1The Ambivalent Abyss 12:14
2Blood Deep in Dread [feat. Steve Roach] 7:54
3The Eliminating Angel 11:45
4Oblivion 6:35
5The Outer Shadow [feat. Paul Haslinger] 6:44
6Infinite Domain 8:27
7A Light That Is Darkness 4:54
8Insignificance 5:00
"Outside the narrow confines of our intellect, larger forces are at play, and some things may best remain unknown."
- lustmord
Days in a daze, thoughts cancelling each other out, a quiet bang that leaves me staring, twitching ever so slightly. Sweeping the floor, trying to cope... it gets me thinking about the Void. And the void gets me thinking about Lustmord.
When i'm in this expansive inky black philosophical mode, i want music that seems as big as the night sky. Distant and cold and empty. Dark ambient fits the mood perfectly, and Lustmord is the acknowledged king of Dark Ambient. So, even feeling empty and dead, i'm still interested in pursuing what makes people considered the master of their genre? Is it just that they create a template, that others then mime? Does the music hold up over time, or is it merely spur of the moment and ephemeral? In the case of many/most noise and experimental musicians, they tend to release boatloads of albums, that are often interchangeable. But buried in this xeroxed tomes, there's a whole history of avant-garde music and art history, a college lecture series on the triumphs and embarrassing defeats of all the funky co-op movements that have come before.
I picked Metavoid arbitrarily cuz i liked the name. I've mainly only been familiar with Lustmord's early '80s stuff, to date, with lots of horror movie chorused keyboards, distant Gregorian chanting, and unsettling clatters and knocks. Brian Williams music has a touch of the ghost train about it, its not legitimate satanic ritual in the woods music, its the facsimile there-of. He's taken a lot of shit for writing 'video-game music', but i feel like, in this day and age when horror-core Carpenter fetishists, the likes of Umberto or Demdike Stare or even Oneohtrix Point Never, this music actually stands to be appreciated now.
I like the way this record sounds; its not as demented and mind-boggling evil as Paradise Disowned, but it is pleasantly bleak and vast. The synths sound cheesy and 80s, like from some movie with a big plastic clam-shell, and the whole affair does have a hint of late 90s Projekt world music ethno-trance minimalism, that has not necessarily held up that well over time (note the presence of Steve Roach on Bullroarer), the music is well-produced, the sounds are well-placed and well-recorded. It seems cohesive and intentional, melodic and thought-out. Brian Williams had clearly learned quite in a bit, in the 20 years he'd been making music at this point.
If you ever appreciated Danzig's Black Aria, if you close yr eyes and just listen to the music during The Sentinel, if you've ever questioned yrself, or yr sanity, or if you want a quick peak behind my eyeballs at 2:04 am, check it out.
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