From Corners Unknown

Nasheim is the atmospheric black metal project of Swedish artist E. Grahn. Though it’s difficult to ascertain when this project was born, his debut album, Solens vemod, dropped in February 2014. Now, almost exactly five years later, he emerges from the charred, windswept soil of an archaic copse to channel a telluric energy. Jord och aska, or Earth and ash, is a despondent expanse made verdant by its lush, transfixing melodies. A seamless wayfaring, this album harbors an elegant blissfulness sodden in melancholy. The quivering violin, the baritone cello reverberations, the frosty tremolo-picked atmosphere; each note is condensed into a single burning essence, which fervently boils as the album progresses. At its conclusion, the essence is crushed and dispersed across the copse in a cloud of ash and ember-emblazoned dust. And when we emerge, transfigured and born anew, we feel a kinship deeper with mother Earth. Thank you so much for listening.

Drano Cocktail is the tonally amorphous noise project of Iowa denizen, Ben Campbell. Established in his early teens around 2013, Ben sought to uncover the harshest, most extreme sounds beyond what is already considered utmost abrasive in underground circles. That is, he yearned to cross the caustic boundaries of death metal, grindcore, and other flesh-peeling genres to locate unbridled experimentation and migraine-inducing compositions. This led him to create a noisecore project with a close friend. However, Drano Cocktail satiates Ben’s drive for tinkering with sounds, mood palettes, and morose themes in liberating ways as he does not tether himself to a single noise style or flavor.

Ben’s first Drano Cocktail release, Hope for Human Extinction, starkly contrasts with his most recent output. Where this 22-minute track features a cacophony of sporadic drumming and hellish shrieks, his latest release, Regeneration, pumps in arteries of droning, ambient-laden harsh noise. Between these releases exist several others, though interestingly, the span of time between Hope for Human Extinction and a follow-up is nearly five years in length. During these years, Ben spent countless hours honing, refining, experimenting. He says most of the recordings from this period will likely never see the light of day as he substantially progressed over this period. But since emerging from the shadows, he has been churning out healthy slugs of drain cleaner.

It is unknown where Ben will take Drano Cocktail sonically. Regeneration and the live set he performs on this episode channels rather hypnotic energy. Though as his discography expands and as he explains in this interview, he continues to seek darker, seedier paths that will unfurl before him and drag him deeper into experimentation. Thank you so much for listening.

Flowers for Bodysnatchers is a neoclassical dark ambient project from the mind of Duncan Ritchie. His Cryo Chamber label debut, Aokigahara, released back in November of 2015. Several months later, he followed this album up with its companion piece, Love Like Blood. In 2017, Duncan crafted a harrowing haunted house tale titled Asylum Beyond. And now, here in 2019, we descend deeper into the confines of Duncan’s psyche with his latest opus, Alive with Scars.

In the months leading up to Alive with Scars‘s publication, Duncan cast a mini album, a prologue, into the ether. This foreshadowed the concept of his new LP, which he describes as the exploration of “the life long struggle of living in a diseased body. A body slowly being destroyed from the inside out by its own central nervous system. A body that with the passing of time will waste and wither to its own unique sonnet of pain and torment.” It was not until the full Cryo Chamber release, however, that Duncan divulged this concept articulates his near ten-year experience of living with Multiple Sclerosis—an autoimmune disease where the body’s immune system attacks itself, degrading healthy tissue that insulates the brain, spinal cord, and central nervous system.

Alive with Scars is a deeply personal album that bleeds with heart-wrenching, and at times, utterly ferocious arrangements. Seldom does warmth percolate in this dreary struggle. From the eerie crawl of nausea-inducing orchestral strings to the gaping maw of hopeless black ambience and the bone-piercing industrial beats, Alive with Scars harbors tones immediately familiar to those acquainted with Duncan’s work, though it simultaneously treads new sonic terrain, bringing us closer toward understanding his existence with Multiple Sclerosis. Much more can be said here in this summary, but we will leave it to the podcast to channel our respective sentiments about this superb record. Thank you so much for listening.

Beaten to Death is an experimental, melodic grindcore quintet from Oslo, Norway. Their fourth studio album, Agronomicon, dropped in December of 2018. Characterized by a turbulent mishmash of genres and styles, Beaten to Death erect a unique tone that is as disorienting as it is blissful. Robotic riffs pockmark the grinding brigade of unfettered blast beats and ferocious snarls, slathering the pandemonium with grooving residue. And every so often, glistening melodies soar. It’s an intoxicating blend of brutality, zaniness, and euphoria—one that tramples and simultaneously inspires awe. Thank you so much for listening.

Dead Twin is the devastating harsh noise/power electronics moniker of John Cartagena, who resides in New Jersey. Where his noise mangling originally began under the project name Grey Bogus several years prior, Dead Twin marked a turning point where John fully embraced the chemically imbalanced chaos pent up in his skull. This led to his ear-obliterating tone that he describes as the sound you would hear if you plugged his mind into an amplifier.

The change in project name simultaneously represents a more sentimental attitude John harbored toward his noise production. Grey Bogus arose from the simple concatenation of two words he pieced together whilst working a warehouse job—a brand of paper named Bogus and the pallid shade of their product. Dead Twin was supposed to be the title of a Grey Bogus track, however, John decided to pay homage to his late baby brother and crystallize his memory by adopting the name. Though not every track he produces relates directly to his brother, his existence is promulgated and remembered in each Dead Twin release.

In this episode of The Noise Perspective, John digs into his early days of experimenting with noise. He describes his piercing sound, some of his wildest live shows, and he touches on some key influences, in particular, the Japanese noise scene. Following this, he treats us to twelve minutes of undiluted hellnoise. Thank you so much for listening.

Veilburner is an experimental blackened death metal duo from Pennsylvania. Their latest record, A Sire to the Ghouls of Lunacy, arises from the wake of the band’s trilogy, which concluded in September of 2016. Where this trilogy explored transhumanism, A Sire to the Ghouls of Lunacy is the first piece of a conceptual duology that articulates a fresh story from the perspective of a tormented man. Though neither one of us have taken deep dives into Veilburner’s trilogy, this record harbors an uncanny plethora of experimentation concreted in blackened death metal bedrock. Barbaric vocal deliveries weave, splatter, and gurgle from guttural rumblings to outlandish shrieks from beyond the veil. And etched into this album’s enigmatic fabric are dizzying patterns of electronic soundscapes, an unflinching quantity of bizarre timbres and transitions, and a keen sense of mania. Thank you so much for listening.

The Noise Perspective is a new podcast series here at From Corners Unknown. In it, we host artists who perform a 10 to 20 minute “live” set after a brief discussion about their music and process. Sets are live in the sense that artists play immediately after our discussion in real time. Once their set is complete, we suture it together with the conversation and apply minimal audio leveling to the performance so as to not shred the ears of listeners. If you are keen on blistering audio, however, we will be uploading the raw, non-leveled performances to our Patreon page.

This series is still in its infancy, but we do not have plans to restrict it to a specific genre. Given that this idea sprouted up through a conversation between myself and Worm Monolith—a rhythmic harsh noise artist—we found harsh noise to be a natural starting point for our first episode. We already have a couple more noise artists lined up for subsequent episodes and we plan to broach the realms of ambient and experimental music to broaden The Noise Perspective’s scope.

This first episode is a bit rough around the edges, but it’s safe to call it a proto-type. The general structure of episodes will morph and evolve as time moves along. And we sincerely hope you enjoy this new journey with us.

LORN is the experimental electronic project of Marcos Ortega. His latest opus, REMNANT, was released in September of 2018 via Wednesday Sound. A moodboard of tones, soundscapes, electronic planes and spires protruding into the not too distant future, REMNANT ensconces listeners in a cyberpunk reality. Elements of the natural world manage to pierce the static veils enveloping and distorting this existence. Electronic beats promulgate then evaporate. We are suspended in this glitch, floating in limbo. Thank you so much for listening.

Grave Blankets is an amorphous ambient/industrial/noise/drone/experimental trio residing in the Philadelphia area. Their debut self-titled EP was released in September of 2018 by the Pennsylvania-based experimental music label, Flag Day Recordings. This album I discussed with Connor back in November 2018 on our Voices From Corners Unknown series and it’s one that I found utterly heart-wrenching. The first couple of tracks on the EP paved a pathway etched with anxiety, confusion, and a lingering sense of wonder. Coils of grating noise churned in icy shadows as industrial throbs faintly reverberated. Eventually, it transitioned into an ambient reprieve, porting us to the poignant fourteen-minute closer track, one which rattled such a tender nerve in me as it paid respects to Alex, the brother-in-law of the Grave Blankets drummer Kyle, who passed away from an overdose.

What is of intrigue regarding Grave Blankets is their ability to experiment with such a diverse breadth of genres, noises, and moods; hence, the amorphous descriptor. Their upcoming LP, Things We Leave Behind, journeys (in part) to fields of post-rock while harboring brighter ambient passages, which were near non-existent on their EP. They also have produced a 33-minute droning noise track to be released as a split with Pittsburgh noise artist Easy Bake Oven on Rorer 714 Recordings. And additionally, the trio has a couple other splits on the way, one with experimental ambient outfit Motel Shadows and one with Bangkok harsh noise artist Ganmad 737.

Beyond the amorphous qualities of Grave Blankets’ sound, the way they go about producing their songs is quite atypical too. At the outset, I presumed Kyle, Dave, and Steve pieced together their evocative sound palettes in a studio or practice space. Though this is not the case. They actually record the bulk of their tracks by sending sound files back and forth to each other via email, adding layers and crafting textures over the course of a single day or several. And what they ultimately seek in their sonic crafting is an emotion—be it warm, consoling, anxiety-inducing, what have you—that resonates with the listener.

In this conversation, all three members of Grave Blankets discuss the piecing together of their debut EP. They describe how the band formed, their writing process, and they divulge some details about their new LP. They also articulate an intriguing notion whereby each member’s contributions to Grave Blankets are for the collective of the outfit and not for egotistical inflation. Thank you so much for listening.

BLACK BILE is an industrial death-doom project from Queens, New York. Their debut album, Dead Leaves Before An Angry Wind, is of a rather experimental evil. It slathers industrial palpitations together with thunderous cracks of doom metal. Interspersed throughout the frigid void writhing, feverish outbursts of death industrial erupt and sometimes, molten heaps of sheet metal eek to create scathing harsh noise textures. However, pensive passages of meditative post-metal percolate. This album ports us to sonic landscapes that bewilder in their final construction and their adroit assemblage is something to marvel at. Thank you so much for listening.