Abyzm — Pyre
The release appears on the always excellent & consistent HNW/ blacked noise/ ambient/ etc label Altar Of Waste, which is run by the highly talent & super prolific HNW/ ambient artists Cory Strand. As one would expect with this label of lot of thought has gone into the look & design of the release, and this is beyond your normal underground label presentation…the CDR comes in the Altar Of Waste house style clear DVD case, and the double sided artwork takes in on it’s front side a very moody black & white picture of a pile of tree sized logs with skulls & rocks on top, with misty mountains & a bleak looking fjord in the back ground. The reverse takes in dense black cloud like texturing…the whole thing perfectly sets the scene for the ultra dense & blackly moody ‘walls’ with-in.
Each of the three tracks fall around the twenty plus minute mark, and each is as oppressive, thick, yet entrancing as the other. The release opens up with “Charring”, and this is track built around a taut & airless mixture of two or three mid-paced noise textures. At the centre of the track we have a dense & deep bass bound judder ‘n’ churn, and around this are thinner continual jittering static textures. The ‘wall’ remains firm, battering & unrelenting through out it’s full length, and it’s a great start to proceedings.
Next up we have the track “Cinerator”, and this ‘wall’ is built around a rumbling ‘n’ churning low-end tone, which is played over by this thinner & agitated rapid jittering tone. This on the whole is a bit more rapid & urgent, than the first track, but once again it’s damn heavy & suffocating in it’s attack. Also the structure is pretty firm & fixed in it’s unfold, though I’m sure I do detect some subtle shift in both textures over the tracks length,…but of course this could just be a trick of the ‘wall’, and in reality the track is firmly unmoving.
Lastly we have the “Kiln”, and this track is the most thick, dense, and heavily smothering of the lot…it’s built around this ultra dense, muffled yet slightly smeared low-end tone which is set towards earthy/subterranean juddering. Weaved into this we have a constantly rattling & jittering tone- this secondary tone is only slightly higher than the central tone, so the whole thing is very much focuses in on low-to-slightly mid ranged tonal attack. As with the other two tracks this is once again firm/ fixed in it’s structure, and I’m sure if you turned this track up high enough you could do structural damage with this beast of a track!.
So in summing up Pyre- this is a highly consistent and entrancing three way hit of dense, extremely heavy, and bone crushing ANW. This release has a fairly small pressing of just 20 copies, but seemingly the label still has copies….so if you fancy been both brutalized yet thoughly captivated by high quality & extremely heavy ANW- I suggest you act fast!