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Natural Snow Buildings

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Natural Snow Buildings, “Terror’s Horns” (Ba Da Bing, 2015)

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After an unusually lengthy period of relative silence, Natural Snow Buildings have returned with a significant departure from much of their previous work. Well, a departure in some ways, at least: both the songs and the entire album are unexpectedly brief and concise. Also, the most memorable pieces eschew the duo’s usual drone and “haunted folk” tendencies in favor of something resembling a lysergic, nightmarish Ennio Morricone score or an imaginary soundtrack to a Jodorowsky film. Otherwise, everything great about the duo thankfully remains, as comparative accessibility has done nothing to lessen Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte’s characteristic spell of haunting and timeless otherworldliness. This is definitely one of the more essential Natural Snow Buildings albums.

Terror’s Horns opens in striking and beautiful fashion, as “Dawn on a Buckskin” evocatively combines a mournful and reverberating Spaghetti Western tremolo-bar strum with massing dissonant drones and a slow-motion pulse of bass drum thud and crashing cymbals. To some degree, the piece calls to mind the Wild West, but Natural Snow Buildings’ version is quite a bit more strange and disturbing than any familiar images from movies. To me, it creates a tableaux that is not so much “gunfight” or “ghost town” as “wounded person stumbling through an empty, flickering, unfamiliar, and hallucinatory landscape.” 

As far as opening salvos go, Mehdi and Solange could not have done better. The following “Saturna’s Black Belt” is both equally short and similarly stellar, again embellishing the hollow twang of the Western with dirge-like, quasi-ritualistic percussion and an ominous miasma of buzzing and swirling drones. Even better is the strangely sickly guitar tone of the central motif. In a mere six minutes or so, Mehdi and Solange managed to plunge me deeply into a twisted, disturbing, forlorn, and temporally dislocated world of their own making.

Lamentably, the album is not able to endlessly sustain such a relentless pace of brilliance and innovation for its entire duration, but Terror’s Horns does offer up at least two other gems, albeit in somewhat different directions. The 10-minute epic “The King in Yellow” is partially a return to NSB’s comfort zone, as it is quite long, prominently features Mehdi’s floating and ghostly vocals, and gradually morphs into a fine drone piece. There is a wonderful twist though, as Mehdi’s vocals occur over a beautifully thorny and broken-sounding thicket of buzzing, stuttering, and stumbling strings. Later, Mehdi and Solange unveil yet another triumph at the end of the album with “Orion is Dead,” elevating their standard dirge-like balladry with eerie vocal harmonies and an explosive crescendo of smoldering distortion, trance-like percussion, and a blearily melodic quasi-orchestral fantasia.

The remaining four songs are generally quite good as well, but they will mostly sound quite familiar to anyone who already has a few Natural Snow Buildings albums. “Twilight Bells, Terror’s Horns,” for example, is a bit of shimmering, twinkling, and undulating ambiance, embellished only by interruptions of deep, hollow moans resembling the shifting of a giant, empty ship’s hull. Later, “People in the Hills” returns to similar territory, mingling buzzing and ominous drones with hollow wooden clacks; lazily jangling chimes; and wordless, spectral vocals. 

“The Sun Tower” is a bit of an exception, however, as it unexpectedly transforms Mehdi’s usual ghost-folk into something quite muscular and metallic with liberal use of distortion and a vigorous boom-boom-thwack percussion crescendo. The lengthy “Rising Portal” is also a bit of an aberration, as its warm and radiant drones do not seem to belong on the same album as any of the disquieting surrounding pieces. I suspect it was included because it has meaning within whatever overarching narrative arc the duo were hoping to weave with their sequencing. In any case, it is a bit too pleasant and straightforward for my liking. 

Curiously, Mehdi and Solange seem to be quite fond of that direction, as the limited edition version of Terror’s Horns came with a second album (The Ladder) that leans very heavily in that vein. Natural Snow Buildings admittedly do ambient drone quite well (they have a distinct knack for texture and layering), but there are too many other artists producing similar fare to make it as satisfying as something like “Dawn on a Buckskin.”

As far as new Natural Snow Buildings albums go, I could not realistically have hoped for anything much better than Terror’s Horns: it may not be perfect, but its high points are very high indeed. Also, I would have been perfectly content with yet another suite of songs that continue to improve upon past themes, so I am both delighted and surprised that Mehdi and Solange instead decided to both try something new stylistically and distill their oft-amorphous and overwhelming aesthetic into something a bit more manageable. It is no small feat for a singular band to completely overhaul its sound without losing any of its distinctiveness. As far as I am concerned, Terror’s Horns is a hugely successful experiment, as half of its songs are absolutely revelatory. 

The sole critique that I have (aside from both the length and inclusion of “Rising Portal”) is that these shorter songs cannot weave quite the lushly mesmerizing and transformative illusion as some of the duo’s best long-form work. That said, however, there is no real need to repeat what has already been done: the world already has many hours of great Natural Snow Buildings epics, so these shorter pieces are a welcome change of pace. Anyone new to the band should definitely start here before plunging into the deep end. Also, this is a great time for any existing fans numbed by the mountain of similar-sounding material to check back in. This easily ranks among Natural Snow Buildings’ finest work.

Listen here.

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Natural Snow Buildings, “Daughter of Darkness” (Ba Da Bing, 2013)

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Ba Da Bing have officially blown my mind yet again, following their 4LP reissues of the epic Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches and The Snowbringer Cult trilogy with an even more ambitious project: reissuing 2009’s incredibly rare and overwhelming Daughter of Darkness cassette series as a massive 8LP box set with hand-painted album art (which took months to complete). While it is not the best Natural Snow Buildings album by any means (no band can make a uniformly great 8-hour album), it is still quite a good one and it is unquestionably their longest, which offers a unique appeal all its own. There are probably are not too many people who find the prospect of plunging into a seemingly endless rabbit hole of roiling, hallucinatory, quasi-ritualistic drone very appealing, but those who do have probably just found their Holy Grail.

Daughter of Darkness is a curious anomaly within the Natural Snow Buildings catalog for many reasons, its staggering scope being just one piece of the puzzle. For example, many of its longer pieces seem quite primitive and monolithic by the duo’s standards, sounding like rather lo-fi and improvisatory experiments in oceanic, multi-layered guitar noise allowed to unfold until the tape ran out. While that is not a bad thing at all, it feels like the formative work of a band who had not yet reined in their more indulgent impulses or turned their attentions towards structure and songcraft.

It is not, however, as Solange and Mehdi had already recorded and released at least two of their most beloved and fully realized albums by that point (the aforementioned Snowbringer and 2006’s The Dance of the Moon and Sun). Also, Daughter of Darkness was recorded in 2008, a year of utterly stupefying activity, yielding two separate triple-albums, 6 CD-Rs, and two cassettes. Given that the duo were already near the top of their game and immersed in a bewildering melange of other projects, Darkness is not a noisy, chaotic, and sprawling monster by accident, inexperience, or youthful over-exuberance.

Consequently, the best way to view Daughter of Darkness is as a conscious attempt to push drone to its furthest possible extreme: this album is far more of an immersive, trance-inducing experience than a mere collection of songs. In fact, there is nothing resembling a “song” at all, though some of the shorter pieces (particularly the rippling, eerie “The Source”) sound very meticulously composed. Actually, I suspect the entire album was meticulously composed on a grand scale, but that is not readily apparent when I am enveloped in the midst of it, as there are long stretches where it feels like the duo are basically treading water for ten or twenty minutes.

In reality, however, they are just working on a very different time scale than I am used to, as such stretches almost invariably give way to something wonderful that makes the whole journey seem both worthwhile and necessary (like the heartbreakingly lyrical feedback interlude lurking within the often harsh, 45-minute “Devil’s Fork”). Also, Mehdi and Solange were just as ambitious with their textures, layering, and detail as they were with Daughter‘s duration, as they regularly make such an unearthly and apocalyptic racket that it is almost impossible to believe that it is coming from two people rather than some of sort of occultist, extra-dimensional army on the march or a horde of demons clawing their way out of the underworld through an incompetently drawn pentagram.

As awesome as that sounds, Daughter actually evokes quite a few other moods as well, which was a very good move listenability-wise. In fact, a few interludes can reasonably be described as warm or beautiful, like the gently quavering outro of “Black Pastures” (intrusions of strangled-sounding guitar noise aside) orthe lush swells of the surprisingly innocent-sounding “Will You Die For Me?”

In another context, some parts of the album (“Body Double,” for example) could probably even be seen as “pretty,” but not in this one: Daughter‘s rare oases of calm are made deliciously tense and uneasy by the fact that they are surrounded by gnarled plunges into the void with names like “A Thousand Demons Invocation” or ancient-sounding funeral processions like “Her Face Is Not Her Real Face.” While many aberrations occur all over the album’s brain-frying duration, the balance of the material definitely veers between roiling, wall-of-guitars drone; quasi-occult death marches; and buzzing Eastern strings and discordant flutes. All of those threads appear on other Natural Snow Buildings albums (and are often better executed there), but the cumulative effect is quite a staggering one nonetheless.

As with most of Natural Snow Buildings’ oeuvre, Daughter of Darkness successfully maintains an unbroken and otherworldly illusion of being field recordings of some arcane ritual by a forgotten and vaguely sinister culture in the very distant past. While it is not nearly as clear, sophisticated, and nuanced as their best albums (possibly because the nuance and sophistication is obscured by the smeary, distorted production), it succeeds despite that, as the sheer scope, immensity, and extremity easily eclipse all details of the execution. The best analogy that I can come up with is this: Daughter of Darkness is less like great, brilliantly realized art than it is like being trapped in a museum that is on fire (while an earthquake simultaneously rages). There would certainly be beauty, vision, and genius all around me, but that definitely would not be what I remembered about the experience, which would be a lot more lasting, deep, and unique than simply seeing a lot of nice things.

(Note: the CD version of this set includes two very long bonus tracks from the Daughter of Darkness V cassette (2009, Recollections of Knulp), which are very much in the vein of the main album. I do not think that their inclusion particularly enhances or detracts from the album in any way, but I will say that it is much more convenient to listen to an 8-hour album when you do not need to keep flipping records over. The vinyl set includes only the songs from the original Daughter of Darkness (2009, Blackest Rainbow), so that might be a better bet for feeble types who can only handle 7 hours of heavy drone in one sitting).

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Natural Snow Buildings/Isengrind/Twinsistermoon, “The Snowbringer Cult” (Students of Decay/Ba Da Bing, 2008)

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Ba Da Bing are clearly not ones to shy away from massive undertakings, following last year’s 4LP Night Coercion into the Company of Witches reissue with yet another quadruple LP. 2008’s The Snowbringer Cult was a monumental album for Natural Snow Buildings at the time of its release, as it was their first effort that was not available only as a hyper-limited cassette or CDr. As such, it was many people’s first exposure to the duo and Mehdi and Solange definitely set out to make it count, packing it with just about every single possible facet of their sound. That “kitchen sink” approach does not make for the most listenable whole, but Snowbringer is not lacking in sustained stretches of absolute, otherworldly brilliance.

The original version of The Snowbringer Cult was released as a double CD by Students of Decay, a format that remains in place for this reissue. The first disc contains a solo album by each member of the band, while the second disc is a lengthy collaborative effort. Aside from the addition of a vinyl format, the reissue remains completely faithful to the original album in every way. That was a wise decision, as only a lunatic would add bonus tracks to a 2+ hour album and the original art is thematically integral to the overall package (and also difficult to improve upon). Also, remastering or “cleaning up” such a beautifully and uniquely produced album would be criminal. The only truly significant change is that all three albums are now available as stand-alone releases, which makes them much easier to absorb. That was a truly great idea.

The Isengrind album (Solange Gularte’s solo project) is the shortest of the three, clocking in at just over half an hour. Despite that comparative brevity, it contains many of the set’s highlights, as Gularte was in the midst of a particularly fruitful creative period at the time. With few exceptions, the mood is a very shadowy and ritualistic one, leaning very heavily on droning Indian stringed instruments, choruses of ghostly chanting, clattering percussive flourishes, and eerily discordant flutes and pipes. 

On the best pieces, such as “To Ride With Hölle” and “Wooden False Face,” Solange manages to sound so anachronistic and alien that it is actually far easier to imagine that this is an ancient field recording of a long-forgotten cult in the midst of a human sacrifice than the solo project of a contemporary French woman. In fact, the latter often seems impossible. The mesmerizing spell is disrupted only once, as the somewhat ill-advised “Cat’s Cradle” dragged me reluctantly back to the present by drifting too closely to contemporary Freak Folk territory. Happily, that song can easily be deleted from an iTunes library to leave a near-perfect album, but vinyl owners will just have to try to get used to it.

The Twinsistermoon half of the disc unsurprisingly shares a lot of common ground with Solange’s effort, offering up still more occult-sounding drones, dissonant woodwinds, and tribal percussion. There are some significant differences, however. For one, Mehdi Ameziane’s drone pieces are more dense and grinding than Solange’s. More significantly, those heavier pieces are interspersed with a number of melancholy and sweetly child-like acoustic ballads. Another key difference is that the illusion of timelessness is not quite as effectively maintained as it is with the Isengrind portion, though that is mostly by design. 

On songs like “Order of the Dreamt,” Ameziane balances his more traditional instrumentation with roiling distortion and spacey flanging to create his own surreal headspace. I am also quite fond of “Spells,” which artfully combines Mehdi’s talents for both ritualistic “funeral procession” percussion and cascading acoustic arpeggios. The rest of the album is not quite on the same level, however, alternating between Mehdi’s simple, eerie campfire songs and some lo-fi metallic drones. Those remaining pieces are not exactly weak, but they are easily eclipsed by both Twinsistermoon’s own post-Snowbringer work and the rest of this album (which is excellent).

I was very happy to learn that Ba Da Bing were making the Natural Snow Buildings’ portion of The Snowbringer Cult available on its own, as it unquestionably one of the duo’s finest albums and needs to be heard by itself (and with fresh ears) to be fully appreciated. However, its original inclusion as the final disc of a three-way split release with the duo’s solo projects was kind of an inspired idea, as it beautifully illustrated how the duo united was so much greater than the sum of its parts. That is not necessarily true now, as both solo projects have evolved greatly in recent years, but Mehdi and Solange’s collaborations still felt like a stunning and magical transformation back in 2008. While I definitely like the Isengrind and Twinsistermoon segments of this collection, the Natural Snow Buildings portion of The Snowbringer Cult is an absolutely revelatory and dreamlike tour de force from start to finish.

Actually, “dreamlike” might be a bit misleading, as the opening “Resurrect Dead on Planet Six” (a cryptic Toynbee Tiles reference?) is much closer to a nightmare, building from queasily dissonant drones and flickering echoes into a roaring, visceral crescendo of guitar noise. Structurally, it closely resembles some of Mehdi’s solo work, but its execution is so complexly multilayered and seamlessly organic in its flow that it rises to a completely different level. That trend basically holds for the entirety of the album: expected ideas are alchemically turned into otherworldly brilliance through ingenious layering and deft transitions (and it all sounds both massive and gloriously anachronistic).

With very few exceptions, almost all of these ten songs are highlights, a fact that is even more remarkable given the uncharacteristically varied stylistic territory covered. “Inuk’s Song,” for example, is a gently rippling and hallucinatory reverie, while “Nieve Sacra” resembles a spacey, psych-damaged Morricone and “They Do Not Come Knocking There Any More” approximates a full-on tribal war march. The more abstract title piece, on the other hand, basically resembles nothing else that earthbound mortals have recorded outside of Natural Snow Buildings: my best approximation would probably be “an ancient voodoo ceremony is sucked through a black hole and eventually re-emerges mashed up with the doomed Children’s Crusade of 1212.” If there is a higher compliment for a piece of music, I certainly cannot think of it.

As was the case with Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches, The Snowbringer Cult is an absolutely exhausting and overwhelming listen in its entirety, which is its primary flaw. There is way too much here to reasonably process and not all of it is great. The similarities end there though: Night Coercion was a time capsule from a formative, largely unheard era of Natural Snow Buildings’ career, while The Snowbringer Cult captures the duo at their absolute collaborative zenith. The other major difference is that the best part of The Snowbringer Cult is now available by itself, no longer diluted by the inclusion of two full other albums worth of songs…and it is absolutely, screamingly essential. The Isengrind/Twinsistermoon albums are perfectly fine, of course, but the Natural Snow Buildings’ third is a strong candidate for the best thing that anybody will release this year (reissue or otherwise). This is the kind of album that I would run into a fire to save.

Listen here.

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Natural Snow Buildings, “Night Coercion into the Company of Witches” (Self-Released/Ba Da Bing, 2008)

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As far as Natural Snow Buildings-related albums go, this sprawling reissue ranks as a pretty monumental and eagerly anticipated event. Originally released in a crazily limited edition of only 22, this 2008 triple-album is one of the band’s most ambitious, yet rarely heard, statements. Given Mehdi and Solange’s tireless evolution over the years, Night Coercion understandably lacks the sophistication and song-craft of their current work, but mostly compensates for those shortcomings with a potent mixture of primal power and sheer massiveness.

Looking back on Natural Snow Buildings’ early career is pretty fascinating, as they released several epic, ambitious, and significantly different albums in a relatively short span for essentially no audience, all of which have since become much sought-after classics. Night Coercion followed the heavily post-rock-influenced double-album The Winter Ray (2004) and the more “eerie folk” double-album The Dance of the Moon and the Sun (2006) and managed to somehow avoid sounding much like either. 

While their dalliance in post-rock turned out to be short-lived, the rest of NSB’s career has essentially been devoted to the blending and perfecting of the aesthetics pioneered on The Dance and this album, which leans quite heavily upon drone and quasi-pagan/medieval themes. Curiously, however, the impact of those stylistic innovations is dwarfed by the sheer staggering scope of this effort: three hours of music divided into just 6 songs. To put that in perspective, many fine bands do not record three hours of music over the course of their entire career.

Naturally, an album of such dauntingly epic length faces some inherent perils The most obvious one is that it is an absolutely exhausting listening experience. Then, of course, there is the second most obvious one:
it is nearly impossible to record that much consistently compelling music at once (even if you are La Monte Young). Most of these songs are built upon just one or two musical ideas stretched out and embellished for 20 or 30 minutes. 

As a result, some stretches of Night Coercion definitely tend to overstay their welcome, like the 7-minute flute outro in “Kadja Bosou” or some of the prolonged bouts of roiling guitar squall that pepper the album. I suspect Mehdi and Solange were completely aware of that though and were probably pleasantly surprised to find that there were actually 22 people who wanted to hear something so nakedly indulgent and experimental (I imagine asking “hey- do you want to hear my new 3-hour-long witch-themed drone opus?” is an excellent way to find out who your real friends and fans are).

Fortunately, such extreme length also offers great benefits. For one, some ideas lend themselves beautifully to extended repetition, such as the weird, locked-groove-sounding “parade of the damned” opening to the aforementioned “Kadja Bosou.” Also, the more slow-burning, drone-based pieces tend to build up quite a bit of intensity when allowed such a long time to unfold. It is also worth noting that one of Night Coercion‘s finest pieces (“The Great Bull God”) is also its longest (by a lot), clocking in at an hour. In fact, “Bull God” could easily have been the entire album, as it manages to cover all of the album’s various stylistic facets over the course of its running time (uneasily discordant droning, ugly guitar noise, slightly off-key flutes, and subtly menacingly tribal/pagan percussion).

Night Coercion is not just notable for its length and stylistic innovations though: it is actually quite raw, scary, and lo-fi by Natural Snow Buildings standards. Even the somewhat pastoral passages manage to have an uneasy shrillness and slightly wrong-sounding feel to them. Also, some of the more dissonant pieces (such as “Brooms, Trapdoors, Keyholes”) build up to crescendos that are pretty much full-on noise. Nor are Mehdi and Solange particularly stingy with unleashing dense oceans of feedback. The album’s (lack of) production also plays a crucial role in setting the mood, as the murky “home-made black metal cassette” sound turns the already disturbing “howls of the undead” section of “Gorgons” into something truly nightmarish.

As a listening experience, however, Night Coercion is ultimately only a mixed success: I would describe it as more of an important and ambitious album than a great one (though “pretty good” seems fair). There is definitely some music that sounds like absolutely no one else and there are a couple of truly memorable complete songs (particularly “Gorgons”), but there is no denying that there is quite a bit of bloat as well. Also, the album’s lengthy stretches of chaos and feedback are not quite as distinctive as the other facets of
the duo’s sound (even if they are quite visceral). 

That said, I still probably would have been floored if I had heard this when it came out, as its weirder, more adventurous aspects necessarily seem perfectly normal to me after hearing all of the superior albums that followed in its wake. Even now, it is far from a disappointment: I may prefer some of their other work, but this is the only logical choice if I want to block out the world and plunge myself into a black hole of prolonged Natural Snow Buildings immersion (which I will inevitably want to do with some regularity).

Listen here.

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TwinSisterMoon, “Bogyrealm Vessels” (Handmade Birds, 2012)

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The trajectory of Natural Snow Buildings continues to amaze me with each new album, as Mehdi and Solange seem to grow more and more inventive and skilled at composition every single time they surface. Mehdi’s last solo effort, the drone-heavy Then Fell the Ashes… was one of favorite albums of 2011, but Bogyrealm Vessels is a completely different (but no less wonderful) animal: an enigmatic and weirdly beautiful song-based concept album involving a space invasion, schoolgirls, and giant plants.

One of the more endearing aspects of Natural Snow Buildings is immediately evident here: while this is musically a Mehdi Ameziane solo album, Solange Gularte’s cover art is absolutely crucial. In fact, what little I can piece together about the album’s concept is taken almost entirely from the accompanying art (though the evocative song titles help a bit too). I wholeheartedly appreciate the cryptic nature of the Bogyrealm Vessels narrative though, as it is definitely an intriguing challenge to try to figure what it all means. Also, I generally hate rock operas and concept albums, so I would probably have flung Bogyrealm across the room if Mehdi had done something as uncharacteristically ham-fisted as spelling everything out with clumsily expository lyrics. I am a huge fan of vague, unexplained menace though, so this approach works just fine for me.

Curiously, most of that sense of menace stems from the album’s elusive narrative, as the actual music is much less heavy and dark than I historically expect from Twinsistermoon. Also, when Mehdi sings, the lyrics that I can make out would not seem disturbing at all if decontextualized from the art and song titles. That lighter touch works beautifully here, as Bogyrealm Vessels has the gently hallucinatory feel of a deeply strange, warm, and beautiful dream that seems fragile enough to dissipate at any moment. That perfect surreal reverie is threatened slightly by the brief, but relatively straightforward, acoustic balladry of “Bogyrealm” and a few other moments, but Mehdi is otherwise infallible in keeping me fully immersed in his alternately uneasy and blissful alternate world.

Roughly half of the album is still devoted to drone pieces, but they are uncharacteristically short and shimmering, acting mostly as pleasant interludes between the folkier “songs.” The sole significant exception is the grindingly heavy “Interferences From Extincts,” which favorably recalls some of Mehdi’s more crushing work from the past. All of the drone pieces on Bogyrealm Vessels are quite good despite their brevity. That came as no surprise to me, as Mehdi has long ago proven himself to be a master of the form. However, I was caught off-guard by how much I loved some of the vocal pieces. While Mehdi’s singing does not depart much from the eerie child-like dirges of past efforts, his lazily cascading and off-kilter guitar playing on pieces like “In Deep Waters” and “Prisms” is absolutely ideal for the album’s dreamy, not-quite-there fantasia.

This is a very unusual effort within the Twinsistermoon oeuvre due to its lightness and relative insubstantiality, but I see both of those traits as definite assets. This is a great album, all the more so because Mehdi avoids both repeating his previous successes or plunging too deeply into the sadness that pervades some of his earlier work. As aforementioned, a few of the songs here do not quite sustain Bogyrealm Vessels’ lysergic trance as well as they could have, but they are easily eclipsed and forgotten by the album’s end. It is funny to think that an album this deeply weird can be considered “accessible,” but it feels like it is…comparatively, anyway. While I personally prefer some of Mehdi’s heavier, long-form drone pieces to any of the individual pieces here, this is a strong candidate for Twinsistermoon’s finest complete work. If it isn’t, it would at least score the consolation prize for the most endlessly listenable.

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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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