Album Type: Full Length
Date Released: 05/05/2017
Label: Ván Records
“Von Meilenwald has created a terrible, tremendous
and frightening invocation of blight and the invincible progress of erosion and
disintegration. More than its component parts, an album to haunt the dreams of
Lovecraft and Ligotti alike. Recommended without reservation.”
“Exuvia” CD//DD track listing:
1). Exuvia (15:27)
2. Surtur Barbaar Maritime (08:51)
3. Maere (On a Stillbirth's Tomb) (11:22)
4. The Pythia's Pale Wolves (14:34)
5. Towards Malakia (09:39)
6. Takitum Tootem! (Trance) (07:45)
2. Surtur Barbaar Maritime (08:51)
3. Maere (On a Stillbirth's Tomb) (11:22)
4. The Pythia's Pale Wolves (14:34)
5. Towards Malakia (09:39)
6. Takitum Tootem! (Trance) (07:45)
The Review:
There
is potential in corruption; there is creation in collapse. The Ruins of Beverast have built
both brilliance and darkness amid the rubble of fallen stereotypes, and have
generated horrific life within the cadavers of decaying subgenres for the last
14 years. For Alexander
von Meilenwald, devolution, atavism, degradation of boundaries and
borders represent always the opportunity for evolution, a cacogenic alternate
genesis that reanimates what was once sterile with septic potential. Impurity
and corruption are, of course, a running theme. The Shrine is Unlocked: from “Rain upon the Impure” and “Foulest Semen” to “Blood Vaults”, which invokes the tainting influence of the maleficar,
rot signifies potency and possibility, an anti-hermetic immanence of
putrefaction. The world we choose to not see, the world of the defiled, is
Enchanted by Gravemould, as it were. Alexander von Meilenwald has time and again acted
as ethnographer par excellence of this corruption as well as its agent and
catalyst. His latest effort, “Exuvia”,
both follows this teleology and transcends almost through a weird autophagic
turn, sloughing off some of the worn Beverast motifs and arising anew; a corpse
worm, a rotting phoenix.
What
is “Exuvia”? An exuvia is the
cast-off outer skin of certain insects after moulting. It is excess, it
is waste, it is the left-behind. It is the carapace more often than not of
carrion insects, those necrophagous creatures that speed the process of
decomposition. Von
Meilenwald harnesses this necrophagic power of the discarded in his
own compositions to move beyond the symphonic corruption of “Blood Vaults” to what amounts to a fugue
of deterioration: it picks up elements from across all his works, infuses them
with shamanic chants to reassemble and reanimate a musical body that is both
uncanny and weird. Uncanny in that it resonates with terrible familiarity. Weird
in that it is alien, twisted and novel. From the fires of “Surtur
Barbaar Maritime” to a song of stillbirth, from the attenuation of
malakia to the unspeaking totem, Von Meilenwald has created a terrible, tremendous
and frightening invocation of blight and the invincible progress of erosion and
disintegration. More than its component parts, an album to haunt the dreams of
Lovecraft and Ligotti alike. Recommended without reservation.
“Exuvia” is available here
FFO:
Batushka, Bolzer,
Elysian Blaze, Blut aus Nord
