CD

[review written by Peter Tibos]

No gods, no masters!

I had not heard of Digital Nova before, to be honest, but this Marseille, France-based act already released a full length before: Alpha Omega, released in 2013. And what’s more, there was an EP in 2010, so this band is not exactly a newcomer within the French scene. They also gained a modest yet not unimportant name live on stage, sharing those stages with acts such as Mass Hysteria, AqME or Tagada Jones.

Float weightless in the void to the sound of exploding supernovas.
A solid thump closes the airclock behind you. Greeting your vision, a myriad of stars shining like beacons in black space. Rapid fingers across the uplink to the mothership ‘feed my cat while I’m gone’.
The engine roars as the plasma ions accelerates. The mothership but a pixel left behind. Your ships humming soothes your excitement as you set out for new unexplored worlds.

Listening to Halgrath’s Ritual Of Lost Epoch that made my brother mentioning the existence of this album. Blessings from the darkness – opus II, the second release of these two members of Corona Barathri, is an almost 75 minutes during trip to the deepest evilness of mankind. This is not an ordinary dark ritual ambient project, this is one long Satanic ambient evocation, based on the Luciferian lifestyle both members keeping up with.

Spell Forest is quite an ‘old’ band, nowadays terrorizing our globe for more than two decades. They were formed in 1995 in São Paolo, Brazil, with members included from other notorious acts such as Mythological Cold Towers, Vobiscum Inferi, Crux Caelifera, Cruor Cultum and other aural greatness.

My first ‘meeting’ with ProtoU was last year, when I had the opportunity to review Lost Here, a grandiose full length album that was released via Cryo Chamber (one of my preferred labels within the Drone / Ambient / Industrial scene lately). The interested ones might read my thoughts and opinion about that release on Concreteweb’s update of April 18th 2016 (or just enter the name in the ‘search’ tab). A brief history can be consulted in that chronicle.

Not that long ago I got in touch with a French guy, Arthur Arsenne, who did initially impress me by a collaborative album, created together with Piotr Cisak and Pawel Oleksinski (for the review on that Arsenne + Cisak + Oleksinski recording, see update of January 17th 2016) – thanks to Frozen Light for the opportunity, and so on… Anyway, it turned out that A.Arthur (his ‘professional’ name as musician) did run two young labels, Death Carnival Records and <

I’ve always been impressed by bands and projects that involve Matron Thorn: Crowhurst, Benighted In Sodom, Midwinter Storm, Andacht and, especially, mighty Ævangelist. And hurray, recently he started a new project, called Death Fetishist.

Sometimes a band needs many years before they find a stable line-up, or before they have the opportunity to record and release decent material. Soulwound is such a band. Actually, the origins go back to the Nineties, when the brothers Niko and Janne Huusari started jamming and gigging. They wrote some pieces, which they did record as a demonstrational release, and there were permanent line-up changes going on in the meantime, which didn’t make it easier to perform live, evidently.