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 Necrophagist and 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 ...

  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...

  Animosity by association I never looked down on allegedly "wanky" music, as my dad played guitar virtuosos such as Yngwie Malmsteen or Steve Vai in his car when I was young. That wasn't all he played, but shredders were a consistent part of my dad's catalogue, and so that sound was normal to me. It wasn't until later that I learned this type of music was (and still is) considered uncool. The musicians and their fans are even accused of being inauthentic, as if one needs an ulterior motive to make and/or (pretend to?) enjoy it. Of course, any remotely non-mainstream taste can be met with suspicion, but there's something about the ease of engaging with clean production, guitar spectacle and lack of any off-key notes or chords (which would give the impression of skillessness to a myopic listener) that lays virtuoso guitar music bare for judgment, fully transparent. "Non-technical" death metal can still be difficult to play, but if it obscures itself b...

Yes, Steve was a real person, except his name wasn't Steve I knew someone, let's call him Steve, who was going to write an ambitious twenty-eight-track prog metal album with twenty-two interludes, ending with five in a row. He proudly described his own project as "random", and cited Pestilence, specifically "Testimony of the Ancients", as inspiration. One phrase from our conversation that stuck with me was "You always need more animal noises." It instilled a feeling in me that Steve was less than dead serious about his creative vision. Maybe both of us had a low opinion on interludes in a metal context, with the difference that Steve parodied them while I silently dismissed. He admitted to me he just liked to document his brain farts (his own words) in sound form, and that squeezing proper music between them was an afterthought. I don't keep contact with Steve anymore, and I fear he never graced the world with his twenty-eight-track masterpiece...