Trumpet of Amdusias

  P O R T A L R E L E A S E D T W O R E C O R D S T O D A Y That's how my day began. Several versions of that message. And friends, the hype is real. Unhinged ambient black metal sludge gloomcloud is back on the menu boys. Avow by itself is a massive adventure into murky disquiet, but played (As intended) sync'd up with companion piece Hagbulbia, it becomes infintely more sinister. Press play below and enjoy the madness Avow by PORTAL Hagbulbia by PORTAL

Nadja is a duo of multi-instrumentalist Aidan Baker and bassist Leah Buckareff—active since 2005—and making music which can be described as ambient doom, dreamsludge, or metalgaze. Nadja’s signature sound combines the atmospheric textures of shoegaze and ambient/electronic music with the heaviness, density, and volume of metal, noise, and industrial. Think Cocteau Twins meets Sunn 0))) . For the new album, Luminous Rot, the duo retain their overblown/ambient sound, and explore shorter and more tightly structured songs reflecting their interests not only in metal, but post-punk, cold-wave, shoegaze, and industrial. Thematically, the album explores ideas of 'first contact' and the difficulties of recognising alien intelligence. This was in part inspired by reading such writers as Stanislaw Lem and Cixin Lui, as well as Margaret Wertheim's "A Field Guide To Hyperbolic Space," about mathematician Daina Taimina's work with crochet to illustrate h...

Violet Cold is an experimental AI simulated music project from 40°22’37.7″N 49°50’51.6″E. It is also one of the weirdest, coolest musical things I know of. Across something like 50 albums in the last eight years, Emin Guliyev has forged his own sonic world. Build out of whatever strikes his fancy, from ambient, noise, house, drum and bass, jazz, classical, folk, shoegaze, sludge, crust, powerviolence, post-rock, post-black metal and depressive black metal, Violet Cold is a towering rebuke to every supposedly "prog" band out there. This my friend, is how you prog. This is how you avant-garde. This man has trained computers to write better metal than the sum total of all Guitar Center part-time employees combined. Best described as "Militantly Anti-Fascist Astral Black Metal Dream Pop" this album takes yet another step into the musical (and political) future I hope we one day all inhabit. I am particularly impressed with the "Daft Punk as a post-metal band...

  Once upon a time, on the shores of Lake Lagoda, outside Saint Petersburg, there were three friends. These three friends played instrumental post-black metal. They played it well. They sort of invented a genre - where French blackgaze and instrumental post-metal met, and created a celestial cacophony. They called themselves Trna . Across three albums they created some very serious and ethereal post-metal (which I should probably talk about here at some point). But, somewhere along the way two of the three decided to explore less salubrious topics, and formed a side project for this more morose, depressing music. That side project is Olhava . This is their second album. It is magnificent. I'm not going to try to sell you on it. Just listen. With a cameo fom Austin Lunn of Panopticon on track 3, this is quite the album. Multi-instrumentalist Andrey Novozhilov and drummer Timur Yusupov describe their new journey with words of thoughtful contemplation: “When winter is just starting ...

  Attention nerds. This is your new favorite album. Why? Because it is not only really good post-metal, it comes with a historically based tabletop role-playing game as part of the package. First off, Kauan is a band was founded by a Russian who writes in Finnish but who moved to Ukraine and now lives in Estonia. As you do. Secondly, they make almost-vocal-less post metal that makes me think of Explosions in the Sky , Russian Circles and Pelican . This record for certain flirts with the piano-laden edge of the boundary between post-metal and flat out post-rock Mogwai worship territory. The title is a reference to the true story of an unidentified fleet of ships discovered in Northern Russia in 1930, with its crew and cargo perfectly frozen in time. And that is where the RPG bit comes in. Ice Fleet is a tabletop RPG adventure/module based on Into the Odd rules. - A unique combination of game and music album that aims to bring your play experience to a completely new level of im...

  Do you like both doom metal and the Cocteau Twins ? Are you interested in what kind of dark ambient post-metal Enya might make? Are you yearning to know what Jesu would have sounded like if they had been a Swedish funeral doom outfit? If you too worship at the twin altars of TEXTURE and ATMOSPHERE, I invite you in for a listen to what may end up being the Sad Boi Noizes album of the year. Self-described as being " ...recorded during a bout of debilitating insomnia. Doom metal with an airy, otherworldly feel - instrumental, dreamlike music for those who can't drift away. " 20 minutes of staggeringly beautiful (successful) attempts to capture the beauty in pain. The Insomniac by Wisp

Gimmik is one of Martin  Haidingers many aliases. Usually more techno-oriented, this is a beatless album of masterful ambient. Just listen to it. Deux Nouvelles by Gimmik

  Yesterday we talked about Krzysztof Traczyk from ROSK . Today we are going to talk about another member of ROSK, Mateusz Szymański. Czary (Polish for "spells") is his second album; a follow-up to 2017s self-titled EP. I am a big fan of Norse mythology. Not in a white nationalist gym-viking way. In a "whole bunch of untrustworthy gender-bending shapeshifting drunks are sort of in control of the universe and accidentally made their own destruction out of sex and lies" kind of way. That makes me a sucker for pretty much any album about Norse mythology that is more intelligent than "WE VIKINGS WE SMASH". Fortunately, this exploration of the Germanic myth cycle is not just intelligent, but inventive as well. This is some really deeply felt ambient dark folk. highly recommended both for close listening and for pushing out other sounds so you can concentrate on writing about whatever nerdy thing it is you write about. czary by krzywdy

  Christopher Sawyer is Krzysztof Traczyk of ROSK , who you will be hearing more about soon. This is his debut solo album, an ambitious piece of melancholy. To quote his own description of the album: This is my piano-based electronic debut album, which I'd been writing on and off throughout 2019 and the beginning of 2020.  It's a melancholic, ruthless account of unveiling, admitting and facing the difficult truths. Or it's about eight hours of getting wasted.   Up to you. Indeed, it is up to us to decide.  Eight Hours of Heavy Drinking by Christopher Sawyer

  Droning psychedelic ambient black metal weirdness from back when things like that were not Brooklyn hipster cool, but confined almost exclusively to weird French bedroom passion projects. Ritual magick noise for, as one bandcamp reviewer put it, "listening to this in the bathtub at night with all the lights off". I have a whole playlist of things to listen to on public transport to drown out all the ambient noise of modern life, and this has been a constant in that rotation for the entire decade it has existed. Murmuüre by Murmuüre

 The thing I continue to love about this album, now five years after it came out, is how unabashedly Chinese it is. For me, there is nothing quite so nice as taking something from somewhere else and adapting it to your particular circumstance, whether it be food, music, or whatever else. The world is filled with terrible Nordic imitators, so I am always really stoked to see bands who lean in hard to their local scene / culture / roots. This is probably one of the albums that really sent me down that path, and I will always be indebted to Zuriaake for that. Gu Yan is an epic, sprawling, even cinematic, album, and should appeal to fans of bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Primordial . Musically, there are serious elements of Summoning here, but most of this album is utterly unique to Zuriaake and the atmosphere they build is entirely their own. Traditional instruments back up the backbone of the sound, not as a gimmick, but as the bedrock on which the whole edifice rests. ...

I have a confession to make. I like music that isn't metal. There, I said it. Now this little blog isn't just about metal music. Which is good, because Dan Barrett just dropped a new album, and it's awesome. Black Wing is the electronic counterpart to Giles Corey , the acoustic-only project of the Have A Nice Life frontman. No Moon is the second album as Black Wing, and it is an excellent document of the Plague Year 2020. Okay, so Vulnerable sounds like a circa 2003 Dutch gabber track, but the rest of the album is decidedly chill. No Moon by Black Wing

 So I try not to read other people's End of Year / Album of the Year lists until I am finished and happy with mine. I do this mostly out of a sense of wanting to make sure my thoughts are my own, but also not to get distracted by how terrible other people's tastes are compared to my immaculate musical palate. What actually ends up happening is that sometime in the middle of December every year I finish my list, and then spend the next several weeks gorging myself on end of year lists and obsessively listening to everything I find on them that I hadn't heard before. This leaves me at the end of the year with a nice stack of new albums to acquire and maybe a new favorite band. These are the gems for 2020 that I wasn't aware of until after my list was finished.  Part 3 - Even More Depressed Italians  I like my atmospheric black metal as slow, melancholy, and depressive as possible. I like it teetering on the edge of shoegaze territory, looking longingly at the Elysian plai...