Tag Archives: Ambient

Exclusive Song Stream: Julie And The Wolf – Devil Is The Man

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JtW Ablaze Artwork

Ghost Cult Magazine is proud to present the new single from mysterious ambient post-rock duo Julie And The Wolf. You can stream their track ‘Devil Is The Man’ at this link or below:

 

‘Devil Is the Man’ comes from Julie And The Wolf’s forthcoming début album Ablaze, releasing on October 30th from the Audiogram label. Imagine Nine Inch Nails’s Ghost EP, put through a filter of bands like Anathema and the mellower moments of ISIS and you begin to understand the framework of Julie And The Wolf’s mindset. Julie’s hypnotic, vulnerable piano lays the foundation for vocalist Wolf Merzbacher’s heart breaking vocals and lyrics. The meshing of the two talents is breathtaking.

 

Julie And The Wolf online:

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Julie And The Wolf on Instagram:

 

 

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Team Sleep Nears Completion Of New EP

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Team Sleep band photo 2015

Team Sleep‘s next EP of new material is currently being mixed. The band checked in with the following update online:

 

 

“Listening to mixes of songs from our first e.p. of new studio tracks. Our dudes at Applehead are killing it. Sounds great! Lots of new music in progress.”

 

 

Team Sleep’s Rick Verret in a recent interview with Ghost Cult for an upcoming feature on the band remarked recently:

 

“We are working on a lot of new stuff. There will be new (original) music sooner than later. Hopefully we will tour again too, next year.”

 

team sleep woodstock sessions album cover 2015

Following the recent release of Team Sleep’s live Woodstock Sessions: Vol. 4 EP, the next release of music from the band will be their first significant new music since their debut album, a decade ago.

Team Sleep is:
Chino Moreno
Todd Wilkinson
Crook Molina
Zach Hill
Rick Verret
Chuck X

Team Sleep – Woodstock Sessions, Vol. 4

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team sleep woodstock sessions album cover 2015

There is a funny thing about cult bands; they rarely ever follow the script you want them to. Team Sleep, notable for a strong group of players led by Chino Moreno (Deftones, Crosses) busted out 10 years ago with a debut album that was long on quality shoegaze, electronica and dreamy synth-pop. Like a weird post-pop rock, Team Sleep made pretty music that just stuck with you. Pulled apart again by other commitments after a brief tour and only coming together in bits and pieces over the year, the band rumbled back to life earlier this year. With a successful Pledge Music campaign to reignite the fans and the promise of new music in the future, the result was the quirky and special live performance of Woodstock Sessions, Vol. 4.

It seems odd that a band that has been more or less dormant for a decade would take the trouble to reunite, only to do a small performance in front of an intimate audience. What has been born out of these Woodstock Sessions recordings at Applehead Studios (Coheed & Cambria, Bad Brains) in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, seems to be special. Perhaps it is the setting, but I tend to think the artists themselves bring something to the table too. For Team Sleep, that something is a cinematic vision and that a song is never truly finished after recording, rather just beginning. The band deconstructed many of the their original tracks and explored new ways to present them. ‘OP’, ‘Live From The Stage’, ‘Death By Plane’, ‘Blvd. Nights’, and ‘Princeton Review’, all taking on some new hues and shapes that surprise and refresh your memory of those first demos.

 

Team Sleep band photo 2015

 

Another great convention breaker is some of the players have swapped positions. Chino, DJ Crook, Todd Wilkinson hold their own, while Chuck Doom has moved over to bass, allowing Rick Verrett to man the keys and synths full-time. Joining on drums is Gil Sharone (Stolen Babies, Marilyn Manson Dillinger Escape Plan). Moreno, like his contemporaries Mike Patton and Maynard James Keenan, won’t be painted into a corner artistically. The idea that Team Sleep in this incarnation will make a new album is exciting news.

8.0/10

KEITH CHACHKES


Eschar – Nova

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When it comes to instrumental outfits, metal bands tend to tread a fine line between fret wankery and songs with actual resonance and heart. In their short existence, Woking’s Eschar have sat firmly on the right side of this tightrope whilst forming a strong reputation, perfectly encapsulated on their latest release Nova (self-released).

Eschar’s sound is one that invokes the dreamlike serenity of progressive metal and post genres; never daunting or overpowering, whilst proving almost purely ambient in part all the while retaining emotional power. Album opener ‘Aphotic’ really embraces the softer elements of such music, proving a comforting, mellow opener which slowly reveals the rest of the album’s busier sides. Further revealing shades of progressive metal’s more technical counterparts, Nova shows intricate layers which even bring to mind the softer sides of the likes of Tool and A Perfect Circle. This technical underbelly never proves inaccessible however, making this an easy listen for newcomers with plenty of deeper segments to find for those with a more trained ear.

Nova is an impressive feat which manages to hold a strong emotive presence despite the lack of vocals, proving an embracing and even comforting effort. Yes some people may be put off by the sheer duration of some songs, most of which surpass the 5 minute mark; but there is no one with an interest in prog or metal that shouldn’t find some pleasure in this. Whether it is to fill the background void, or to totally immerse oneself in, Nova is an archetypal effort in music that is not in your face, but is simultaneously hypnotic and drawing.

 

8.0/10

Eschar on Facebook

 

CHRIS TIPPELL


Laster – De Verste Verte Is Hier

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With recent black metal releases either making you want to march off into battle (Winterfylleth) or spend an evening viciously murdering crackheads in an urban underpass (Anaal Nathrakh), it’s refreshing when an album comes along that’s perfect for merely slumping back in your chair and drifting off into the void. Dutch trio Laster are the architects of said proposed lazy endeavour but don’t be fooled into thinking that their debut album De Verste Verte Is Hier (Dunkelheit) is a snooze-fest, for it contains a plethora of fascinating motifs that demonstrates once again that atmosphere matters more than mindless aggression.

Nestling somewhere on the outer-reaches of the black metal spectrum where drone, ambient and Shoegaze converge for an exclusively morbid and dream-like tea party, the 45 minutes of De Verste Verte Is Hier is akin to wandering through a ruined, expressionist landscape of abandoned factories, mist-shrouded plains and decaying, haunted cathedrals. The riffing veers between light speed ferocity that calls to mind Krallice if they were given a heavy dose of lithium to more mid-paced plodding that references the darkest lights of the USBM depressive scene, such as the suicide obsessed Xasthur.

There are enough noticeable differences between songs to ensure that the same ideas aren’t merely recycled with a vaguely different coat of paint, such as the horribly surreal choir-and-shrieking section that appears in ‘Tot de tocht ons verlicht’ and the devastatingly bleak piano passage in ‘Ik – mijn masker’. But the real rug-pull moment comes in the arse-shakingly danceable post-punk of the title track, which is like being in a nightclub with Cenobites for bouncers.

All in all, a thoroughly impressive debut from a trio of talented multi-instrumentalists who know how to paint grim pictures with enough beauty mixed in to warrant many a further inspection.

 

8.0/10

Laster on Facebook

 

JAMES CONWAY


Team Sleep Springs Back To Life, Launches Pledge Music Campaign

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team sleep

Long slumbering shoegaze super-group Team Sleep has returned and is writing and recording a new album. Late last week the band annonced via a series of Facebook messages their Pledge Music campaign to launch their new album, outside the confines of the standard music business. The band is traveling to Woodstock New York in The Catskills Mountains, in mid-October with plans to live and record together at Applehead Studios. Pledge Music is the standout crowdfunding platform that has seen a wide range of artists leverage the social network such as Devin Townsend, Sevendust, Apocalyptica, Flotsam And Jetsam, Flyleaf, Peter Murphy and Steel Panther to not only launch new projects, but aid charities too.

See the full Pledge Campaign with Featured Items

http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/teamsleep

 

Team Sleep is:

Chino Moreno
Todd Wilkinson
Crook Molina
Zach Hill
Rick Verret
Chuck X

 

 

From The Team Sleep Pledge Music Page:

Dear friends,

Please join us as we create our next record in Woodstock, New York. We’ll gather at Applehead studios, near the base of the Catskill mountains to eat, write, play and record. For a long time, business people, logistics, careers, adulthood, families and the House Republicans have thwarted us, but we’ve continued to make music. At the same time, the creative process has become increasingly fragmented and dehumanized. With that in mind, we’re very excited to get together with our dear friends, hang out, play music and have a unique experience in a beautiful place. We’d like you to be there, too. Your participation will be essential to the independent creation and release of the live performance and our forthcoming studio record; we look forward to seeing you.

Chino Moreno
Todd Wilkinson
Crook Molina
Zach Hill
Rick Verret
Chuck X

 

Team Sleep on Facebook

 


Common Eider, King Eider – Taaleg Uksur

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ceke album cover

 

The link between Metal and Dark Ambient music, though by this point undeniable, is rather a strange one. The point of commonality presumably lies in both genres’ fascination with “darkness” and negativity, but in terms of musical approach there’s very little common ground – Metal’s aggression and energy contrasted with music which is passive and languid by design.

 

California’s oddly-named Common Eider, King Eider seem like the personification of this contrast, with artwork and aesthetics designed to catch the attention of any Grimly Frost-Bitten Cryptic Winter Panda in the area, and music that couldn’t be further from Metal’s “more is definitely more” approach.

 

The four tracks that comprise Taaleg Uksur (Pesanta Urfolk) are built of sparse, minimalist drones, echoing silences and vocals that range from ghostly whispers to desolate shrieks. Whereas more Metal-friendly acts like Gnaw Their Tongues create dense walls of howling noise, Common Eider… keep it simple – there are several moments which consist of a single, unaccompanied drone that hovers on the verge of silence. 


It would be easy for a listener more comfortable with the conventions of Rock and Metal to declare that “nothing happens” on Taaleg Uksur, and they wouldn’t exactly be wrong. This is an album where things are suggested rather than heard – where atmosphere takes precedence over event – but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing interesting here. They have a surprising grasp of dynamics, switching from quiet to loud (or comparatively loud) drones to positive effect, and the use of vocals (comparable to last year’s Lustmord album, but much more stripped down and minimalist) adds a lot. The final track, ‘Caribou People’, introduces acoustic guitar and electric-guitar drones that create a sense of climax, and allow something to finally “happen”.

Taaleg Uksur is a rich, surprisingly engaging album of minimalist ambiance that uses emptiness as a potent tool, but if you’re the kind of person who reads that as a pretentious way of saying “someone goes ‘whooo’ and then nothing happens”, then you’d be advised to stay away. Metal fans seeking more ambient territories may find the new Wolves In The Throne Room an easier starting point.

 

7.0/10.0

Common Eider, King Eider on Facebook

 

RICHIE H-R

 


Ormgård – Ormblot

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ormgard - cover

 

Originally released on tape in 2011, Ormgård are re-releasing the Ormblot demo on CD, via Forever Plagued Records. Ormblot was praised a lot within the black metal underground scene and the band itself was hysterically compared with black metal monsters such as Emperor.

Including three ambient songs and three black metal songs, the entire work is so 1990s that’s hard to think it’s only three years old. The ambient songs instantly put me somewhere between 1993 and 1995 when great projects like Mortiis or Satyr’s Wongraven were born. Of course, they don’t deliver ambient songs with forty minutes, but the ancient essence is so there: it’s slow and cold with dark ruined corridors on sight. The title-track profoundly embraced me with its very slow pace and with its compassed bells tolling that I even jumped on my chair when the ‘Hugsad’ track begun with the frozen and hostile guitar riffs. Hailing from Sweden, a country that has a well settled and modern black metal movement, but the band’s sound is so Germanic featuring fast yet melodic riffs combined with a wall of simple orchestrations that reach our ears through the keyboards. However, there is another characteristic that easily leads me to Finland because of the high-pitched vocals which may remind me a whole bunch of black metal acts.

The gelid landscapes are brought by songs like ‘Av Svartkonst & Fördärv’ which is the most demonic one in the demo. Telling a story about sorcery, Orm goes far and mixes the concept with the evilness of demons, being Satan the center of it all. 

In sum, it’s hard for me to say this is really an iconic item. Yes, it’s worthy to listen, especially because of the ambient tracks and because of the 1990s spirit – now and then I still check the date and I figure out it’s a 2011 demo. Nowadays, I don’t really know what Orm wants to do, but according to the 2012 album, titled ////\, it seems black metal isn’t a priority as we have a dark ambient full-length.

ormgard - pic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 7.0/10

Ormgård on Facebook

Diogo Ferreira


Stripped Down And Naked – An Interview With Katatonia

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katatonia_band_photoWith Dead End Kings (Peaceville) being released last year it came as quite surprised that another Katatonia album saw the light last month. However, Dethroned And Uncrowned (Kscope) isn’t just an “another” record. It features stripped down and reworked versions of the Dead End Kings material. Ghost Cult talked with Katatonia guitarist and main composer Anders Nystrom about this remarkable release, the potential of crowdfunding and touring in America.Continue reading →


Emilie Autumn Live At Dynamo Eindhoven, NL

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Emilie Autumn04On the night of August 27th Emilie Autumn had a show in Eindhoven. It was a warm night after a sunny day, and the sun had not even set yet because the concert was due to start very early. Our photographer had to solo it and also review due to unforeseen circumstances, and was on her way to what proved to me a dark twisted fairytale telling of a crazy story with a lot of neo-Victorian sauce on it.Continue reading →