BC Grimm – “Orbis Obscura”

November 7, 2016 at 5:50 pm

BC Grimm

A 35 minute long sci-fi tone poem for pipa (chinese lute) and guitar pedals. It’s not exactly something you encounter every day. The music are also ambitious and quite unusual to say the least. BC Grimm, aka Brian Grimm, grew up with various chinese string instruments and has also later studied several of them in Hong Kong.

On “Orbis Obscura” the traditional chinese influences are not that obvious, so if you expect that you might get disappointed. But the music is built from the sound of Grimm’s pipa, a sound he then manipulates with the help of pedals and effects beyond recognition. Noise, drones and other sounds that are connected to sci-fi are poured into the mix, creating an interesting journey through Grimm’s sound imagination.

 

 

BC Grimms site | Bandcamp | Twitter

Avgrunden – “The Cursed Earth”

November 8, 2011 at 3:53 pm

Avgrunden

The band Avgrunden recently released their second album, or LP, like they prefer to call it; it was primarily released on a good old cassette tape through Ominous Recordings (sold out at the moment).

The name of the album is “The Cursed Earth”, and like the name implies the music is rather dark, or at least with a strong mellow ambience. Drone music the genre is called, though the title track is referred to as doom country. It’s about instrumental, slow music, where the closest music I can refer to is ambient music, but here the instrument setup is based on guitars, drums, strings, and percussion.

The ambience reminds of a barren, desolate landscape with a heavy, fateful atmosphere. In a song like “Crazy Horse Redress” I’m looking at american deserts, but overall the feeling I get from the music is a strong nordic melancholy.

Victor Granat, who started the band, explains that the band’s name Avgrunden (The Abyss) is partly based on the quote from Nietsche: “If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss will in the end stare back at you” (my translation). In the beginnning (2 years before the band was formed and the concept consisted of just Victor and two guitars) he could play a guitar riff for 15 minutes and that was it. The idea was that if you repeat something enough it will change it’s shape and appearance, Victor says and continues:

I also get the feeling that Sweden is kind of “The end of the world” or at least “The end of the western world” (according to many). There is a melancholy within Swedish culture that I, personally, love and it’s the same melancholy you would expect if you were standing on the edge of the end of the world, staring into the infinite abyss.

Th music is supposed to picture that border land at the end of the world, it’s music that hopefully will take the listener on a journey through musical landscapes on the edge of the abyss.

You can find Avgrunden on their site or on Facebook and you can listen to more music on their Soundcloud page.

The Cursed Earth

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