From Corners Unknown

Serpent Column is an inscrutable avant-garde black metal troupe based somewhere in the United States. Though I did stumble upon a note postulating that they’re located in Michigan, I was unable to independently verify this, hence my generic geographical marker of “somewhere.” Details on this project are scant. The date of formation is not explicitly known. Their lyrics are not published to our knowledge. However, we do know that Theoponos is the sole brainchild and lifeblood of Serpent Column. Their real name eludes us, but this insight is moot in digesting and making sense of the caustic grime festering within their debilitating aural constructs.

Not even seven months after their 2019 sophomore LP Mirror in Darkness did Serpent Column unfurl their deafening sequent, Endless Detainment, a 22-minute mini-LP (MLP). Where Mirror in Darkness harbored an engulfing atmosphere laden in dreariness and perpetually shifting vistas of cataclysmic grandeur, Endless Detainment boils these elements down to their utmost jagged essence. Not a single iota of fat drips from its carrion-picked bones. Compositions are terse and trenchant. Pandemonium ceaselessly wavers via mathcore angularity, oft clobbering us in a tempest of excoriating howls and scalding discordance. This intoxicating vigor permeates the vast breadth of Endless Detainment‘s runtime, however, sporadic respites corrugate its roughshod barbarity. These come in the form of thrashy or rocking aberrations, and while admittedly surprising on first encounter, they render the blasphemous excursion most enthralling. We sincerely hope you enjoy our exchange over this MLP as Connor found it to be a gem as did I. Thank you so much for tuning in!

It’s been much too long since our last “Album Reviews” episode here at the FCU bayou. Allow me to jumpstart your memory regarding this series as even I am a bit misty on the details. Tim and I select four recent albums that are festering in the veins of extreme metal. We endeavor to summarize our thoughts for each and then we proceed to chat about them in an order usually determined toward the beginning of an episode. In this one, we went alphabetically as three of the four bands begin with the letter ‘b’. Relative to the weekly album review podcast episodes between Connor and myself, this series is quite relaxed in that we don’t delve into the bedrock of each track comprising a record. Rather, we speak more generally about the qualities we liked/disliked, and I often ask Tim (aka Humbaba) to opine from his own music production/composition perspective. That’s the gist.

With all of that exposition out of the way, we are elated to return to the fray with tones barbaric, ritualistic, blistering, and ravenous. In this episode, we prattle about the return of tech-death titans Beneath the Massacre and their fourth LP, Fearmonger. Then we proceed to the latest conceptual offering from France’s renowned brutal deathgrind quintet, Benighted, and their latest effort, Obscene Repressed. Endless Wound, the excoriating black death debut from extreme metal supergroup Black Curse follows next and the episode concludes with the amorphous and ever-mysterious black ambient doom duo, Death Void Terror (DVT).

Below you will find a few extra details regarding each album discussed in this episode. Timestamps are provided for the approximate mark we begin chatting about a record in case you’d like to skip around. Additionally, social media links and links to each band’s respective labels are provided in case you want to acquire a digital/physical copy. Thank you so much for tuning in; we sincerely hope you enjoy our exchange.

Greetings Gloompa Loompas! Back toward the end of March 2020, which feels like eons ago, the experimental ambient sludge quintet Old Man Gloom (OMG) pulled a “reverse gloom” on us. Instead of dropping their two new LPs on the official release date of May 22nd via Profound Lore, they instead published their second album, Seminar IX: Darkness of Being, well in advance of the first, Seminar VIII: Light of Meaning, as a gift to the world. This tactic is rather uncharacteristic of the ape troupe, especially when compared to the antics (i.e., “gloom”) leading up to the dawn of their Ape of God era in 2014. At that time, they dropped the eponymous record to reviewers and news outlets alike, however, they soon divulged that it was a fake and that Ape of God is actually two LPs. For brevity, I’ll skirt the plethora of details, the chagrin of music journalists who reviewed the counterfeit album, and note that Ape of God were formative records for both Connor and myself. Not only did OMG’s antics give us something snicker at, but it also expanded our respective extreme metal horizons and simultaneously entrenched between us a riverbed through which our friendship would deepen and flourish.

Seminar IX: Darkness of Being is a heartfelt tribute to Caleb Scofield (bassist for Cave In, Zozobra, and OMG), who tragically passed away in March of 2018. Most, if not all compositions, comprising this record harbor his memory. Be it through lyrics, unfinished tracks and/or bass lines Caleb crafted years ago, or the poignant effusion of grief, the healing process endured by each OMG member radiates throughout this seminar to commit his life to the timelessness of recorded sound. Admittedly, Connor and I are not so familiar with OMG’s pre-Ape of God work (exceptions being NO and Christmas), though relative to the Ape of God era, Darkness of Being expands the troupe’s tonal palette. “Death Rhymes” emanates a cozy living room feel as a droning, dirgeful organ accompanies a loving acoustic guitar melody. Contemplative ambient swells lull as if an endless gaze upon a serene expanse will dredge understanding. Yet still, we are treated to the off-kilter experimentation commonplace to OMG and other Aaron Turner adjacent projects: out of tune strings, mangled percussive notes, insidious gurgles of noise; it’s all there. Much more could be said here, but so as to not subtract from the conversation, I will refrain. We sincerely hope you enjoy our review as well as the little stories we share as it relates to OMG and their importance to us; thank you so much for tuning in.

Hello! Welcome to the pilot episode of a new podcast series we’re testing out here at the rickety FCU dwelling titled “Track Reviews”. The goal is to provide you some quick insights into fresh(er) tracks, EPs, and/or splits that have recently made their way onto the web. In traditional fashion, we plucked a smattering of disparate tones and vibes to keep the conversation tilted and dynamic. Heavy indie, funeral doom, cybergrind, and slamming death metal are but a few genres discussed. And to make matters a bit more topsy turvy, we enlisted the third voice of review writer Derek Paul, not only to intermittently derail the conversation into Dark Souls diatribes but to add some undiluted frankness to the mix.

Below you will find the list of tracks, EPs, and splits we discuss during this episode in order of appearance. Bandcamp embedded players, social media links, and a handful of other cursory details are provided too. As this episode is a pilot, we do not have a publication frequency ironed out quite yet; however, our current thought is to produce these about once per month. If there are some new tracks you’d like to hear us dissect, please don’t hesitate to ping us either by email or on our social media channels. We sincerely hope you enjoy this new series and we’d love to hear any feedback (positive, negative, indifferent) you may have about it. Thank you for tuning in.

Back in February of 2019, Connor and I had a relatively brief chat about Return to Worm Mountain’s debut self-titled LP. It transpired during the final episode of our now defunct Voices From Corners Unknown series, which was structured as us having three snappy discussions of, you guessed it, three albums. However, immediately after that episode’s release, we switched gears to focus on one album per episode because we found the Voices structure too limiting to provide in-depth insight into albums we could likely spend an hour plus rambling about. And though I cannot say Return to Worm Mountain’s debut was the sole reason we shifted speeds (our sanity and composure were slowly decaying under the weight of the swift reviews), it certainly played a key role as it was one Connor and I loved (and still love) dearly but we didn’t have enough time to expound upon it. Fortunately, the South African duo has returned to the fray with their sophomore effort Therianthropy, which now grants us the ripe opportunity to pour over their outlandish cross-pollination of psychedelic synth quirks, verdant folk melodies, acid-churning sludge, and a sundry of timbres balmy, bitter, and beatific.

Comprised of Cam Lofstrad (drums, synths, guitars, bass, vocals, etc.) and Duncan Park (guitars, bass, banjo, jaw harp, vocals), the duo embarked on a journey in January of 2019 to the land of the pig children who dwell at the foot of the eponymous mountain. Rife with experimentation, their compositions schlepped the disheveled pathways and obtuse gradients through pastel flora and alien fauna to further illustrate the extraordinary landscapes only vaguely captured in the album’s artwork. On their latest release, however, Worm Mountain eschews a return trip to the pig children and instead focus on cryptids, some well-known and others esoteric (at least to us). With this shift unfurls new vectors of sound. Still, Duncan’s serene acoustic melodies percolate and aberrations of desert-tinged synth sting, but these moments are exhaled in vivacious spells amidst caustic deluges of grindcore and blackened spew. Their knack for suturing these disparate timbres together remains steadfast and though we miss the pig children and their antics, Therianthropy is an astonishing showcase of the duo’s ever-evolving capabilities. We had a hell of a lot to say about this record, from the cryptids it pays homage to as well as the wonderfully strange chasers accompanying their brand of psychedelic tonic. Thank you so much for tuning in.

Welcome back to Camp Crystal La… I mean Park Plaza Mall, the famed destination of crispy youngsters that vacated their beef husks with the cordial assistance of some berserk security robots. This is where KOTH DOLGOMORU’s (not to confused with Koth Dolgomoru) project originates, within the dregs of schlocky 80s horror flicks of which his band’s moniker borrows its name. However, despite the Chopping Mall title, the lyrical content, themes, and imaginative story-telling are anything but related, save the exception of the album’s opening track. In fact, Chopping Mall’s debut, Mauled by a Magical Bear with Scalding Hot Liquid Cheese Spraying from its Eyesockets (MBAMBWSHLCSFIE for short), wrangles with taboo subjects such as scarfing moldy granola, feeding spoiled milk to a grand wizard, and getting plastered in unicorn feces, amongst a litany of other touchy subjects contained within its 21-track gamut. This is likely the dumbest album we’ve discussed in our podcast’s tenure thus far, but unsurprisingly, Connor resonated on a primordial level with every iota of Chopping Mall’s aesthetic. So here we are.

Based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the solo deathgrind army that was originally 12 members large dwindled “to one stupid asshole” (KOTH’s words, not mine). It is also alleged that there exist six obscure Chopping Mall records preceding MBAMBWSHLCSFIE that total 223 tracks, but I am suspicious of this claim because who would spend time crafting a fake menu for an imaginary barbecue joint instead of uploading every track to Bandcamp for no one to listen to? Posers, that’s who. Joking aside, Chopping Mall revels in the campiness of the era it is inspired by. This is promulgated, in part, by the lyrics, which were penned in five minutes (or less) for each track. They are cheesy, absurd, and rather doltish, however, there permeates an acute self-awareness that renders would be eye rolls into cheeky smirks. Riffs, while prosaic, are whittled to misshapen spikes; some apply blunt force grindcore trauma and others excoriate with tendon tearing grooves. While I could divulge more detail here, I think I’d be liquefying the substance (read: granola) of our conversation. Without further ado, we sincerely hope you enjoy our exchange over MBAMBWSHLCSFIE. Thank you so much for tuning in.

At the end of February, we opened our monthly poll to have you all vote on the next album Connor and I would review in podcast form. Intronaut’s sixth LP, Fluid Existential Inversions, won by a landslide. Admittedly, I may have gone a bit too obscure with the other contenders; nevertheless, we’re thrilled to share this discussion with you as we have both been aware of Intronaut’s presence for the better part of a decade, yet we have not descended into their discography until this release.

Intronaut is a Los Angeles-based progressive metal quartet that formed in 2004 and has released six LPs in their approximate sixteen-year existence thus far. From 2006 forward they had been producing one record every two years on average; however, the timing between this latest effort, Fluid Existential Inversions, and their previous, The Direction of Last Things, is the longest breather taken between outputs, five years. While we cannot opine on how this extended respite has influenced their tonal evolution (or lack thereof), song-writing chops, cohesiveness, or any other dimension related to their growth, we did discover an abundance of riffs, textures, atmospheres, and flora to marvel at.

Though not explicitly deemed a concept record, there does persist a thematic throughline of a psychedelic trip gone awry. This is woven together via intermittent audio transmissions that playback like an exhausted VHS tape, distorted and warped. Instruments expand this kernel by unfurling seemingly boundless swathes of alien terra firma which nourish the spry germinations of outlandish timbres. Air currents remain in a state of perpetual flux, swaying the tempo and intensity of a track’s biome at a moment’s notice. And as the color palette of the album’s artwork suggests, an illustrious spectrum of oceanic blues and verdant emeralds tinge the foray into the inner-self. Every track on this record breathes and Intronaut promulgates the sense that they, in fact, prevail somewhere in the unknown reaches of the interstellar canopy. Though foreign-sounding on the ears, there is something inherently organic permeating their constructions. There’s a whole lot more we have to say about Fluid Existential Inversions beyond what is written here. We sincerely hope you enjoy our exchange; thank you so much for tuning in.

As we have endeavored to diversify the breadth of timbres we cover here on our podcast over the past several episodes, our journey has led us across some engrossing terrains. A few weeks back, we rambled about the caustic effusions of harsh noise seeping from clipping.’s harrowing brand of horrorcore, we unhinged ourselves as we attempted to mimic the maniacal word slop spilling from Chat Pile’s Remove Your Skin Please, and we floated through the hypnotizing realm of electronics where science collides with spirits in Lemna’s Retrocausality. Now we approach another frontier. It’s one not wholly alien to us as it is imbued with flickers of noise rock. However, this outfit lovingly embraces a whirlwind of timbres, blending balmy gales of infectious hooks sideswiped by mathy clods of misshapen rambunctiousness to coalesce into an auditory experience that channels the fragrant stillness of a twilit evening in the dead of summer. This is Mammock and their debut album, Itch.

The concrete date of Mammock’s formation is not abundantly clear to us, but their earliest social media post suggests they may have congealed some time in 2018. Itch was recorded during February 2019 and it dropped on the first day of 2020 (our first podcast review for a record that came out this year! Day late and a dollar short, I suppose). In the album’s thirty-minute runtime, Mammock splays themselves aslant. Palatable riffs are abundant and often oscillate between grooving hooks and spams of feedback or off-kilter lunacy. Junctures of giddy—and sometimes cheeky—bliss burgeon amidst the warm atmospheric resonance radiating from their strings. Further yet, they achieve a smattering of ephemeral highs by way of slow-burn melodies, some of which stir elation and some of which dredge a soulful longing. Itch was quite a wonderful surprise for Connor to stumble upon. Though it’s not within our “traditional” fair, we had a slew of words to share over it. We sincerely hope you enjoy our exchange; thank you for tuning in.

What’s up eye-crusted sleepy heads! After you wipe that sand from the corners of your eyes, I wanted to welcome you to another podcast interview where I have an in-depth chat with Ian Coarse, conjurer of the Sleeping Village Reviews webzine. Founded back in February 2018, Ian established Sleeping Village Reviews as an Instagram-only platform to provide snappy and succinct reviews of albums he adored. Through time and with a fervent dedication to his craft, his articulate writing began to amass a cult following of underground bands and avid readers who revel in the dingy, cobweb-riddled corners of obscure auditory gems. And as the popularity of Sleeping Village burgeoned so did the list of promos begin to mound toward the clouds. He found it difficult to stay on top of his then previously manageable music coverage, and thus, he began to recruit writers who reciprocated his intrigue and passion for the underground.

Around the time his writer enlistment became more full-fledged, Ian developed a website without losing sight of his dedicated Instagram audience. This opened the doorway to pen long-form reviews uninhibited by Instagram’s character count, and in a clever twist, it afforded him the opportunity to tinker with etching some medieval-tinged lore. Instead of opting to traverse the well-trod route of having each author use their real names in their respective album review publications, he characterized each writer as a scribe with a moniker of their own choosing (e.g., Ancient Hand, Loveloth). In the library or archives of this mysterious “sleeping village”, a review can be thought of as a transcription of timeworn text that expounds upon the sonic constructions of musicians relatively enigmatic. Though one could merely chalk these kernels of lore up to a gimmick, it does permeate a cryptic aura that makes the Sleeping Village feel like a lived-in cluster of cottages dimly illuminated by torch-fire.

In this episode, Ian describes the inception of Sleeping Village Reviews. He dives into how his taste in extreme music has evolved as Sleeping Village and its ranks have expanded, while also offering up a multitude of tips for smaller bands as to how they can get their foot through the door of the ever-spreading cellar of extreme metal outfits. There’s a whole hell of a lot more detail we go into beyond these points, however, I want to refrain from rambling too much (as I am wont to do) so that there remains a litany of insights for you all to unearth. I sincerely hope you enjoy our exchange. Thank you so much for tuning in.

For the last handful of album review podcast episodes, we have been endeavoring to trek across auditory terrain seldom wandered in our murky corner of the web. Recently, we discussed the dirty garbage water flooding Chat Pile’s second EP, followed by an effort to dissect the latest opus from the experimental hip hop trio, clipping. Now, we find ourselves at a precipice where electronic and ambient, science and the spirit world, converge.

Lemna is a solo project helmed by Maiko Okimoto, a composer and producer based out of Tochigi, Japan. Her musical background is extensive and long-running as she started studying music and playing the piano at four years of age. Fast forward to 2006 when her then-fledgling adventure into electronic music bubbled from a wellspring experience of being an MC for drum and bass (D&B) music in Tokyo. Maiko herself says this D&B blip was a rather unlikely origin for what would eventually become Lemna (her former moniker being Key), but as she embraced this genre and poured innumerable hours into sharpening her compositional and production skills, she ultimately ended up unearthing a tone both striking and transcendental.

Though Lemna’s earliest electronic beginnings are rooted in D&B, her tone is anything but. Retrocausality, one of her latest releases, is an album of ever-flowing organic and mechanical layers. Methodical Lemna conjures wavelengths brooding, beat-driven, alien, and periodically melodic, each of which is introduced at pivotal junctures in her compositions; sometimes she folds them into one another and other times, cannibalizes them. There permeates a consistent undercurrent of crisp and often bleak ambient resonance that shrouds each electronic thrum, speckle, and flourish in a glacial mist. And it is within the suturing of this uncanny atmosphere and the blankets of subtly evolving layers where Lemna’s craft becomes hypnotic.

Though technically a concatenation of two EPs, Retrocausality: A Priori (from cause) and Retrocausality: A Posteriori (from result), both of which dropped in October 2019 (I know, we’re late to our review; it’s tradition around here), we thought it’d be an enjoyable reprieve to delve into the elucidating, trance-like innards of Lemna’s work. We also took a bit of a different approach in this episode where both Connor and I penned skeletons of videogame concepts that would be served by Retrocausality as a soundtrack. It gets a titch bizarre in spots, but we sincerely hope you our exchange. Thank you so much for tuning in.