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Hail was formed by Carl Annala and featured Crash Worship's percussionist
Markus Wolff and guitarist Set Sothis Nox La. Their output
from 1998 and 1999
was collected
posthumously on
Crimson Madrigal (2009) and
Seeds (2009).
Oregon-based L'Acephale, the project of a vocalist and guitarist who calls himself
Set Sothis Nox La, debuted with the eclectic if unfocused
Mord Und Totsclag (Aurora Borealis, 2005):
black metal, noise and post-rock
(all mixed up in the 21-minute Against A Weeping Sea Of Sleep),
apocalyptic folk (Psalm of Misery) and gothic ambient music
(the 16-minute Euntes Ibant Et Flebant).
L'Acephale became an ensemble on
Stahlhartes Gehause (Aurora Borealis, 2009):
piano, drums, guitar, percussion, violin and sampler.
The album contains just four lengthy pieces, each one a cryptic collage of
wildly different styles.
The 18-minute Stahlhartes Gehause begins with a field recording of
Tibetan women singing a popular song. Then militaristic drumming and tragic
choirs
(a` la Death In June)
lay the groundwork for a furious black-metal eruption. This segues into
a solemn and melancholy hymn sung in German and soberly accompanied by violin and guitar. The black-metal fury returns with uncontrolled blasts of epileptic drumming and manically repetitive guitar riffs. The last few minutes are again
devoted to a field recording to popular music, this time a female lament.
The 12-minute Psalm Of Misery opens with a few seconds of an operatic
choir and then a tragic wall of sound of guitar and drums. This time the
protagonist is the guttural vocalist, who intones a relatively melodic tune
over that lulling noise. Halfway into the song, the noise dies away and is
replaced by a neoclassical duet of (acoustic) guitar and violin with German
vocals. This is ripped apart by a incendiary shoegaze-grade guitar, leading
to a mournful vocal theme and to sounds of people crying.
The first ten minutes of Perdition contain the most
sustained black-metal maelstrom of the album. That frenzy is interrupted by
an electroacoustic coda for piano, guitar and electronic buzz. (The last ten
minutes are silent).
The 16-minute The Book Of Lies - Seventh Gate
returns to the blend of operatic samples, black metal and electronic effects,
leading to a sinister sequence of satanic sounds and voices and, after a last
burst of black metal with theatrical vocals, to a coda of psychedelic chaos.
This last piece represents the apex of the group's dissonant alter-ego.
Malefeasance (Aurora Borealis, 2009), a solo album,
is the non-rock complement to Stahlhartes Gehause.
The ten-minute Vainamoinen Nacht is a purely electronic piece that has
an abstract drone slowly unfold a multitude of voices and that ends with
the voices having eliminated the electronics.
The nine-minute Hitori Bon Odori is another exercise in purely studio
manipulation of sounds (both live instruments and field recordings of voices).
The 18-minuteFrom A Miserable Abode is pure horror architected out of
found sounds, screams and distorted guitars; the flow of nasty noises coalesces
into a hornpipe-like lament, one of the many cryptic metaphors that surface in
L'Acephale's albums.
The 23-minute Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted has 12 minutes
of slowly mutating electronic drone and then a delicate tapestry of
acoustic guitar.
The album also includes a 14-minute remix of Current 93's Sleep Has His House (2000).
dabbles in the same mix of
operatic music and black metal, but the center of mass is definitely tilted
towards the latter.
Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted (Radical Matters, 2009)
was also released in a 93-minute version.
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