspire par les tympans et les narines. Au bout il n’y avait finalement que la Mort. "Endfall", la messe noire, les funérailles de l’âme fleuries de bruit blanc et d’une alarme macabre. Une descente aux enfers dans un boyau organique suintant la bile et l’acide. Tu es poussières et tu retourneras poussières, dans la crasse et dans une dimension ou chaque seconde dure une éternité. Ghosts s'écoute seul. Monno traduit en musique la définition littérale de La Peur. Celle qui glace le sang. La primaire, celle qui mène à la paralysie des muscles. Ghosts ne se nomme pas Ghosts pour rien et Monno joue de notre instinct de survie. Une superbe sortie pour Conspiracy Records et surtout pour Monno, qui avec cette carte surprenante laisse planer le doute sur la teneur de leur prochain disque. Métalorgie --------------------------------------