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Big Blood, “Unlikely Mothers” (Blackest Rainbow, 2014)

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Sometimes I wonder why the rest of the world does not seem to appreciate the singular genius of Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin like I do. Other times, an album like this comes along and reminds me how truly unhinged, prickly, and unsuited for mass consumption the duo can be and everything makes sense once more. Given the diversity and volume of Big Blood’s output to date, it is hard to say just how dramatic a divergence Unlikely Mothers actually is, but I normally associate the band with a uniquely raw, primal, and art-damaged strain of folk that defies easy categorization. 

Unlikely Mothers also defies easy categorization, but calls to mind some sort of primitive, sludgy, and bass-driven strain of ’70s hard rock. Some of the grooves achieve an unexpectedly hypnotic momentum or bracing, wild-eyed power, but the shrillness and single-mindedness of some these pieces can definitely make for a rough ride.

I have wrestled with what to say about this particular album for months, which I find very amusing given that Unlikely Mothers was probably composed and recorded in significantly less time than that. I do not mean that as a critique, as Big Blood’s intention very clearly seems to have been to unleash something loose, spontaneous, and different (and Unlikely Mothers is certainly all of those things). What troubled me instead was that a band I love made an album that I found very hard to embrace, yet they themselves thought enough of it to make it one of their more high-profile, widely distributed albums (plenty of perfectly fine Big Blood albums have historically gone into the world as self-released cassettes or CDRs). 

Consequently, I figured that I was probably missing something significant and just needed to hear the album enough to unlock its secrets. Now that I have listened to it quite a lot, I can safely say that Unlikely Mothers probably has no secret layers or great buried melodies to uncover, but that it is nonetheless an admirable and unique experiment. It just is not one for me.

With just a couple of exceptions, these nine songs are basically all grooves built upon a single promising riff. Most of the riffs are admittedly cool ones, particularly the bass lines in “Steppin’ Time, Pt. II” and “Watery Down, Pt. II,” but those riffs rarely make the leap from “great groove” to “great song,” a problem compounded by some rather indulgent song lengths. It takes quite an exceptional vamp to hold my attention for ten solid minutes and Big Blood are unlikely to dethrone Fela Kuti in that regard any time soon, though the 15-minute closer (the aforementioned “Watery Down, Pt. II”) admittedly works quite well. 

Still, if a bunch of simple, fuzzed-out bass riffs was all Unlikely Mothers had to offer, it would be fairly easy to dismiss. It is not easy to dismiss at all, however. Some of that success is certainly due to some neat details (the primal, clattering drums in “Thumbnail Moon,” the lazy psychedelic guitar meandering in “Watery Down, Pt. II,” etc.) and some occasional strong melodies and songcraft (“Watery Down” yet again). Most of the album’s success, however, is due to the duo’s decidedly unique aesthetic.

Quite simply, Unlikely Mothers sounds like the work of some kind of isolated, backwoods cult that has largely spent the last few decades consuming massive amounts of peyote, reading arcane books, and listening to Sabbath and Dead Moon. In fact, I suspect this album sounds far more like a weird backwoods cult than an actual weird backwoods cult would sound. Caleb and Colleen have always sounded delightfully ragged, but Mothers takes that tendency and amplifies it to a raucous, stomping, religious fervor. While there are a few oases of genuine beauty to be found in these songs, the emphasis is much more on trancelike repetition and frayed abandon (Kinsella often sounds more like a banshee than a Siren this time around).

The tragedy here is that I am perfectly fine with absolutely all of that: I am quite happy to follow Big Blood as far out on their weird, precarious limb as they want to go. In fact, I think Unlikely Mothers is a legitimate stylistic triumph, as it all sounds genuinely fiery, gut-level, and half-crazed without a trace of irony, artifice, or artistic detachment to be found. I love that. I just wish that the duo’s shriller, more unhinged tendencies had been better balanced with strong melodic hooks (Big Blood are historically very good at finding ways to present beautiful melodies with sharp edges). 

The most perplexing thing of all is that at least some of these songs are reworkings of older pieces (both “Away” and “Leviathan Song” previously surfaced on Old Time Primitives, for example). If cannibalizing pre-existing songs was fair game, it seems like Unlikely Mothers could have been forged from much stronger raw material than it was. Perhaps these were all chosen for thematic reasons (the title refers to the fact that both Kinsella’s mother and her aunt were nuns), but I was unable to find any kind of overarching narrative thread or theme in the songs as a listener. 

Consequently, this album feels like a bit of an exasperating missed opportunity to me, albeit a wonderfully wild and divergent one. A better album than this one can definitely be made in this vein. That said, however, both halves of “Watery Down” rank comfortably among Big Blood’s finest work, so apparently even a somewhat frustrating Big Blood album is still good for roughly 20 minutes of sublime greatness.

Listen here.

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Isengrind, “Night of Raining Fire” (Blackest Rainbow, 2012)

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Natural Snow Buildings seem to be currently locked in a rhythm in which they release one truly monster album each year and Solange Gularte’s latest solo effort seems to have possibly secured that honor for 2012 right out of the gate. More remarkable than the album’s quality, however, is how restless and adventurous Solange has been in tweaking her sound. This sounds almost nothing at all like her last album (2010’s Modlitewnik) and makes some bold and somewhat surprising changes to her expected aesthetic.

In the past, I have mentioned how Natural Snow Buildings’ lengthy “dream-drone” pieces were beginning to yield diminishing returns for me due to the sheer volume of them that I have absorbed over the last few years. Perhaps Solange was experiencing a similar effect herself, as she limits herself to just a few such pieces here and two of them are absolutely amazing. “Lost Girls” and “Spine of the Night” essentially bookend the album (there is a brief coda following the latter) and they easily rank among the best drone pieces that
Gularte has composed.

“Spine of the Night” is the more mesmerizing of the two, as it is a billowing, shimmering, hallucinatory cloud of bliss with just enough metallic buzz, clatter, buried snarl, and unpredictability to imbue it with serious heft
and depth. Also, it undulates and changes so constantly and so organically that it feels almost alive. “Lost Girls,” on the other hand, is a bit more dark, earthbound, and intimate due to Solange’s hazy vocals and steadily strummed acoustic guitar, but either piece alone is enough to make the entire album essential.

Nevertheless, it is the pieces in the middle of the album that make Night of Raining Fire such a unique and fascinating album in Gularte’s discography. On a basic, immediately obvious level, the disquietingly ritualistic/pagan atmosphere of Modlitewnik has been largely replaced by a more medieval feel…or, in some cases, a surreal fairy tale one. The fragile, discordant plucking of “Horselberg,” for example, sounds like the perfect soundtrack for nightmare that takes place in a snow globe. Most of the other pieces are less dissonant and unsettling though. The bulk of them sound like instrumental medieval ballads warped into something dreamlike and otherworldly by buzzing Indian instrumentation and forlorn, slightly-off flutes and whistles.

Despite all the buzzing and subtle dissonance, there is considerably more warmth and light here than there has ever been on previous albums. Gularte certainly isn’t softening (one glance at the album artwork should prove that), but has instead found a way to effectively assimilate a broader spectrum of emotion into her work. That makes a lot of sense within the context of her body of work, as Solange’s aesthetic trajectory has always seemed based in a fascination with ancient cultures and the more primal aspects of humanity. 

Sadness, horror, and pain have always been balanced with joy, ecstasy, and other positive emotions (probably much more so before the grinding mundanity, isolation, and pervasive detachment of the modern world set in). In fact, the presence of more heavenly and hopeful pieces like “Ascending” makes this feel unusually affecting and “human” for an Isengrind record (as well as perversely “complete”). Also, the occasional shafts of light bring welcome contrast and heighten the impact of the album’s darker moments, which Solange still does extremely well.

There is some deeper and less instantly apparent evolution at work here as well. The big changes are that Solange seems to be stepping away from density and working towards making specific textures seem more alive and meaningful. As a result, Night of Raining Fire is filled with a dynamic array of well-placed moans, plinks, buzzes and dissonant metallic shimmers that crisply cut through the drugged, dreamy haze. Also, she continues to get better and better at subtly shifting the emphasis from one motif to another as a
piece unfolds.

I probably sound like a locked-groove because I have loved just about every recent album that Solange and Mehdi have made, but…hell, they keep making great albums. This is simply a very vibrant, imaginative, and unique batch of songs without a single misfire to speak of. There are certainly other Natural Snow Buildings-related releases that are more staggering, visceral, enveloping, and/or disturbing than this one, but such a comparative divergence in mood and structure from their (massive) existing body of work is quite a welcome one for me (especially when it is pulled off so beautifully). Solange has absolutely nothing to prove at this stage in her career, so it is enormously heartening to hear that she is still tirelessly straining to increase the depth and scope of her work.

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TwinSisterMoon, “When Stars Glide Through Solid” (Blackest Rainbow, 2011)

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This is the long-awaited reissue of Mehdi Ameziane’s incredibly scarce 2007 solo debut, which was previously only available as a self-released CDr edition of just 30. Naturally, both Twinsistermoon and Natural Snow Buildings have evolved and blurred together quite a bit over the last four years, but at the time of its original release, these raw, fragile, and eerie pieces were a dramatic departure from the less distinctive drone/post-rock that Mehdi and Solange Gularte had been releasing. While I definitely believe that Mehdi’s work has only become stronger over the ensuing years, this remains a unique and mesmerizing highlight in his voluminous discography.

I have no idea what triggered it, but the years 2006 and 2007 were an incredibly fertile creative period for Natural Snow Buildings.  For one, they released a brilliant double album that many still consider to be their
greatest work, The Dance of The Moon and The Sun. Then, both Mehdi and Solange released stunning and wildly different solo albums (Solange’s being Isengrind’s Golestan). There were always unusual threads running through NSB’s sound, but up until that point, it was very easy to see close similarities to other artists like Tarentel, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Stars of the Lid, and Windy and Carl. Both the hallucinatory pagan drone of Golestan and the haunting childlike folk of When Stars Glide Though Solid had no such clear
reference points or precedents though: from 2007 onward, no one else sounded like Natural Snow Buildings.

Even since then, the “Natural Snow Buildings aesthetic” has seemed to be largely based upon perfecting and blending those two disparate threads (and they have been doing it extremely successfully). It was a career-defining period. The simplest way to describe Mehdi’s sound for much of When Stars Glide Through Solid is “field recordings of a choir of undead children singing around a campfire,” a rather singular vision best expressed in pieces like “Ojibway Ghost Trail Song” and “Momuzo.” Ameziane covers a lot of other stylistic territory as well, but tape hiss, sparse acoustic guitar accompaniment, soft childlike/feminine vocals, and an otherwordly sense of temporal dislocation are fairly omnipresent throughout. While a number of the vocal pieces are quite strong (“To Breathe Underwater,” in particular), my favorite moments tend to be the more abstract ones.

The opening “I Wish I Could Drown The World In Reverberation,” for example, beautifully interweaves shimmering layers of shoe-gazing guitar, spectral wordless vocals, and quasi-tribal percussion into something
that easily could been a highlight on The Dance of The Moon And The Sun. The brilliant title piece also recalls Ameziane’s work with Gularte, but goes even further: it seems far more in line with future masterpieces like Waves of the Random Sea…or something like a boisterous funeral parade for an imagined culture from several hundred years in the past. 

I suspect that this album would have completely floored me if I had heard it when it was originally released, as I am quite used to Mehdi’s strain of ghostly folk at this stage.  I miss having fresh ears. Also, I can’t help but compare everything he releases to the amazing …And Then Feel The Ashes. Despite that daunting mixture of familiarity and unfairly high expectation, however, I still managed to find quite a lot to love here. This isn’t the best Twinsistermoon album to start with, due to its somewhat primitive recording quality, but the content is absolutely essential for those already converted (particularly those who prefer Mehdi’s more song-like side).

(Note: The vinyl version of this reissue includes one full side of bonus material, much of which is as good as the actual album. Also, Solange’s new artwork for the inner gatefold is among her best.)

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Natural Snow Buildings, “Chants Of Niflheim” (Blackest Rainbow, 2011)

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I was both surprised and amused when Natural Snow Buildings released an entire full-length album of all new material to celebrate Record Store Day, as nobody has such a voluminous backlog of material that they can afford to do something like that (well, almost nobody). Even more unexpectedly, Chants of Niflheim feels like a thematically coherent and deliberately sequenced Natural Snow Buildings album rather than just some collection of curiosities and orphaned songs. While I wouldn’t characterize it as “uniformly brilliant” or “radically different,” it is nevertheless a very solid effort that boasts sufficient flashes of greatness to make it unmissable for existing fans.

In Norse mythology, Niflheim (or Niflheimr) is a cold, bleak region in the lowest level of the universe that translates roughly as “home of mists” (it’s beneath the third root of Yggdrasil and somewhat in the vicinity of The Shore of Corpses, if you happen to have a map handy). That mist-filled realm, presumably still ruled by the goddess Hel, is probably also notable for being populated by the dead (with a strong emphasis on souls that died unheroically). Despite that singularly sad and macabre inspiration, Chants of Niflheim is not a particularly dark album by Natural Snow Buildings’ standards. Nevertheless, the title is still quite appropriate, as this four-song suite sounds hazy, mysterious, pagan, and hallucinatory enough to do justice to its namesake.

I’ve seen the term “dream-drone” used a few times to describe the recent work of Natural Snow Buildings and that is probably the most succinct way possible to describe the bulk of this release. Of the four pieces, “Templar’s Ritual” stays most closely rooted to that aesthetic, drifting along for 17 delirious minutes of dense, quivering swells and ephemeral, blurred theremin-like tones. Mehdi and Solange truly excel at this type of song, as when they get it exactly right, it almost feels like the very air is shimmering. “Templar’s Ritual” does not quite hit that level, but it is still pretty likable. As is “Chants of the Niflheim, Part Two,” which takes an unexpectedly warm and blissed-out tone for most of its duration, before ultimately turning somewhat menacing near the end. Unfortunately, I’ve heard too many “straight” Natural Snow Buildings drone pieces at this point for them to fully resonate with me anymore. Those pieces are often great, but I am like a greedy child that ate way too much of his favorite candy. Fortunately, Mehdi and Solange have also grown quite adept at inventively twisting and subverting that template.

One such piece is the more pagan-influenced opener “Chants of Niflheim, Part One,” in which buzzing drones, cymbal washes, and tambourine-heavy percussion evoke a darkly ritualistic atmosphere. The album’s enigmatically titled closer reaches similar highs. “H. Scudder” most likely takes its inspiration from the late H. Scudder Mekeel, who was one of the first anthropologists to seriously study American Indian culture. His fascination with the disintegration of indigenous cultures makes him an appropriate choice here. The piece itself does not offer many clues, sadly, though it does sound like a surreal and eerily beautiful funeral procession march (perhaps for the death of an entire culture). It also sounds like something of a minor masterpiece, fluidly drifting through several different movements: Mehdi’s unsettlingly doubled-vocal folk musings, heavy swells of buzzing drones, wounded-sounding piano cascades, and something that sounds like the most forlorn parade in the world. Even better, almost every single one of the individual segments is memorably great. It’s an absolutely killer song.

Stylistically, Chants of Niflheim falls very much in the vein of the last Natural Snow Buildings album (Waves of the Random Sea). So much so, in fact, that it feels like its second half (and not like bonus material either). I wish more bands would blindside me with unexpected addendums to classic, beloved albums like this. I wonder if that was their conscious plan. Probably not, but regardless of its intended purpose (the new album, a tease before the “real” new album, a fun surprise, etc), pieces like “H. Scudder” and “Chants of Niflheim, Part One” ensure that this a fairly exciting and noteworthy addition to Mehdi and Solange’s massive discography.

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Natural Snow Buildings, “Waves of the Random Sea” (Blackest Rainbow, 2011)

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More than a decade into their career, the evolution of Natural Snow Buildings continues to surprise me: Waves of the Random Sea might be the most accessible album that Mehdi and Solange have released to date (in a good way, fortunately). It might also be their masterpiece. In any case, they’ve clearly made a lot of progress in broadening their palette of moods, as there is not much here that could be categorized as crushing, menacing, seething with dread, or oppressively sad. Instead, this album occupies somewhat lighter, more spacious territory and is mostly filled with drone-tinged, temporally ambiguous acoustic folk instrumentals (albeit of the most lysergic and warped variety). More importantly, it is absolutely amazing. This is one of the most vibrant and multilayered albums that I have ever heard.

This is a very coherent and thoughtfully sequenced (double) album, something that Mehdi and Solange have become increasingly adept at in recent years. Waves of the Random Sea works quite nicely as a whole and it works equally well as two separate halves. That separation of the two albums is even preserved on the CD version, as the third piece, “Breaches Through the Layers of Fog,” concludes with roughly a minute of silence. Interestingly, however, the two halves bisect quite differently on the CD and LP versions, with the brilliant first half of the album ending with either the post-coital-sounding warmth of “Breaches” (CD) or the disquieting, theremin-happy, sci-fi weirdness of “Abduction Dream.” There are some other differences between the two versions of the album as well, ranging from subtle editing and track length changes to an excellent LP-only drone piece entitled “Split Realm,” which seems far more like an album highlight than a bonus track.

As alluded to earlier, the first half of this album approaches perfection. It may very well be the most consistently mesmerizing and beautiful forty-minute stretch in the entire Natural Snow Buildings discography. “Waves of the Random Sea” begins the album with flanging drones and quivering swells before turning into a hypnotically repeating and surprisingly melodic acoustic guitar and tambourine interlude. Those two motifs set the tone for the album’s entire first half, which can best be summarized by saying that I feel like I am covertly witnessing a pagan/medieval/morbid fairy tale/ritualistic acoustic ensemble performing in a clearing in the woods while the very fabric of reality shudders and occasionally ruptures around them and a murder of nearby crows caws ominously.

Even that doesn’t quite do it justice, however, as it fails to mention that Mehdi and Solange manage to sound like a full drum circle and a half dozen musicians wielding an eclectic array of tamburas and other stringed instruments playing together at once. Nor does it take into account that the production and layering throughout is quite stunning, as sounds seamless drift in and out of the mix and pan and shimmer hypnotically. Or that the woozily twinkling coda of “Breaches Through the Layers of Fog” feels like waking up after a long beautiful dream. There are also a number of great details that I could zero in on as well (like the increasingly prominent scrapes of a finger sliding from fret to fret in “Breaches”), but the important thing is that the first three songs constitute pure drone/psych heaven.

The second half, on the other hand, is merely great (although the added “Split Realm” evens the score a bit on the vinyl version). The centerpiece here is the twenty-minute epic “Drift the Water Soul,” which morphs into a prolonged bed of glistening, shuddering drone after an introduction that sounds like ceremony music for some sort of royal medieval procession. One thing about the drone section that amazes is me is how alive and organic it feels: all of the various components shiver, drift, and swell with such seamlessness that it is hard to remember that there are two actual people with instruments and a mixer weaving it all together. Each sound seems intimately connected with every other sound and they all seem to react to subtle shifts around them.

“The Still Desert” concludes the album in much the same fashion, though it is nicely enhanced this time around by a complicated tapestry of cymbals, acoustic guitars, and pipes as well as a heartbreakingly strangled-sounding trumpet. Again, an important CD/LP difference makes an appearance here, as the vinyl version slowly fades and shivers to a close, while the CD ends with brief and perversely sweet vocal piece by Mehdi in which he repeatedly assures me that my home is where I’m happy. It’s an unexpected way to end the album, but a very effective one: by the end of Waves of the Random Sea, I feel like I have just returned to reality after a very long and weird journey. I’ve not sure that I’m necessarily happy that I am back, but it is nice to have some time to process what I just experienced.

Assessing the superiority of the vinyl vs. the CD version is thankfully made quite easy by the fact that Solange’s cover art is characteristically striking and better appreciated in larger form. However, both albums are absolutely stellar: they’re just a bit different. Oddly, it took me a few listens to fully warm to this release, as I was initially startled by how comparatively “pastoral” it is at times. It also seemed quite puzzling that Mehdi hardly sings at all and that there are no majestically dense drone passages. However, the more I listen to the album, the more I find myself utterly baffled by my initial reaction. The depth, complexity, focus, imagination, and ambition of this album are all pretty spectacular, even by Natural Snow Buildings standards. Waves of the Random Sea is essential. I love this.

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Isengrind, “Modlitewnik” (Blackest Rainbow, 2010)

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The long-awaited (and almost instantly sold-out) vinyl debut from the less prolific half of Natural Snow Buildings continues Solange Gularte’s fine tradition of dreamlike, disquieting, and temporally dislocated ethno-ambience. While perhaps not as consistently graceful and brilliant as her solo contributions to 2008’s epic The Snowbringer Cult, Modlitewnik is nevertheless scattered with some of her most singular and otherworldly music yet.

Modlitewnik (“prayer book” in Polish) opens in supremely haunting fashion, as “Night Dew Call” fades in with sad, vaporous, and almost sacred-sounding wordless vocals amidst a haze of reverb and spectral flutes or pipes. Unexpectedly, however, it lasts less than two minutes before transitioning into the comparatively cheerier, but considerably less impressive “Ver Sacrum,” which approximates pastoral Irish folk filtered through a blurred, hallucinatory fog. Fortunately, the bulk of the album is very much in the vein of the initial eerie ambiance, though Gularte breaks up the sequencing a bit with occasional divergences like the relatively straightforward acoustic guitars of “Fire Flies.”

Solange’s current aesthetic can be best summarized as “early traditional music warped into something very lysergic and pagan-sounding. ” What makes her work so fascinating is both the enormous breadth of her inspiration and her unique skill at evoking occult, earthy, and timeless atmospheres. Isengrind’s music simply does not sound like it is being made in the present time, nor does it sound like Gularte has any interest at all in the culture that the modern world is currently producing (aside from perhaps noise/drone music). Instead, this album is a bubbling cauldron of Norse and Babylonian mythology, macabre Romanian lore, inscrutable runes, timeless spirituality, enigmatic art, and folk music culled from India, the British Isles, and the Far East. In fact, the weakest song on the album (the ’60s acid-folk-tinged “I Know Where I Am Going”) is the only one that overtly nods to relatively contemporary times at all.

There are a few other songs that I don’t particularly care for, but most of the album is extremely good and sometimes stunning. Gularte has a distinct knack for making tambourines, pipes, and sitars sound sinister and ritualistic. She’s also quite adept at some less tangible things, like making sounds echo and bleed together to the perfect degree or allowing songs to unfold at a natural unhurried pace. Much of the time, Modlitewnik sounds like a very inspired album by a very odd woman with a houseful of exotic instruments and esoteric books. At its best, however, it sounds far more like I just blundered into a forbidden grotto and that a circle of ecstatically tranced she-druids is now closing in on me, drawing their curved knives for a blood sacrifice.

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TwinSisterMoon, “Then Fell the Ashes…” (Blackest Rainbow, 2010)

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With a few exceptions, most of Mehdi Ameziane’s recording career can be broken down into two simple categories: “great albums” and “albums that would have been great if they had been pared down a bit.” Then Fell the Ashes… happily falls quite squarely in the former category. There is definitely some evidence here that Mehdi is continuing to evolve and improve, but the more important thing is that this is one of the most perfect distillations of everything that makes TwinSisterMoon so unique and wonderful. This is one of my favorite albums of 2010.

I have always preferred the darkly psychedelic drone side of Ameziane’s work to his folkier pieces, so I was quite pleased to discover that the bulk of Then Fell the Ashes… is devoted to his more quasi-ritualistic, otherworldly, and abstract leanings. In fact, the entire second side of the record is filled by one such work, the overwhelmingly beautiful 25-minute title piece. 

It is hard to make me rabidly enthusiastic about drone music (editor’s note: that is no longer true), but “Then Fell the Ashes…” is just staggeringly perfect in so many ways: there is a head-spinning amount of textural activity occurring, it is hugely powerful, it’s filled with great instrumental passages, and it all seamlessly flows from crushingly dense to ghostly to fragilely melancholy without any lapses in majesty or vitality. The sad, oddly-timed cascade of guitar and piano notes near the middle stood out as particularly sublime, but I was also very impressed with how it unexpectedly evolved into an actual song at the end, like the closing credit music of an especially hallucinatory nightmare. I’m a big fan of unconventional song structures that aren’t clumsy or jarring.

While “Then Fell the Ashes…” is certainly pretty stunning from a compositional standpoint, I was equally struck by Mehdi’s skill as a producer and arranger. He weaves together an absurd number of tracks and instruments here, all of which are shimmering, flanging, rattling, swelling, or fading in some way, yet it never sounds cluttered or muddy, just gritty, psychotropic, and enveloping. Making drone music sound visceral, organic, and detached from our time is an art form all its own: I can’t fathom how long it must have have taken him to record and mix such a piece.

The six pieces on the first side maintain a similar level of excellence. My favorites are (predictably) the more drone-themed ones, particularly the massive “Black Nebulae,” which almost seems to breathe in an ominously Lovecraftian way. “The Big Sand” is equally wonderful, though markedly less unsettling. In fact, the coda is almost pastoral, as the howling pagan pipes give way to quivering organs (or treated flutes), field recordings of water and birds, and an elegantly melodic acoustic guitar motif.

The four brief “songs” are pleasant enough in a “tape hiss-damaged recording of Vashti Bunyan” kind of way, but they don’t pack quite the wallop of their lengthier, more maximalist counterparts. I’m glad they are included though; as they’re essential from a sequencing perspective: 18 solid minutes of heavy psychedelic drone would be exhausting. The occasional oases of space and intimacy go a long way towards heightening the impact of the album’s denser pieces. Also, I am pleased that the neo-folk songs are less oppressively sad than usual (“Trailer” could actually be described unironically as catchy). I suspect Mehdi is making an effort to broaden to expand his mood palette a bit and it seems to be an experiment that is working very well so far.

I expect to like every TwinSisterMoon release at this point, but Then Fell the Ashes… exceeded my expectations in every way: it sounds awesome, it doesn’t resemble anyone else, the melodies are great, the heavy parts are elephantine, and it all flows beautifully. Also, it seems like Mehdi is becoming more skilled at finding the ideal lengths for his songs on a case-by-case basis. This is a near-flawless and remarkably listenable album. Anyone curious about checking out TwinSisterMoon or Natural Snow Buildings would be wise to start here.

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TwinSisterMoon, “The Hollow Mountain” (Blackest Rainbow/Dull Knife, 2009)

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This brilliant and mind-bending solo opus by Natural Snow Buildings’ Mehdi Ameziane was originally issued as an LP by Dull Knife in 2009 and sold out within hours. Fortunately, it has now been reissued and remastered and augmented with a massive amount of bonus material for those of us that
weren’t fast or well-informed enough to catch it the first time around.

There are a lot of unusual things about Natural Snow Buildings, but the most notable (to me anyway) is how utterly detached they seem to be from the mundane and often petty world that the rest of us are stuck living in (both musically and otherwise). Instead, Solange Gularte and Mehdi Ameziane seem to inhabit a darkly magical and Edward Gorey-esque shadow reality. Also, they seem guileless and genuine in a way that is wholly foreign to modern human nature. Those are admittedly odd statements to make about a band, but Solange and Mehdi’s recorded output provides excellent corroborating evidence. The duo are certainly prolific, but each new album is released without fanfare, as though they had simply accumulated enough otherwordly material for yet another dispatch from their insular, self-contained universe. 

More significantly, though the duo tend to put a great deal of effort into beautiful art and packaging, they release everything in such limited quantities that it seems that they have a total indifference to any of the external rewards that might be reaped from producing great work. Or they’ll release a double-album as a free download (through some third party, of course). The simple act of creation seems to be the entire point and whether the rest of the world notices or gets a chance to hear it is largely irrelevant.

Another odd thing is that Mehdi’s vocals are quite feminine- in fact, critics often mistake him for a woman.More specifically, he sounds like a profoundly sad and somewhat ghostly Vashti Bunyan. The actual music, on the other hand, sounds exactly like the sort of album Shirley Collins might have made (but regrettably didn’t) after teaming up with the Current 93 milieu. 

Some songs, like the simple and sparse acoustic ballad “Bride of the Spirits,” sound a lot like traditional Celtic folk (until the “Come to me, my only child- I’ll just eat your flesh” line, anyway). More often, however, the songs seem to come from a much more exotic time and place, such as the pagan drone of “Druids.” While this mystique and timelessness is certainly deliberate and well-earned, some of the credit must be given to Mehdi’s exclusive use of instruments that cannot be associated with a fixed point in time, such as flutes, tampura, shruti boxes, and tambourines.

Despite the clear allusions to psych folk, traditional music, and modern drone/noise strewn all over the album, The Hollow Mountain still sounds like something entirely fresh and unique. Ameziane weaves all of his influences together in an unpredictable, ingeniously arranged, and complicated way, but makes it all sound like a seamlessly and organically unfolding dream. This is the kind of music that unicorns would make (if they had good taste): melancholy quasi-medieval ballads warp into field recordings of babbling brooks, clanging cathedral bells, or a chorus of happily chirping birds just as easily as they turn into evil-sounding drones or heavenly psychedelic fugues. The tone is similarly mercurial, as Mehdi’s sweetly melodic songs have a tendency to become menacing, ritualistic, or pastorally beautiful with little warning.It never seems jarring or clumsy either, although Ameziane’s vocals can sometimes be oppressively sad when I am in the wrong mood.

I have not heard the original LP version of this album, so I cannot say how much effect Ben Nash’s remastering efforts have had on it. It’s a pretty lo-fi album, but not in a bad way-—more in an immediate and raw way, but with a thin patina of hiss and distortion that suggests that it may have been recorded with just a microphone and an 8-track. Amusingly, the “bonus track” included here is almost 45 minutes long, making it essentially a “bonus album.” Disorientingly, it is just as good as the main album and could have easily been released separately, but I’m sure Mehdi forgot about it as soon as it was done and had already moved onto something else. Regardless, more TwinSisterMoon is always a good idea, as Mehdi’s artistry is best appreciated as complete immersion.

I haven’t tracked down enough of the voluminous Isengrind/Twinsistermoon/Natural Snow Buildings ouevre to effectively contextualize The Hollow Mountain within a hierarchy of essentialness (they’ve been working in extreme obscurity for 13 years now), but I can conclusively state that it is a beautiful and stunning album and that it is actually still available (a very rare occurrence indeed). Also, despite the fact that it has been retooled slightly for mass consumption, it still retains some of the duo’s characteristically ambitious packaging: the disc is (egolessly) enclosed in a booklet of Solange’s creepily surreal woodcut-inspired art.