Trensmat send word of a couple of 7″s from Gnod & Whirling Hall Of Knives they’re releasing in July.
Gnod – 5th Sun
Spiralling around a gargantuan 14.5 second repeating bass riff, Gnod bring forward the end of the Mayan calendar by a few months with some ominous seismic vibrations. Though clinging for dear life to the central bassline, guitars, samples, and various sonic debris are permitted to do their own thing, creating an ever-shifting, unsteady tectonic base. Battle drums punctuate the murk and a lone voice babbles unintelligibly before raising to a louder call-to-arms. This is the intro music for the triumphant return of some colossal ageless beast. As a final head-scratcher the final sound we hear is a haunting synthetic voice instructing us to “…stop being weird”. Well at least that’s what it sounds like – you may need to replay this track several times to solve all the riddles within.
On the flip is a dub version of the A – perhaps a quaint (g)nod to the time when 7 inches was the favoured diameter for quick fix audio injections, and people had no problems listening to basically the same song twice. When a band couldn’t be arsed recording a b-side, the nearest junior engineer was given free reign of the console and commanded to “go nuts!” for the remaining 43 minutes of pre-booked studio time, lashing as much delay/reverb on everything as possible, while waggling the volume on the vocal track like a 4 year old drawing an explosion with a crayon.
Is that what Gnod have done here? Essentially, yes…and how! If it is indeed a junior engineer, he has spent his 43 minutes well, with an eery mastery of the deep black arts that raises the A-side to even greater heights while simultaneously busting it apart. The various strands get their time in the (5th) sun – guitars bust out and shred unhindered, drums are distorted and echoed well into the red, and that goddamn bass riff swells and swells, eventually sapping the life from everything around, swallowing the lot and ultimately shitting out the delay-soaked detritus for nearly a full minute on the run-out. In summary, this record is a fitting successor to Prince’s 1999 as planet earth’s official global end-of-times floor-filler.
The 7″ comes with digital copies of the tracks on the record. Pre-orders will be immediately sent a link to the download package. VERY limited edition coloured vinyl 7″ in silk-screened sleeve (+ 2 downloads).
Whirling Hall Of Knives – Alternate Devil
After a couple of LPs on our Nute imprint & a split with Tlaotlon, Whirling Hall of Knives have produced a fantastic individual 7″ – Alternate Devil.
Split over the A/B are the two sides of this track. The Tamas side is a white hot feast of swirling hypno-psych, blown out and buried in sheets of corrosive feedback with all manner of buzzing and swirling guitars blending into a pulsing, throbbing, hypnotic and mesmerizing noise-scape underpinned by seriously wild & propulsive groove. Flip for the Sattva side which flows out of the afterglow of the A and sprays grinding skree, viscous fuzz and squealing feedback that transforms into a spacey kosmiche groove with some bizzaro vox underpinned by a gorgeous droned out chunk of brooding slow building psychedelia, layered tones and looped rhythmic fragments..
The 7″ comes with digital copies of the tracks on the record plus an additional track exclusive to this release – ‘Staggering Depths’. Pre-orders will be immediately sent a link to the download package. VERY limited edition coloured vinyl 7″ in silk-screened sleeve (+ 3 downloads).
