Rudimentary Peni - Cacophony

Well, we arrive at the 500th post and so I give you Rudimentary Peni's aptly titled Cacophony.  Notable as not only one of the most vital and well known works of Lovecraftian music but also as one of the most insane, terrifying things ever committed to wax, it is largely responsible for my fascination with the Mythos and therefore for the existence of this Swamp.  A sharp departure from the band's bleak anarcho-punk sound and long held to be an account of Peni frontman Nick Blinko losing his mind, these songs seem like random fragments stitched together and pasted to a padded wall inside a cell.  

There a hints of punk and hardcore, shimmering instrumental exploration, drinking songs, collages of mad noise, multi-tracked gibbering, morbid story-songs, threatening doggerel, and references to (and jokes about) nearly every facet of Lovecraft's work.  Much of this is driven by Blinko's horrific vocals, which range from cheeseball operatics to metallic growls, from snotty punk taunting to inhuman gurgling, often simultaneously.  Famously, one interlude is composed of a choir of clacking, gnashing teeth; another is a melange of wheezes and death rattles.  It's hard to believe it all came from one man.  The album is overstuffed, impenetrable, and baroque, in sharp contrast with the minimalist path the band followed afterwards - it's as if all the horrid knowledge in the universe flooded out from between Blinko's jaws.  

Dead Death Dead Death Dead Death 

(fixed link)

Cryongenic - Celephaïs

Here's a bit of pompous, low-budget symphonic black metal from Germany's Cryogenic, paying homage to the Lovecraft story of a doomed city locked in a vicious cycle of death and rebirth for all eternity.  Defined by cheap synths, phony choral vocals, rubbery drums, and a sort of cardboard epicness that makes me think these guys are probably LARPers in their spare time, Celephaïs has a certain charm that makes up for its lack of atmosphere or audible guitar.  For fans of Bal Sagoth or Septic Flesh, especially the kind that likes to make armor out of soda pop boxes and duct tape.

Ignis Occultus Im...

Celephaïs

This is another new release made available as a free download by the artist, German one-man metal act Celephaïs. Combining the atmospherics and drone of black metal acts like Fen or Altar of Plagues with the cinematic sweep of, say, Fall of Efrafa, this instrumental album is pleasantly entrancing and meditative for the most part, but punctuated with bursts of dissonant blasting and menace.

Solace

Methuselah - The Sleeper in the Abyss

I was initially quite overjoyed to discover this obscure slab of funereal doom based upon several lesser-known Lovecraftian works, but upon opening my mind to its dark whispers the horror of my situation was thrown into sharp relief. Paced as slowly as the passage of aeons, littered with cruel, unintelligible voices calling obscenities in forgotten languages, framed by seemingly random notes plucked out on dusty, detuned piano, and hinting unsubtly at a universe of more horrid things, The Sleeper in the Abyss is the last recorded testament of British hermit Methuselah. As to his whereabouts I cannot speak, but surely he must've been in the final stages of syphilitic insanity by the time of this recording, for it contains nary a shred of human warmth or sympathy. A cold, bleak void yawns outward from my headphones and into my ears.
Ecce Lex

Atlantean Kodex - The Pnakotic Demos

One of my most played albums of 2010 was Atlantean Kodex's ambitious album The Golden Bough, one of those rare records to which the word "epic" can be applied without just meaning "long songs" and "attention-span challenging." This demo recording, released a handful of years earlier, showed them honing their chosen methods to a fine point with which to pierce dimensional boundaries. It's named for the pre-human manuscripts recording the secret history of the universe, having been added to and modified over many millenia, much like the human Bible, albeit on a much larger scale.
Similar perspective-shattering broadmindedness is a key factor here, and I must warn you that the depth and breadth do not begin to emerge until careful study is made. The devoted student will find much to absorb, however.
'neath shadow green and standing stone
Far from the rule of modern throne

Ophidian - Lost in the Halls of a Dream

Well, Swamplings, I'm not sure what to make of this one at all. Blackened Power Metal? Symphonic Italian Melodeath? There's all kinds of things going on here. The opening track, "Drowned In The Stygian Sea/Set In The Enigma Blaze" alternates between pretty orchestrated parts with operatic female vocals and grindy parts with screechy vocals, only to weave the two together with some emo-ish clean singing and death grunts in the background. Next we have the bafflingly titled "The Sarnath's Night," which is mostly slabs of Suffocation/At the Gates streamlined sound but with the female singer wailing away simultaneously with the death vocals, followed by some whispered narration. The other two songs here are equally schizophrenic and overstuffed. I can't find any information about this band at all, save that they share a name with some DJ douchebag and that this is their only release. Ah well, it certainly is strange and charming enough to stand on its own, but I'd love a lyric sheet.
Here come my revengeful desire!
Reply me! Reply Me!

The Ziggurat - Hymns of the Cthulhu Mythos

What can we say about the Ziggurat? Their palpable enthusiasm for Lovecraftiana is undeniable, and the primitive death metal approach is just on this side of competent, but something about this band just makes me smile and shake my head in amused bafflement. Everything about them, from the goofy song titles (my favorite, sadly not on this album, is "Chocolate Shoggoth Shake") to the requisite Geocities homepage to this photo of band leader Dwayne Boyd, screams unintentional hilarity. This particular LP might be less obviously amusing if the vocals weren't twice as loud as everything else and the drums didn't sound like rubber tubs, but then it wouldn't be as memorable either. Ah well, who cares what we think?
Into the Dank Abyss

Payne's Gray - Kadath Decoded

We've got a doozy for you today, little ones, so take a seat and perhaps do some breathing exercises to steel yourself against this onslaught on your earholes. Short-lived German prog band Payne's Gray (tellingly named after a muddy bluish-gray pigment) seemingly only ever managed to self-release two cassettes and this album before vanishing off the face of the earth, but they certainly left a...memorable epitaph. Certainly Lovecraft's crowning epic The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is prime material for an overblown concept album, ripe as it is with bizarre detail, episodic travelogue anecdotes, and sprawling geography, and surely Germany is as good as any place for pretentious puffy-shirted doofuses to make such an album, but when it's all said and done, how the hell does it end up sounding like this, especially in 1995? Far beyond your typical flute-happy technical pomposity (although there is by no means a lack of flute playing at any point), Payne's Gray is a virtual bubbling fondue pot in which the myriad concepts and styles are dipped and gummed together into one heart-attack inducing cheese-coated unidentifiable blob. Cheap synths, electronic drums, baroque acoustic guitar runs, wildly off-key wailing from not one but two mustachioed singers, impenetrable syncopated rhythms seemingly created to stifle foot-tapping or head-nodding, and a baffling central theme somehow all add up to create something even larger than the sum of its parts. Oh, my kingdom for a lyric sheet! The mind whirls.

I realize there's been quite a bit of questionable prog posted here in the past few weeks, but we can't just listen to stoner rock and Swamp Dogg all the time, it makes the brain lazy. No apologies.

Busy warrior during night
Changing paws to fearsome weapon
Jumping then on moonshine heights
Where you fight the terrors threat-on.

The Hastur Cycle - Mike, Shut the Fuck Up

Salutations, scumbags! I have returned from merciful oblivion carrying copious amounts of medicinal resinated heavy metal in a garbage bag slung over my shoulder, scraping down your chimney like a loathesome Santa. A recent re-reading of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath goosed your foul narrator to the fact that Unspeakable Hastur hasn't been spoken of enough here in the Swamp, so let's annihilate life as we know it with this wacky thrash record, which is brief but extremely memorable, like being headbutted by a goat. Note the two subtle puns - not only the drug related band initials but also the seemingly silly album title, obviously a sly nod to He Who Shall Not Be Named. Say it aloud with me:
Hastur Hastur Hastuuuuurrrrrrrrrr

Aldebaran - Dwellers in Twilight

Poetically named after the distant star circled by a dark planet ruled by The High Priest Not to Be Described, a.k.a. He Who Cannot Be Named, Portland's crusty doomslingers Aldebaran deliver evil with the patience of an undying embodiment, an apotheosis of gleeful, dancing chaos. Wikipedia would ignorantly have it that this nameless entity is an avatar of our beloved Nyarlathotep, but true scholars know that all signs point to Hastur the Unspeakable, the half-brother of Cthulhu. Much like the monstrous yellow-robed flautist himself, the band slowly allows its "music" to unfold over a seeming eternity, drawing the incautious into its sinister bliss while draining them dry of life and hope. The album begins simply, with ringing open whole notes, but slowly melodic fragments appear and eventually begin to overlap and intertwine, with sinister growls and bellowed cries competing for earspace in an increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere. Surrender to their charms and be lost, little speck.
A motionless descent sightless and silent into blackened gulphs

Aarni - Bathos

Your host likes to keep his beloved readers on their collectives toes and tentacles, so let's see how just far out we can go tonight, shall we? Aarni, Finnish one-man experimental prog-folk-doom, sings of matters esoteric and inscrutable, drifting spectrally across windswept mushroomscapes, transversing from choral chug-a-lug metal riffs directly into extended flute sections, chanting, grunting, whispering mad things, and harmonizing with himself in an ouroboros loop of strangeness. The guitar is tinny and swathed in sheets of effects and hiss, the drum are barely audible and erratic, the lyrics swerve between fractured English, Latin, and Finnish, and song structure is arbitrary and labyrinthine. In other words: a treasure, a maddening artifact smuggled from a different plane of existence. Also, possibly the only metal album with maracas. Charmingly, Aarni takes its name from the Finnish spirit who floats above buried treasure, clinking his gold coins and cackling.
"Visit the innermost of the earth and by rectifying what is there, you will find the hidden stone."

Dead Meadow - Peel Sessions

Dead Meadow have never been shy about voicing their debt to authors such as Lovecraft and Tolkien, and in fact several of their albums are based loosely around the Old Gentleman's Dream Cycle stories. This aspect of Lovecraft's work doesn't get as much attention as the later Cthulhu Mythos stories, but Dead Meadow explores the delicate beauty and strange floating landscapes aptly and subtly. This brief 2001 Peel Session represents them at a very early stage, just getting comfortable in their nerdish hipster persona, working out the kinks of live performance. Not flawless by any means, it still feverishly reverberates the sound of wind-swept plains, huge yawning skies, and whispering alien tongues.
Good Moaning.

Fungoid Stream - Celaenus Fragments

Thanks to the attentions of my scholarly colleague Shelby Cobras, I was recently informed that Fungoid Stream, esoteric Argentinian cinematic doom explorers, have released a new album.
This is not it.
In its wake, and at Mr. Cobras' not-so-subtle prodding, I present you with the group's first major work, based on the suitably suppressed Celaenus Fragments, relics barely decipherable even to one such as myself already waist-deep in esoterica, with runes and equations twirling around my increasingly fragile mind like the plankton and flotsam eddying just in and out of my swaying grasp. Subtle connexions can be made between this work and the infamous Dream Cycle Mythos, seemingly predating most of the research pertaining to the Old Ones, with the notable exceptions of "The Fungi From Yuggoth" and its uncoccooned form, "The Whisperer in the Darkness." I must confess I am intrigued with the slow but perceptible influence of Nyarlathotep-related material in flux this past fortnight, exemplified both by yesterday's post here and certain personal conundrums as yet unrevealed.
I shall buy the new album, and you shall tremble in its terrible shadow. But in the meantime...

The Lamp of Thoth - Sing As You Slay

Lo, faithful cultists! Almost 48 hours since we last spoke and so many things have gone horribly awry! Only one solution presents itself to make up for it, and promises some sort of horrible revenge later: The Lamp of Thoth's new album, Sing As You Slay. Fans of Arkham Witch shall be delighted with this complex, unpretentious non-sub-genred heavy metal record, as it is primarily the same set of fishy sub-humans. Greek myth, Lovecraftian dread, Tolkien swashbuckling, Viking rage, sinister voodoo ritual - something for everybody. Another functioning musical ensemble, they, and I have soul-searched somewhat deeply as to whether I shall aid or hinder them to just hand the damned thing out like loaves and fishes, but no answer comes, only vengeance.

Khoral - Uniforms of Snow

Arcane and pleasingly atavistic instrumental music composed on primitive rhythm machines decades past their prime and sound-wave bending synthesizers from the remotest plateau of Moog, this is a concept album based on At the Mountains of Madness, a soundtrack to a movie remembered but never made. Eerie signals from another time, inscrutable hieroglyphics carved by an alien hand, widely shunned as somehow namelessly evil.
On the other hand, for the hoarder of bizarre materials...

Cephalectomy - The Dream Cycle Mythos

Based on the least horrifying corner of the Mythos, Canadian "mystigrind" thugs Cephalectomy explore realms heretofore believed to be unfathomable. Behold, the twenty-five minute grindcore song.

Onward!