#aderlating

Aderlating ‎– Hell Follows

Label: Black Plagve ‎– Infect16 Format: CD, Album Country: US Released: 10 Dec 2015 Style: Dark Ambient, Power Electronics

The 5th full length CD for Aderlating finds the duo of Eric  Eijspaart and Maurice De Jong returning to Black Plagve for the first time since 2013’s Gospel of the Burning Idols.

Hell Follows takes a somewhat altered approach as it moves away from the ritualistic horror and smothering claustrophobia  of past releases,  and into a more spacious realm,  with more distinguished sounds and clearer instrumentation.  That’s not to say that Hell Follows isn’t steeped in atmosphere and dark energy. The 9 tracks are unpredictable, wildly hallucinatory and beguiling…odes to nightmares and flickering visions of torment and anguish, an alchemy of blackened kosmiche keyboard textures, raspy, foreboding voices, and passages of corrosive rumblings, hellish drift, and sinister percussive clangor.

Mories has stated that Hell Follows was recorded live in the studio with less computer processing, and it shows in the amorphous quality of the tracks; a Coil like sense of psychedelia and surreal wooziness to some, a  hopelessly dark and apocalyptic feel to others  that adhere more to the traditional Aderlating template. Collectively, it’s a wild and mercurial sonic journey that resides on the peripheral of anything Mories and Eric have done to date, and yet at the same time, makes perfect sense within their discography.

Buy: 13 € http://www.gh-records.com/1190-aderlating-hell-follows.html

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Aderlating

Drink From The Lethe

Mories pushing boundaries early on.

I stumbled across this demo as I browsed through the Bandcamp page of the infamous Mories. Now gaining notoriety as the mastermind behind such sonic monstrosities as Gnaw Their Tongues and Aderlating, the self proclaimed demon channeler was certainly pushing the boundaries of Black Metal with the '93 bedroom demo called We The Unclean Shall Flourish. According to Mories himself, WTUSF was reorded on a 4 track tape recorder using "crappy" gear (apparently he borrowed a lot of it for the recording). Don't let this discourage you from checking this stuff out. The foundation of what would become the beautifully cacophonous orchestrations Mories has released in the decades subsequent to this demo can be seen in Astral in spite of the amateurish recording quality and overall execution.

There is no guitar in this Demo. There's bass and synth, but not the slightest trace of the instrument to be most expected in BM. This is an ongoing choice that Mories has made in all of his projects, and he pulls it off very well. His insistence on giving bass the spotlight in a style of music where the instrument is often inaudible shows that he has no problem with taking the preconceived notions of what BM should be and throwing them out the window in favor of his strange vision. Luckily, this artistic bravery does a great job of maintaining integrity in spite of its weirdness. The bass is often laden with effects, and fills the sonic space nicely as it assumes modulative and melodic control over many passages in the demo. Between it and the synth leads, Mories produces a much more catchy vibe than would be associated with him now. Listening to WTUSF often has me hearing '80s Pop through the filter of BM. The more BMish passages are often much less dissonant and oppressive than other bedroom demos. However, the classic raw BM feel is maintained through the familiar tremolo picking and galloping rhythms. It should be noted that the overall execution of the bass lines are sloppy at times, but it never feels disjointed. There’s always a genuine musicality that pervades in them. In the end, the main thing that threw me off was the synth. Instead of using it to create atmosphere and soundscapes like many metal bands, Mories decides to use them as a melodic and harmonic instrument in a way that makes me think of Deep Purple. Does Astral sound anything like Deep Purple? NO!! But parallels can still be drawn between the two bands in how their synth lines dominate the music at many points, and become the major source of melodic and harmonic diversity. Mories uses an alien combination of melodic instruments to create a vibe that maintains enough BM while exploring its most eccentric tendencies.

The drums in WTUSF suffer from what I call "Burzum Syndrome." Like Varg Vikernes, Mories is a multi-instrumentalist who does everything in his projects... and also like Varg Vikerness, he doesn't display the same amount of skill at the drums as he does with the rest of his instruments. Although the drums on this album aren't terrible, they're certainly not the best. They sound like a guy playing drums because his album needs to have drums, as apposed to, I don't know, playing them well or realizing that he's not that great and finding a drummer that plays better. This shouldn't be that offensive in Astral because WTUSF is the perfect example of spirited amateurism in of itself, but the annoyingness of the drums is accentuated by the fact that there are actual drum solos on this record. Spoiler alert: They're not good. I have no idea why Mories thought these passages were something he'd want to put on the demo . I do commend him for using real drums instead of a drum machine. It adds more dynamic variation, and helps the demo feel more real. Unfortunately this does not stop them from being the worst part of this record.

Mories isn't known for his vocals, for they're usually sparsely used and hard to hear in the density of his work. I can't decide whether I like the vocals in WTUSF, but they’re undeniably unique. They're packed with reverb and pitch shifted beyond belief, but not so ridiculous as to become silly. They fit the weirdness of the music well. The only aspect of them I'm really bothered by is when they use a droning, low pitched technique that basically sounds like talking slowly through the filter of pitch shifting. I found these vocalizations to sound more weird than good. All in all, Mories gives these songs appropriate vocals that complement the strange feel of the songs.

The most obvious antecedent to GTT I noticed on this demo was the use of spoken word samples over a creepy noise-scape. There are many points where the songs drop into freaky explorations of occultism and vampires and whatnot, and it works (although in a less professional fashion). Mories knows how to combine ambience and people talking, and it's something I've always appreciated about him as a musician. The transitions between these sections and the song oriented ones are more jarring than I would prefer, but Astral shows Mories begin to develop something that currently garners him a lot of attention in the underground.