ƚBM [INSPIRED BY BLACK METAL]

ƚBM focuses on the influence of black metal anno 2014 and is a response to the current prevalence of the genre. Not coincidentally 30 years after the establishment of legendary Norwegian black metal band Mayhem. Nor coincidentally 20 years after the release of their debut ‘De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas’ - one of the most influential black metal albums ever.

GNAW (us)

“Gnaw’s music just sounds like a fucking hideous and monstrous deformity made of mechanical chaos, decaying flesh, madness, and uncontrolled fucking horror.” (CVLTNATION)
He who says Gnaw, says Alan Dubin. As, for New York's Gnaw, everything is based upon the voice of Alan Dubin. Pichfork described Dubin poetically as a ‘vocal torturer’ and his vocal skills as “stuck somewhere between a lupine howl and a serpentine hiss.” His ‘high shriek voice’ is pretty much the characteristic of black metal but Gnaw manifests himself at the musical crossroad between metal, noise, industrial and electronica. We still know Alan Dubin as the imposing frontman of Khanate, the extreme doom metal supergroup of and with James Plotkin and Sunn 0)))’s Stephen O’ Malley. He was recently also to be heard on ‘Through A Pre-Memory’ (Boomkat on that: “a modern doom masterpiece”) by Äänipää, the collaborative project of our favourite electronic Finn Mika Vainio and Stephen O’ Malley.

The influences on their latest album ‘Horrible Chamber’ are legion: Einstürzende Neubauten, Swans, Merzbow, Tim Hecker, Throbbing Gristle and Burning Witch. Cvltnation praised he album highly: “Few bands have managed to pull off such a seamless and triumphant splicing of doom metal, noise and industrial as Gnaw have managed”. Just like The Wire: “it’s like a Khanate record mixed by Merzbow”.

?Alos

Queer. Pagan. Doom. Avant. Metal. That's what we read on the blog of ?Alos, the one-woman project of Stefania Pedretti. Together with husband Bruno Dorella, she forms the half of the duo OvO. Their album ‘Miastenia’ (’06) was even released via America's wonderfully cross-grained Load Records (see too: Lightning Bolt). ?Alos is synonymous with experimental performance art.

Screening of One Man Metal parts I, II & III

Vice & Noisy, 2012, 45 min., zw/w
One Man Metal
This very well filmed, 3-part documentary offers us an insight into the lives of 3 enigmatic black metal outsiders who place themselves on the very edge of society - through their voluntary solitary existence - and create the very darkest metal there.
We gain an intriguing and personal portrait in which Jef-Leviathan-Whitehead, Russell Menzies aka Striborg and Scott Conner van Xasthur (who permits himself to be interviewed for the first time) speak candidly about their art, life and place in society.