Probability Storm

  I believe esoteric music has the ability to spark reflection on deeper truths about the human experience and the world that are inaccessible through conventional musicality. Even in most avant-garde pieces, the sonic expression is bound by expectations and tropes which obstruct the true idea that inspired it. These expectations and tropes create the language of a genre as a way to communicate in the medium of sound, but any language is inherently limited. Some music sheds most layers of expected structure to discover new modes of expression, potentially better representations of their source. One such project is the one-man band Uzumaki by the prolific Jared Moran, who's also known as Plaguehammer. He plays a form of through-composed dissonant death metal whose rhythmic and tonal forms shift without warning. It's most comparable to Pyrrhon's improvisational jazz take on the genre but much more disorienting. When I listen to "Gift of Tongues", I imagine a dark an...

  The Polish prog metal project Chaos Over Cosmos started out as a power metal band, which had ambitious song structures and neoclassical form since its first release. Changing multiple vocalists while only keeping the original member instrumentalist Rafał Bowman, the band soon turned to a more brutalist interpretation of Obscura's prog/tech death sound. There were minor detours on the way towards metalcore, ambient and drum-and-bass, but the main direction was clear. The galloping riffs were replaced by more abstract melodies, the upbeat drums turned into an unbudging wall of blastbeats, and the clean vocals went through different variations of harsh ones in screeches, rasps, or processed growls, depending on the current vocalist. Chaos Over Cosmos had already switched to this style by their second album, but with each following release, the overall sound became more consistent, without the tonal whiplash of tense and weirdly upbeat sections, leading to "The Hypercosmic Parad...

  With rare exceptions, it has always been difficult for me to consistently enjoy any album that has a minimalist approach, going between amazed and underwhelmed while relistening to it. By definition, "minimal" music develops only a few ideas, so if one fails to connect with those, there are very few, if any, finer details to discover on subsequent listens that could change that person's opinion. Appreciation of simple music is almost binary in that way, so the type of listener who wants to understand why a piece of music that left them with bad or no impression matters to others will need knowledge external to the music. That external knowledge can include the state of the scene at that time, the artist's views stated in interviews or elsewhere, or insight from invested fans and reviewers. I already knew Ildjarn by his reputation for raw and ascetic black metal and his misanthropic outlook (from what little is known about him as a person), which set correct expectat...