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LIMITED EDITION 500 ONLY BLACK VINYL LP
LP Tracklisting
A1. Obedience
A2. Burial Ground
B1. Woodchurch
B2. Disease
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OR BANDCAMP SITE (IF
STILL AVAILABLE)
Release Info:
The first full-length shows the band developing the esoteric theorems
established on it's debut 7" and going far deeper in the methodical
exploration of the occult powers of musical trance. With the goal to
create a timeless, organic mixing of krautrock's strangeness and black
metal's coldness, Aluk Todolo conjures rabid obsessive rhythms and
abyssal disharmonic guitars, subliminal spiritualist vibrations and
bizarre, magick summonings. By reducing psychedelic improvisation to a
bare, telluric instrumentation, and basking in the archaic rawness of
lo-fi production, the trio elaborates on an audio ritual meant to be
monolithic and stabbing, hypnotic but unpredictable, minimalist yet
teeming.
Artist Info:
With the goal to create a timeless, organic mix of krautrock’s
strangeness and black metal’s coldness, combining Striborg with Faust,
Burzum with This Heat, Svest with Paul Chain, or Ildjarn with Can, Aluk
Todolo conjures rabid obsessive rhythms and abyssal disharmonic guitars,
subliminal spiritualist vibrations and bizarre, magick summonings. By
reducing psychedelic improvisation to a bare, telluric instrumentation,
and basking in the archaic rawness of lo-fi production, the trio
elaborates on an audio ritual meant to be monolithic and stabbing,
hypnotic but unpredictable, minimalist yet teeming. Aluk Todolo features
members from the legendary, underground black metal acts, Diamatregon (tUMULt)
& Vediog Svaor (Paragon International)
REVIEWS
There’s been a fair
amount of teeth gnashing and intermittent bots of throwing ourselves
through the air against walls in our gaff since we finally get off our
lazy hides and put this beauty on the turntable.
The gnashing of teeth due in the main to discovering the small though
painfully consequential fact that this lot have somehow managed to sneak
past a release in the shape of their self titled two track 7” for
Public Guilt - the blighters. While our strange re-acquaintance with the
walls in our place are borne of the fact that we are utterly smitten by
this colossal unholy sounding four track hybrid opus of kraut, dark
psych and blood chilled industrialism.
‘Descension’ is the debut Aluk Todolo full length release - limited
to just 500 vinyl copies via the rather tasty Riot Season imprint who
are it has to be said garnering something of a reputation for being
latent spotters of taste makers (in our gaff anyway) having just blown
us away with the latest double vinyl outing for the very excellent Shit
’n’ Shine (a review is imminent) as well as offering safe haven for
the of those Jap psych overlords Acid Mothers Temple as well as in
recent memory outings for the Skull Defekts and Black Boned Angel (which
I have to hear and now come highly recommended).
The French trio who are made up of members of occultist / black metal
ensembles previously unknown to us (now isn’t that familiar)
Diamatregon and Vediog Svaor have in ’Descension’ delivered one of
the early runners for psyche debut of the year. Loosening up on their
black metal upbringing ’descension’ is grimly layered, the opening
sequences of ’obedience’ envelope the listener in a sinew tightening
tenseness routinely marked and scarred by the delicate drift of an
apocalyptically monastic and bleak monochromatic backdrop before the
frenzied scourge of hammer headed primordial kraut grooves are unleashed
with blood letting intent. Unrelenting, inescapable and impeccably
claustrophobic, this caustic armoury provides the setting for a serious
power driven locked down head fuck of some measure beset with a raging
frontal assault of howling feedback skree, acute no wave dialects and
doom lashed foreboding and retribution.
The ice dripped looping skin jangling paranoia of ‘burial ground’
drops the temperature to near chilling, ominous and skulking this
heavily set bleak and blankly slice of fraught post punk taps
disturbingly in to the monolithic atmospheres of Joy Division at their
most overtly hollowed and here we are thinking ’dead souls’ and
’decades’ whilst intermittently being subjected to scorch marks
resulting from hostile fuzz furies that neatly blends into…..
…’woodchurch’ which annoyingly our spell checker keeps trying to
change to Woodchuck (whatever happened to them?) is as eerie as it gets
is replete with life force evaporating drone montages that mooch
restlessly like some kind of pulsating sonic black hole sucking dry any
semblance of light - think LaBradford in a face off with Growing.
Its left to the parting ’disease’ to provide the set with its
curtain closing centrepiece - deliciously set off and primed by some
stunning dust ridden fuzzed up snaking blues accents as though a smoking
Bill Horist had lifted some neat side winding riff tricks from Ry Cooder
before being dragged backwards into darkening oppressive haze of
stricken industrial treated drone dub collages whipped straight out of
the arse pocket of an early career Roy Montgomery. Fierce some stuff.
All at once brooding and brutal ‘descension’ is an uncompromising
ceremony of caustic generic engineering and an absolute must have record
collection addition.
LOSING TODAY
Coming from a black
metal background Aluk Todolo reek and reel with a devil-may-care
attitude to the niceties of rhythm and harmony. Descension offers four
captivating long format delves into experimental sludgerock, where
single-mindedly repetitive percussion battles with wadges of lo-fi
distortion and jagged scrapyard klang.
PLAN B
Descension is Aluk Todolo debut full length after a highly praised 7
inch and what a debut this is. For 37 minutes you tumbled through, get
hypnotised and brutalised by this nightmarish, lo-fi , head-ripping and
psychedelic black mind fuck. Taking in elements of black metal,
krautrock, locked grooves, noise and black/ ritual psychedelics to
summon up something that is truly of their own diabolic making- this
feels like it could have been made by blood thirsty satanic
hippies that have just crawled from a suffocating dark forest to play in
front of you & scary the hell out of you. The music engulfs you in
it’s looped, smogy and sometimes seething presence, as the drums
pound on and on as if played of human skin drums, bass and guitar get
smudged, melted and smeared into each other. Like dark tripped out
globules of sound that fall like strange enchanted entrails slipping
from a vast black structure that stretches off over a blood red and
black horizon as far as your eyes can see. This Apocalyptic ritual music
for the end times, screw-up, nasty and bitter yet inviting and
hypnotic. One hell of a musical death-trip into the beating black
heart of this three piece. Truly music that threatens to swallow you all
up leaving you in a limbo of Lovecafts making. I cant recall a
project baised around just your drums, bass and guitar sounding
this strange, different and hellish. This is available in both cd form
from public-guilt and on vinyl from riot-season.
MUSIQUE MACHINE
Following a hefty bout of ‘summoning up dark forces’, Grenoble’s
stalwart BMers, Diamatregon, have collaborated with fellow Gallic
disciples of The Black, Vediog Svaor, to raise the spectre that is
revered as Aluk Todolo. Named after Indonesia’s indigenous religion,
Aluk Todolo roughly translates as ‘the way of the ancestors’, which
is the particular shining path this inventive & largely spontaneous
trio have elected to follow. Recorded in a cave in the Alps over the
summer of 2006 after ‘extensive ritual ingestion’, Aluk Todolo’s
debut long player, ‘Descension’, features 4-porky prime cuts of
esoterica-inspired instrumental eccentricity that veers from the
Blackness of Burzum & Striborg, leftwards, across the dual
carriageway signposted ‘UK post-punk circa 1982′, before parking
up for the night in a kruatrockian lay-by to slip into a substance
induced trance! Aluk Todolo claim they have no idea where their music
comes from - or where it’s going to - & even after several intense
sessions with ‘Descension’, I must admit, I’d have to agree with
them.
Side 1 of ‘Descension’ opens with ‘Obedience’, a gargantuan slab
of BM inspired organic psychedelia that rumbles ominously and
relentlessly towards its apocalyptic finale, bombarded by all manner of
disharmonic fret-board pyrotechnics and abstract noise as she goes. A
subdued, post-punky guitar figure shapes ‘Burial Ground’,
interspersed with the sound of giant insects arguing about who gets to
go first on a decaying corpse over a minimal metronomic beat. Quark,
strangeness & charm, indeed! Side 2 gets off to a strident start
with the insistent ‘Woodchurch’, a feedback drenched exercise in
stating the ‘bleeding obviously fantastic’ over & over again, ad
infinatum. A flurry of fuzzed-up slide guitar introduces ‘Disease’,
before we slip into a narcotic informed coma haunted by disembodied
voices and stabs of untreated noise.
So, there we have it: ‘Descension’: 37-minutes of endlessly
evocative discipline steeped in magik ritual & invocation.
TRAKMARX
France’s Aluk Todolo earned significant praise on the back of their
debut seven-inch, so much so that they had no problem finding
international distribution for their first full-length. Like the
seven-inch, Descension is a thorough exploration of the crossroads
between scratchy, arcane Krautrock and black metal noise. The opening
“Obedience” starts with a dense but distant industrial atmosphere
and drums that slowly pick up steam. Then something that sounds like a
train runs the atmosphere over and continues to run it over for the
remaining six minutes of the track, during which the layers of screaming
whistles and the rackety drums remain basically unchanged. The following
“Burial Ground” is a lot easier on the ears. There, a slacker drum
pattern and bass progression solemnly support drifting fogs of
whispering devils and a brutally tortured guitar that phases in and out
of time for the entirety of its ten minutes. Granted, it sounds like
they’ve got some good ideas for a minute or two, but they pad them out
to ridiculous lengths and don’t end up really going anywhere with
them. They need to learn the lessons of succinctness and/or progression,
but it is their debut album, so time is on their side.
POP MATTERS
Occult noise mavens Aluk Todolo turn loose this ghoulish set of
pseudo-black metal cacophonies for the Riot Season label, guaranteed to
be about twenty times harsher than your standard genre emission by merit
of its James Plotkin mastering job. As usual, it sounds as though
Plotkin's got his favourite distortion unit involved, saturating the
track to the point of fizzing overload and giving the guitars a good
mauling. The drum sound is obscenely lo-fi, sounding like someone
assembling flatpack furniture two doors down. The band's brand of
instrumental metal clears up occasionally to reveal webs of
disharmonious string clamour, only to ultimately return to its noise
blizzard default setting. Oh yeah, it's also worth pointing out that
this album was recorded "in the Elder's Cave". Sweet.
BOOMKAT
This album by Aluk Todolo deftly blends the cold and dark aesthetic of
Black metal with the cosmic trance and experimentation of Krautrockers
such as Can and Faust, to great effect. Across the album's four epic
tracks the moods and styles are very different, from bracing blizzards
of guitar noise to hypnotic metallic rhythms and guitars, it's almost a
post-rock album in some ways, but with a difference in influences and
intent, the feeling here is raw and lo-fi compared to the studio gloss
of post rock. It's a great album and an experiment that works well.
WARPMART
"I’ll now conclude this month’s reviews with DESCENSION, the
epic debut album by France’s Aluk Todolo. For their playing unites
Krautrock with Zeuhl via classic No Wave, and rocks mightily. Commencing
like the soundtrack from some forgotten gulag escape movie, this power
trio’s time-honoured guitar/bass/drums line-up is outstandingly
meditative and un-clichéd. Once the album kicks deep in there, it’s
as though these gentlemen are hypnotized and playing along while
watching an animé interpretation of Ted Hughes’ Iron Man (now
re-titled ‘The All New Adventures of Iron Man’ and in its third
series replete with failed Scrappy Doo counterpart), and in this episode
he’s fumigating the entire West Midlands conurbation with an
all-purpose Heavy Rock deodorant/pesticide. Very Cleveland, very Can,
very This Heat, very Magma, but very much its own original thing, and
definitely another necessary part of the puzzle that leads us to the Rue
d’Awakening.
JULIAN COPE / HEAD HERITAGE
Finally, the first full length from these mysterious French post black
metal krautrock alchemists. And if you think calling a band French post
black metal krautrock alchemists might be overdoing it, you haven't hear
Aluk Todolo.
An offshoot of black metal horde Diamatregon (who have one record on
tUMULt, and another one coming soon), this trio, just guitar, bass and
drums, are most definitely alchemists, working some sort of ancient
magic, turning the simplest of rock band instrumentation, into something
massive and mysterious, heavy and haunting, brutal and mesmerizing,
repetitive and motorik. Crafting songs, that manage to be both pieces,
in the classical sense, abstract and intellectual collections and
arrangements of sound, subtle shadings, tonal color and timbre, harmony
and dissonance, and SONGS, in the rock sense, fucking kick ass jams,
that seem to go on forever, killer riffs, and relentless head nodding
rhythms, like krautrock, only heavier and darker and way way blacker.
Like black metal but without all the buzz and howl, stripped down to its
very essence, to just mood and rhythm, ambience and propulsion.
In the review of the previous 7" we described the band's sound as:
Ominous krautrock rhythms over Einsterzende style industrial clatter,
some lost seventies psych rock holy grail channeled through modern post
rock. Dreamy and dark and mesmerizing. Hypnotic guitar lines and simple
shuffling rhythms that build into clattery propulsive jams, all clanging
angular riffs and dense tangled drumming. VERY This Heat like, and
reminiscent of the late great Laddio Bolocko. Some sort of dangerous and
mysterious postrock / krautrock hybrid, lo-fi but thick and dense and
amazingly heavy.
And the full length essentially still sounds like that, but having
loosed themselves from the shackles of the way too brief 7" format,
the band can take all those elements, and lay them out, an epic massive
post rock, krautrock, dronerock, experimental post black metal sprawl.
These are the kinds of songs and sounds that need space, and time, need
to lull the listener in, to entrance, ensorcel, the rhythms are stripped
down and repetitive, looped and hypnotic, simple, but surprisingly and
subtly complex at the same time. It's not hard to hear other hypno
rockers in Aluk Todolo's sound, Circle, Salvatore and the like, but also
space rock masters of repetition, Hawkwind, The Heads, and of course
krautrock legends Can and Faust. Especially Can, with their focus on the
power of the rhythm, no mater how seemingly simple or plain. But more
than anything, it's legendary UK experimentalists This Heat whose,
haunting mysterious rhythmic influence is all over Descension.
The opening track is the heaviest, a brutal slab of in the red distorted
riffage, the actual riffs barely discernible, more like a heaving mass
of crumbling distortion and space rock FX, but the rhythms that frame
the whole record are already in place, pounding steadily beneath the
buzz and skree. A head nodding pulse underpinning the swirling distorted
clouds above. A bracing and white hot burst of blackdronekrautpsych that
has the speakers rattling for all of its 8+ minutes.
But that track mostly serves as an intro to the complex and moody
rhythmic sprawl that makes up the other three tracks. "Burial
Ground" begins with what sounds like a slowed down This Heat rhythm
track synched up to the free abstract drift of legendary seventies
dronepsych collective Taj Mahal Travellers. The drums unwavering, but
the background constantly in flux, swaths of black buzz, brief flurries
of chaotic FX, distant low end swells, haunting fragmented melodies, a
gorgeous spare kraut rock jam dropped into the abyss.
"Woodchurch" is a dense wall of high end buzz, all swirling
distorted hum and keening feedback, tones all tangled up, a chordal wash
of tuned vacuum cleaners, a sort of Sunroof! Style urdrone, but beneath
it, the simplest of bass lines, distorted and downtuned, a heartbeat
like throb, only a handful of notes, just enough to tie into the even
simpler drum part, just kick drum and snare, a two step tattoo, as
completely mesmerizing as it us utterly simple. The background buzz,
swaying and pulsing, like some massive black sea, or clouds of insects
ravaging a blighted sonic landscape.
The disc closes with "Disease" which opens with an ultra heavy
slide guitar, unfurling a slow motion blues riff, caked in black buzz
and thick distortion, the notes left to hang, ringing out until the
tones slowly transform into feedback, immediately being swallowed up by
the riff right behind it. It's like Robert Johnson playing SUNNO))), and
then suddenly, the sound shifts, and the band reverts to its murky
trawl, a thick throbbing bass line, another Can like rhythm, guitars
warm and warbly, more like a layer of wet fuzz than distinct riffing,
but occasionally, bits of that opening salvo return, offering up brief
blasts of speaker destroying crunch, or brief bits of grinding buzz, a
sudden start that almost, but doesn't quite wake you from your soporific
reverie. Near the end, the distorted slide guitar returns, and drums
drop out, and the track finishes with a thick coda of pealing guitar
roar and shimmering chordal drones.
Intense and hypnotic and heavy and fucking genius. Ritualistic sounds,
both black and brilliant, pulled from the void, a mysterious and sonic
netherworld. Definite
contender for record of the year.
AQUARIUS RECORDS
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