Jordan Vauvert
Première étape d'une trilogie qui traînait dans l'esprit d'Adam Kalmbach depuis deux ans, Discontinuities abandonne le chemin de l'electro expérimentale pour revenir sur un black metal microtonal. S'il est loin d'être un novice dans ce style, force est de constate que son désir de se dépasser est toujours aussi prévalent. Discontinuities possède les architectures musicales les plus glauques jamais composées par l'artiste ("The Failure of Transmutation") qui hurle à s'en déchirer les poumons.
Favorite track: The Failure of Transmutation.
Michael Carter
A lot has been written about this artist,I feel a strong connection to his music,in a way that is emotional to say the least.The way everything seems different,twisted,off kilter,but it is not,just different.Once you get used to difference does it become like everything else?taken for granted,my answer is no,this music is so invigorating!
The haunting sense of an unrepeatable
unidirectional vector
Modernity’s square pyramid’s base
The day recedes
Both joy and light grow pale
Flowing irresistibly onward
Where are those who were before us?
The skeleton of a ship choked in its own sails
Day and night unglued
Embalmed in secret vertigoes
Ill with the obstinacy of images
Blank pages of history
To revere a false past is to be historically deaf
Night is the collaborator of torturers
Day is the light on harrowing discoveries
To you who have turned aside
For whom light and color
And sound and odor
And taste and touch are dung
Natural truths spat like insults
To you defilers for whom the earth would flame
With a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom
The cremation of some vast corpse long dead
The loved one’s whitest flesh is what the
broken glass will cut and the wheel crush
Wilderness, authentication, and deleterious exploitation
Resultant progress, alienation, loss
Great deserts of black sand
A people’s autumn’s Heliogabaline synonym
Now pale and cursed to wander winter’s rise
At the mercantile endpoint of Endlessness’s eye’s gaze
The vastness of commodification
The absolute fake
Evidence accumulated in whorls of ash
Catalogued and atomized, witnessed with one’s own eyes
Surely we were a flame
Fled from the beaten tracks of men
Blood coagulated with melancholy
Black bile rising again
Waiting for the heavy fall
The tremendous weight
The failure of transmutation
In a fleshy tomb
Buried above ground
Crumbling and inarticulate
Stalled with lassitude
The spiders of weariness upon me
Nothing to cleanse the poisoned element
Flashing and yearning
Suffering and identification
The enigma of survival
A call heard within sleep
Cold copulars embrace
about
Notes:
I turned to microtonal guitar due to a growing sense that I did not have access to the tonal materials I needed and a dissatisfaction with the lack of accuracy afforded by more traditional solutions, like slide guitar or fretless necks. Giddy at the possibilities afforded by a quartertone guitar I wrote this album as well as its successors, Vast Chains and Ressentiment, quite intuitively in the span of two years.
The title "Night Is the Collaborator of Torturers" is from Anaïs Nin's House of Incest. "Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal" is the title of a photocollage by Joanne Leonard (and is true). "Supreme Fictions and the Absolute Fake" refers to Wallace Stevens and Umberto Eco; the line "great deserts of black sand" and the nested possessives (probably ill-advised) refer again to the work of D.F. Wallace. The title track begins with a canon on a twenty-four tone series. The canon shifts, one voice at a time, to an arpeggiated minor triad, a transformation from microtonal serialism to triadic diatonicism.
"...A dense, dizzying microtonal black metal, that spends much of its time locked in spiraling, frenzied swirls of frenetic buzz, the sounds slippery, slithery and shimmery, those moments the closest any modern black metal band has come to creating something truly transcendental..." - Aquarius Records
"I've probably said it before, but this is basically a one-man Sonic Youth for the post-Burzum generation. The guitars fixated more on the former comparison, the vocals and shared love of ambiance redolent of the latter. This is an album which heavily explores textures. Warped, wonderful textures. From the thundering, droning inaugural progression of "The Haunting Sense of an Unrepeatable Unidirectional Vector", you can immediately feel the difference in the chords as subtle bass grooves are wrought below them. There is still a propensity for sheer 'wall of noise' amplitude, especially in some of the faster, harder hitting sequences, but these are never given so much face time that they grow to any level of annoyance. Instead, they're measured off against jangling, cleaner passages of dissonant tranquility, and once in awhile he pulls off a truly climactic, otherworldly chord sequence: near the minute mark of the wryly titled "Romanticism is Ultimately Fatal" (best song title this year?) would be one example, or the hustling post-punk clamor opening "Supreme Fiction and the Absolute Fake", which turns out to be perhaps my favorite overall of the metallic tracks.... There's a shocking sense of warmth exuded by even the most frenzied and insect-like polyphonic picking patterns, and though it might not be labyrinthine on a purely technical level, there's a natural complexity that builds while the mind reels and attempts to place the guitars into perspective. Uncomfortable? Of course. But in the clause of 'it if didn't hurt, it wasn't worth it'. Kalmbach continues to traverse genre boundaries as if they were mere hallucinations, and I do hope he continues to incorporate aesthetic divisions, implement nuanced instrumentation, and twist the knobs (and spines of the listeners). Another killer in a largely unbroken line of killers." - From the Dust Returned
"With this radical level of experimentation, the degree to which the album feels natural rather than manufactured is impressive. Perhaps it is unsurprising then that Jute Gyte is a one man band, the work of Adam Kalmbach whose experimental tendencies have gone untempered by the compromises that often happen with collaborations. “Discontinuities” is daunting because of its strangeness, its hour long length, and a certain kind of majesty that isn’t immediately obvious or instantly rewarding. Still, the album has lasting power far beyond whatever novelty it provides. Although supremely strange, it is more importantly a great album because of how the immersive layering makes such an alienating experience one that is absolutely worth repeating." - The Oak Conclave
credits
released March 4, 2013
Created by Adam Kalmbach between Spring 2011 - Spring 2012
24TET guitar retrofitting by Sword Guitars
supported by 82 fans who also own “Discontinuities”
Swirling guitars, furious drums, vocals that at the same time howl from infinite distance and are right up in your head; everything put into dissonant form with the help of unconventional songwriting. This album is my personal key to the icelanding black metal madness that I've ignored for way too long! Lukas Kaufmann
supported by 82 fans who also own “Discontinuities”
PSA: if there was an album you heard a couple years ago and thought it was ok, listen to it again and you might love it.
That's what happened to me with this album. I cannot fathom why it didn't stick with me back then. Same thing happened with Decoherence's Unitarity for that matter. Matten