Neurot Recordings

Ufomammut

Hidden

Neurot Recordings

Ufomammut formed in the late ’90s by Poia (guitars, FXs) and Urlo (bass, vocals, FXs, synths), rising from the ashes of past band Judy Corda, together with Vita (drums). With Levre taking over on drums in 2021, the band has undergone a rebirth, culminating in the release of the album Fenice and the Crookhead EP. Over the course of twenty-five years, the band has developed a unique sound that combines heavy, dynamic riff worship with a deep understanding of the psychedelic tradition in music. This has resulted in a cosmic, futuristic, and technicolor sound that fully immerses listeners. The band has produced ten records along with various other releases, such as compilations, EPs, and live albums. Now, in 2024, as they celebrate their quarter-century milestone, the band is set to release their latest album, Hidden. This album marks a shift in the band’s musical composition, aiming for a more intense and heavy sound, and it’s the third release featuring Levre as the band’s new drummer. The title reflects the concept of the presence of everything in existence and the ability to bring to light what lies within. With Hidden, Ufomammut delves into a sonic journey that traverses vast expanses of space and time. From the crushing heaviness to the haunting melodies, from the textured compositions to the otherworldly atmospheres, it testifies to the never-ending evolution of the band and their mastery of creating immersive sonic experiences: a fitting celebration of their twenty-five years of sonic exploration and experimentation.

Harvestman

Triptych: Part One

Neurot Recordings

At its heart, music has always been a questioning of inheritance—a dialogue with predecessors and forebears, the forging of one’s own perspective in relation to what has come before, and for some, a plunge into the boundless realms between. For Steve Von Till, that process has always taken on an added dimension to become the most sacred of tasks. Whether through the apocalyptic uprising of Neurosis, the sonic deconstructions of their sister project, Tribes Of Neurot, the invocatory intimacy of his eponymous solo albums or his instrumental psychedelic reveries in the guise of Harvestman, that dialogue has never just been with musical influences, but with what underpins them: the primordial, elemental forces now banished to the peripheries of our contemporary consciousness, yet still broadcasting a signal for all who will listen. The first of a three-album cycle, Triptych: Part One, is Harvestman’s most ambitious undertaking yet. Drawn to the megaliths, ruins and ancient sites mapped out along the British and European mainland’s geographical and psychic landscapes, the folklore and apocrypha forever resurfacing as portals from a rational world, Triptych is a meditation forged from traces and residues, and an hallucinatory recollection of artists who have tapped into that enduring otherworldliness embedded within us all. It’s a dream diary narrating a passage through Summer Isle where Flying Saucer Attack are wafting out of a window, a distant Fairport Convention are being remixed by dub master Adrian Sherwood, celestial scanners Tangerine Dream are trying to drown out Bert Jansch and Hawkwind are...

Ex Everything

Slow Change Will Pull Us Apart

Neurot Recordings

Our world has been gradually falling apart. This may seem like a bleak point of view, but the collapse being witnessed inspired post-mathcore outfit Ex Everything as they created their eruptive debut Slow Change Will Pull Us Apart. “Everything around us–politically, socially, environmentally—seems to be stretching and breaking,” says guitarist Jon Howell. “Our record sits in that terrifying place where you’ve been watching it happen.” The Bay Area quartet boasts current and former members of Kowloon Walled City, Early Graves, Mercy Ties, Blowupnihilist, Less Art and others, but listeners shouldn’t mistake this for a short-term project or side band. This is a priority, every member focused and committed, and it only takes a few minutes with the album to understand how serious they are. “This band is completely its own thing,” says Howell. “It addresses the part of us that wants to write fast, chaotic, knotty, messy, pissed off music.” Started initially in 2018 between Howell and bassist Ben Thorne, drummer Dan Sneddon joined in 2019, solidifying the core of the band. After going through the usual growing pains, spiked with a global pandemic, they recruited vocalist Andre Sanabria who understood what the band needed and delivered it with a fierce dedication. Cut to the band heading into Sharkbite Studios with Scott Evans—whose engineering credits include Yautja, Town Portal and Ghoul—and the band was finally able to hear what they’d accomplished. Slow Change Will Pull Us Apart is a near-perfect fusion of Dischord-influenced math rock and noisecore, a nuanced...

False Fed

Let Them Eat Fake

Neurot Recordings

From the dark roots of Amebix, Discharge and Nausea. A new twisted branch of thorns shoots from the alternate family tree. In 2019 BC (Before Covid) Discharge frontman Jeff Janiak reached out to longtime friend and musician JP Parsons to assist on a new project. The pair wrote and recorded various ideas before reaching out to Amebix guitarist Stig.C.Miller who joined them in the midst of the global pandemic. The trio utilized this new creative climate of physical restriction and went on to set the foundations for their first album, via file sharing home recordings, which would be arranged and produced by Stig. It was several months later when he would call upon Nausea, Ministry and former Amebix drummer Roy Mayorga to complete the line up. Roy went onto record drums, mix and produce the band's debut album 'LET THEM EAT FAKE'. In these unprecedented times of global restriction, fear and the everlasting lack of faith in the hierarchy 'False Fed' has cultivated a heavy sound that is drenched in melody, aggression and shrouded in darkness. It is not bound by genre, yet still offers subtle hints to the creators lineage.

Great Falls

Objects Without Pain

Neurot Recordings

Read any article or comment thread about the Seattle noise-rock outfit GREAT FALLS and you're likely to see descriptors like cathartic, heavy, crushing, and unhinged. Maybe even psychotic. And sure, those are all apt: For over a decade, vocalist/guitarist Demian Johnston and bassist Shane Mehling (who also played together in the early-2000s noisecore band PLAYING ENEMY and the experimental duo HEMINGWAY) have honed their sludgy, overwhelmingly intense brand of heaviness, punctuated by delectably discordant riffs, terrifyingly low, thwacking bass lines, and mesmerizingly tight percussion. In the live setting, too, they’re notorious for a stage presence that is so aggressively confrontational and menacing that Mehling once broke his own arm mid-set. But the most striking aspect of GREAT FALLS, setting them apart from the murky sea of sludge metal and AmRep-inspired noise-rock bands, is their ability to paint a deeply, utterly human story through an all-out assault on the senses: an art the band has perfected on their fourth full-length album OBJECTS WITHOUT PAIN, out September 15 via NEUROT RECORDINGS. The album is not only their NEUROT debut, but also the first LP featuring drummer Nickolis Parks (GAYTHEIST, BASTARD FEAST), who joined the band prior to the release of their exhilarating, cacophonous 2023 EP, FUNNY WHAT SURVIVES. OBJECTS WITHOUT PAIN takes us on a bleak, purgative journey through a separation – a snapshot of the turmoil and indecision that occurs after the initial realization of someone's misery, and before the ultimate decision to end a decades-long partnership. From the foreboding intro...

Janaka Stucky

Ascend Ascend: Live in Seattle with Lori Goldston

Neurot Recordings

"Praised by Jimmy Page as “riveting,” Janaka Stucky’s book length poem, Ascend Ascend, published by Jack White’s Third Man Books in 2019, gets a mesmerizing treatment on this album by the same name, accompanied by experimental cellist Lori Goldston. Goldston, known for her work with a number of acts—including Nirvana, Cat Power, and Earth—provides otherworldly layers of distortion and natural reverb over Stucky’s dirge-like vocal performance. Recorded at the All Pilgrims Church in Seattle while Stucky was on a 7-city tour produced by Atlas Obscura in 2019, the performance is served well by the room’s ambiance and was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Mell Dettmer—who has engineered albums for acts such as Earth, Sunn O))), Master Musicians of Bukkake, and Wolves in the Throne Room. "

Petbrick

Liminal

Neurot Recordings

In a world hurtling towards new frontiers of horror on a daily basis, there’s preciouslittle time for pause. For the self-respecting artist, the only reasonable solution is psychic warfare. Moreover, the only way to wage this is without compromise, with the least possible respect for thresholds or co-ordinates of any kind. Such is the terrain of Petbrick on the titanic and transformative Liminal. Here on their second album the duo of Wayne Adams (Big Lad / Johnny Broke) and Iggor Cavalera (Sepultura / Cavalera Conspiracy / Soulwax) lays waste to all or any constrictions in its path, dispensing an assault of vibrant catharsis that is as rich in atmospheric dread as sulphuric intent. Blending a vast sonic landscape with a relentless compunction to break the pain barrier, Liminal is a dizzying exercise in overdrive which can take in industrial abrasions, pulverising rhythmic drive, acid-damaged freakery, cinematic tension and balladic gravitas in disarmingly coherent fashion. The methodology that led to the cathartic brew of Liminal arrived via new approaches to their meld of raw percussive aggression and equally caustic sonic textures. Other heads and personalities also came on board to add richness and intrigue to the onslaught—“I believe we got an amazing team of collaborators—from old school friends like Neurosis’ Steve Von Till and Converge’s Jacob Bannon to new school artists like Paula Rebbeledo from Rakta and New York doom rappers Lord Goat and Truck Jewelz” notes Cavalera. Indeed, the last-named’s bar-spitting fury hits just as viciously as Bannon’s paint-stripping vitriol....

Tension Span

The Future Died Yesterday

Neurot Recordings

Using the musical language of their past, the dark punk of their early bands (Christ On Parade, Neurosis, Dystopia, and Asunder) Tension Span brings a new band and a new album to Neurot Recordings that sounds both urgent and personal, speaking truth to the bleak realities of today’s socio-political collapse and the angst and identity crisis it brings. Somehow within the fabric of these themes of stress and fear and rage, there is a feeling of underlying hope, that there is something beautiful in the struggle. Recorded during the isolation of Covid, Noah Landis, Matt Parrillo, and Geoff Evans crafted The Future Died Yesterday, an album that sounds both varied and cohesive, combining musical and emotional heaviness with melody, samples, and synth. Sonically unique and riveting. “In terms of direction, the veteran Oakland-based musicians explore a noir-kissed post-punk path that fans of Killing Joke, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, and New Model Army should take note of.” –No Echo

Ufomammut

Fenice

Neurot Recordings

For over twenty years, Ufomammut has combined the heaviness and majesty of dynamic riff worship with a nuanced understanding of psychedelic tradition and history in music, creating a cosmic, futuristic, and technicolor sound destined for absolute immersion.  Fenice (meaning “phoenix” in Italian) symbolically represents endless rebirth and the ability to start again after everything seems doomed. The album is the first recording with new drummer Levre, and truly marks a new chapter in Ufomammut history. While the band are well-known for their psychedelic travels into the far reaches of the cosmos, Fenice is a much more introspective listening experience. It was conceived as a single concept track, divided in six facets of this inward-facing focus. Sonic experimentations abound in the exploration of this central theme: synths and experimental vocal effects are featured more prominently than ever before, as the band push themselves ever further into the uncharted territory of their very identity.  The towering synths on the opening track “Duat” evoke an almighty machine rising from the depths of primordial ooze. There’s a shift to a frenetic garage-psych pace before mellowing out into a more familiar doomy stomp. “Kepherer” is a respite, albeit a slight one, returning to the pulsing rhythms of the album’s intro before plunging the listener into the menacing build and release of “Psychostasia” next. Each oscillation of this extraordinary album feels inevitable—Ufomammut are after all, masters of their craft, and when it comes to creating enveloping sonic journeys into the unknown, it’s their uninhibited...

Amenra, Cave In, Marissa Nadler

Songs Of Townes Van Zandt Vol. III

Neurot Recordings

My Proud Mountain and Neurot Recordings are thrilled to release Songs Of Townes Van Zandt III, continuing the tradition of well-known artists in the heavy music and dark genres covering the songs of Townes Van Zandt. This album features nine new and unique covers by Amenra, Cave In, and Marissa Nadler. Opener “Quicksilver Dreams of Maria” paints Nadler as a pastoral daydream of mournful siren vocals, embodying the lovelorn and lustful side of Van Zandt some listeners tend to overlook. Her covers of “Sad Cinderella” and “None But the Rain” capture the tender and weary surrender to hope in the face of turmoil, like a flower blooming on a gravestone. The melodic and rhythmic contributions of Milky Burgess help make the covers a hazy carnival of memories that may be real or imagined. Amenra strip back their sludge metal sound to just vocals and acoustic guitar to pay tribute to the tortured soul at the center of Van Zandt’s work. “The sadness and despair in his songs are unparalleled,” says guitarist Lennart Bossu. Tackling “Kathleen”, “Flyin’ Shoes”, and the eerie “Black Crow Blues”, Amenra shine a light on the real pain that made Van Zandt’s lyrics all the more haunting. The result is the Texas desert by way of Belgium, a set of stark and emotionally raw ballads for long night drives to nowhere. Cave In’s full-band covers of “The Hole” and “At My Window’ find them at their most cavernous, slowing down their high-wire sound to a sidewinder crawl...

Kowloon Walled City

Piecework

Neurot Recordings

In the world of heavy music, few bands embrace dynamics and negative space like Kowloon Walled City. Since forming fifteen years ago, the band has increasingly refined its deconstructed approach to noise rock, math rock, and doom, landing them on stages with similar boundary-pushing bands like Neurosis, Yob, Sleep, Sumac, and Thou. Now, with Piecework, the band’s fourth album and first in six years, Kowloon Walled City reaches new levels of restraint. Songs are bleak and slow, but also shorter and more concise—seven songs clock in at about thrity minutes. There are stretches of near silence. While the band has always operated under the MO that less is more, it has doubled down on that ethos here Singer/guitarist Scott Evans and guitarist Jon Howell, the main songwriters, self-imposed restrictions to push themselves creatively—“restraining ourselves into oblivion,” as Howell put it. Songs are written in more straightforward time signatures. Evans and Howell also changed their guitar rigs to sound more “clean and clanky.” With the gristle stripped away, bone and muscle remain: drums decaying in a room, bass strings rattling, a lonely guitar chord. Sometimes, it’s almost uncomfortably barren. But the negative space also amplifies the ruptures of heady aggressiveness that anchor Piecework. Angular guitar notes from Howell skew off the neck, dissolving into space. Ian Miller’s bass lines churn in the muck. Drums and cymbal smashing by Dan Sneddon punctuate dead air. (Sneddon, formerly of Early Graves, makes his recording debut with the band five years after joining.). As with...

Von Till, Steve

A Deep Voiceless Wilderness

Neurot Recordings

Steve Von Till has made a life’s work out of seeking the elemental. With a solo discography that stretches back more than two decades, he has toiled in a shadow realm, peeling back layers of reality in a never-ending search for true meaning and raw emotion. A Deep Voiceless Wilderness strips back the veil even further. An achingly beautiful ambient work with neo-classical leanings, the album is a hallucinatory and elegant rumination on our disconnect from the natural world, each other, and ultimately ourselves. For some listeners, the album may recall the work of modern composers like Jóhann Jóhannsson, Brian Eno or Gavin Bryars. For Von Till, it’s about surrendering to the spirit of place—and to the original intent behind his 2020 solo album, No Wilderness Deep Enough. That album marked a significant first for Von Till: it was his first solo record without a guitar in hand. Instead, Von Till intoned powerful and thought-provoking lyrics over piano, cello, mellotron and analog synthesizers. A Deep Voiceless Wilderness is that same album without Von Till’s words. “This is how I originally heard this piece of music,” he says. “Without the voice as an anchor or earthbound narrative, these pieces have a broader wingspan. They become something else entirely and unfold in a more expansive way. The depth of the synths, juxtaposed with the strings and French horn, have space to develop and allow the listener to imagine their own story.”

Von Till, Steve

Harvestman - 23 Untitled Poems

Neurot Recordings

In 2020 Steve Von Till published his first book of poetry, Harvestman: 23 Untitled Poems And Collected Lyrics. Published by the University of South Dakota’s Astrophil Press, the book established Von Till as a formidable and thoughtful author of verse—a fact that Neurosis fans knew all along, but the wider world was only just becoming aware of.“There is a depth of hope, acceptance and loss that permeates these poems,” Joseph Haeger said in his review for The Inlander. “Like any great piece of art, Harvestman contains multitudes, and that’s exactly what I was hoping for when I cracked it open. Von Till has already established himself as a great musician, and he’s about to put his stake into the ground proving himself to be a damn good writer.”For 2021, Von Till has reimagined Harvestman in a new format, delivering an intimate and captivating reading of the collection with sound enhancements. “Being a constant sound-seeker, I thought it would be more interesting to have some textures and treatments to break up the intimate voice recordings,” Von Till says of his decision to add some atmosphere to the spoken-word version of Harvestman. “The background sounds used on some of the tracks were pieces related to No Wilderness Deep Enough that were either not used or repurposed to interweave further connections between my artistic output at this time of my life.”

Deafkids + Petbrick

Deafbrick

Neurot Recordings

As one traverses through new and intimidating terrain unfamiliar a short while ago, two collaborators have come together to unwittingly create a record curiously suited to an intimidating and unpredictable new era. Deafbrick, the collaboration between Säo Paulo’s sonic warriors Deafkids and London’s pulverising duo Petbrick is a vertiable force against adversity, and less a polite meeting of minds than a fiery collision whose impact and incandescence extend beyond the horizon. The results run the gamut through a litany of uniformly invigorating audial landscaps—this is an arena where Deafkids’ appetite for lysergic punk-damaged tumult and Petbrick’s ventures into dystopian synth-driven soundscapes can happily engage in gladiatorial contest. From the unearthly percussive clangour of “Hyperkinetic Mass Disordert” to the DHR-addled chaos of the paint-stripping “Mega Ritual”, every second of Deafbrick is infused with malevolent charisma and iconoclastic élan. Yet perhaps the ultimate destructive moment of this particular demolition derby comes via a thrillingly monomaniacal take on Discharge’s ‘Free Speech For The Dumb. Not that it necessarily met the approval of Discharge themselves, who make a cameo appearance on the song’s outro. “I asked them to record some quotes saying how much they hated our version” laughs Iggor. “One of them even said that Metallica did a better job. That really freaked me out!”Metallica, it’s fair to say objectively, do not do a better job.

Von Till, Steve

Harvestman: 23 Untitled Poems And Collected Lyrics By Steve Von Till

Neurot Recordings

Von Till’s first published work of original poetry together with his solo lyrics of the last 20 years. First printing, limited hardback edition beautifully illustrated with linocuts by Mazatl. Published by Astrophil Press at the University of South Dakota.

Von Till, Steve

No Wilderness Deep Enough

Neurot Recordings

Over the course of recent time, an aching, growing void has developed where a normal way of life has resided. Uncertainty abounds, and Steve Von Till’s No Wilderness Deep Enough provides a voice of existential wisdom and experience to offer comfort and perspective in an era of uncharted territory. These six pieces of music shape a hallucinatory landscape of sound that plumbs the depths of the natural world’s mysteries and uncertainties—questions that have vexed humanity since the dawn of time, asked anew amidst a backdrop that’s as haunting as it is holistic. Von Till’s fifth solo album is a swirling and iridescent blend of ambient, neo-classical, and gothic Americana that swan-dives into the darkness of modern life, with the resulting emergence a sonic document of rural psychedelia that transcends the physical world—towards a greater spiritual acceptance that connects naturalism, spiritualism, and the corporeal form.  Von Till has charted an extraordinary musical path over the last several decades, from his main duties as singer and guitarist of the boundary-breaking Neurosis to the psychedelic music of his Harvestman project and the unique folk songs he’s released under his own name. But No Wilderness Deep Enough is truly like nothing ever heard from him before—an album that’s devastatingly beautiful and overwhelming in its scope, reminiscent of the tragic ecstasy of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ recent work as well as the borderless ambient music pioneered by Brian Eno, late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s glacial compositions, and the electronic mutations of Coil. 

Neurosis & Jarboe

Neurosis & Jarboe Reissue

Neurot Recordings

***Back in print on 2xLP!!!  Neurot Recordings are proud to reissue the landmark collaboration Neurosis & Jarboe, which was originally released in 2003. This latest version is fully remastered and with entirely new artwork from Aaron Turner, available on vinyl for the first time, as well as CD and digital formats.  When two independent and distinct spheres overlap, the resulting ellipse tends to emphasize the most striking and powerful characteristics of each body. Such is the case with this particular collaboration between heavy music pioneers Neurosis and the multi-faceted performer Jarboe (who performed in Swans and who has collaborated with an array of people from Blixa Bargeld, J.G. Thirlwell, Attila Csihar, Bill Laswell, Merzbow, Justin K. Broadrick, Helen Money, Father Murphy, the list goes on...) The musicians pull from one another some of the most harrowing and unusual sounds ever heard from either artist at the time—a sentiment which also rings true to some fifteen years later. The collaboration is a deeply textured mosaic that is a culmination of merged aesthetics from two major influences on free-thinking sounds. It unlocked the hidden potential of electronic music as a new force in heavy rock. At a time when groups like Oneida, Wolf Eyes and Black Dice were beginning to experiment with technology in making mind-numbing leaden electro-drone freed from any essence of “dance music,” Neurosis & Jarboe redefined all notions of their past—and outlined the course of heavy music to come.

Deafkids

Metaprogramação

Neurot Recordings

Deafkids is back with a new album born of experience—Metaprogramação is their third full length, but first full length to be released with Neurot Recordings. While their previous release, Configuração do Lamento, captured the group as they delved deep into their own musical world of diverse and discordant characteristics, this latest takes this blend to entirely new extremes: songs melt and dissolve into one another, electronic pulses blend into powerful rhythmic and percussive fabrics, all weaving a “future-primitive psychic scenario.” Difficult to describe or pigeonhole—yet, all the elements which characterize the band’s punk and aggressive aesthetic are present (even if in unpredictable and surprising ways): barrages of delay and noise, wailing guitars, dancing frenzied rhythms, all culminating in a wild psychedelic journey that’s bound to reach one’s mind through the body while inebriating both.  “Deafkids is one of the most exciting bands I have heard in a very long time. They are a unique psychoactive journey of Brazilian polyrhythmic percussion, hypnotic chanting, and aggressive repetitive raw punk all echoing out from another dimension. Having had the blessed opportunity to play several shows with them in Europe and Brazil I can say that without a doubt, they are something new and mind blowing created from something old and primal.”  —Steve Von Till (Neurosis)

Mirrors For Psychic Warfare

I See What I Became

Neurot Recordings

It’s been three rough years since Mirrors For Psychic Warfare sprang into existence with their startling self-titled debut, but don’t think for a second that the time was spent idle, this unit (comprised of Neurosis’ Scott Kelly and producer Sanford Parker) constructed an even more unnerving and destructive record with I See What I Became, hard as it is to believe. Over the course of these eight bile-rich pieces a sonic abattoir is erected, exploited, and razed. Turbulence rises and churns giving way to rhythmic machinations, lights flicker, a grand mal / guignol seizure besets a frog-headed snitch, blood collects in a stainless steel gutter. Claustrophobic sudor that evokes all one holds dear from Skinny Puppy, Foetus, Godflesh, bath tub tina, and wondering where to sleep, provided one can. There’s nothing fun here, nothing but the cold of an autopsy followed by the heat of a crematorium. A sliver of galvanized bone flies from a circular saw into the toothless maw of a streetwalking Kali Yuga.

Christ On Parade

A Mind Is A Terrible Thing

Neurot Recordings

“Christ On Parade started in 1985, rising from the ashes of local bands Treason and Teenage Warning.  Like much of the punk music at the time, they had an intensely political edge and very serious lyrical approach. The “Peace Punk” scene of the early ‘80s Bay Area—typified by local bands like PLH, Treason, Trial, Crucifix, and Atrocity, and heavily influenced by British anarcho-punk—had a formative influence on many bands in the scene including Christ On Parade.  “The band coalesced into a unique hybrid of influences that could have only happened in the venue / living space that most of the members dwelled in, Emeryville’s New Method warehouse. At that time, a lot of the Oakland punks were into the almost “prog-punk” stylings of bands like the Subhumans, Santa Rosa’s Victim’s Family, and the darkly paranoid spasms of England’s Rudimentary Peni. Musicianship had become a virtue rather than a non-issue. This confluence of sounds and ideas, and the fact that the East Bay was awash with LSD in those days, led to the band’s classic album, A Mind Is A Terrible Thing.  “The album is a demonology of the dark undercurrent beneath the relentlessly inane and superficial ’80s. Noah Landis’s feral vocals and grindstone guitar spearhead the album with second guitarist Doug Kearney, bass player Malcolm Sherwood, and drummer Todd Kramer turning in an equal number of distinctive songs and performances. The result is brooding and angular, often catchy but never poppy. The production is raw, but this unvarnished...

Neurosis

Pain Of Mind

Neurot Recordings

“Pain Of Mind marks the inception of one of the weirdest and most powerful bands there ever was as they begin their odyssey through the sonic landscape: thirty-three years, thirteen albums and counting. These gritty punk songs bear little resemblance to what Neurosis would become, but the future was written here, and if you listen closely to these kids—barely out of high school at the time, you can hear their early influences: the guitars and existential anguish of Amebix and Rudimentary Peni, the passionate politics of Crass, the heaviness of Sabbath—and here, too, they lay the foundation for some of their enduring concerns: the pursuit of transcendence, and contemplation on the downward suck of despair. “As Ian MacKaye coyly suggests in the East Bay Punk doc Turn It Around, there are ‘a lot of holes to fall into’ growing up in the Bay Area. In 1987 Dave Edwardson was 18, Scott Kelly was 19, Jason Roeder was 16, Chad Salter, the band elder, was 21, and they had already fallen into many of them, including, of course, the great abyss of depression. Only a teenager could write the punk anthems ‘Black,’  ‘Grey,’ ‘Life on Your Knees,’ and of course the title track, ‘Pain of Mind.’ They are songs of survival. “With Pain of Mind, Neurosis sunk their claws into the hearts and minds of the East Bay scene like no one else. They were fucking dark, gazing right into the abyss and refusing to turn away. The cacophony of vocals...

CHRCH

Light Will Consume Us All

Neurot Recordings

Standing at a crossroads of light and dark, Sacramento’s doom quintet CHRCH wields epic, lengthy songs, massive low end and an occult vocal presence in a perfect blend of height and depth. They have been hard at work crafting their particular sound since late 2013. There is no image or campy gimmick to uphold, only the humble glorification of their fundamental musical elements. The band’s second full length, Light Will Consume Us All, carries with it the same quality of songwriting that caught the attention of fans worldwide on their first release, Unanswered Hymns (Battleground Records, 2015), a sprawling roller coaster of an album. Long form songs build and heedlessly dismantle as the band reaches sonic heights and beautiful plateaus. Severe, sometimes unrelenting, vocals contrast melodic singing; massive fuzz gives way to clean guitar parts. Building upon this unyielding foundation, this latest album continues the band’s narrative, traversing life’s epic journey of loss, reclamation and, ultimately, finding hope within the darkness.

Dark Buddha Rising

II

Neurot Recordings

Prepare the mind, the body, the deepest recesses of the soul: the black gates that Dark Buddha Rising opened a decade ago with I open further in 2018: the band’s II EP continues to twist spiritual gyres and follow calls from beyond.  For ten years, this Finnish band has convened in the now-famous Wastement—set below their home city of Tampere—to roil in the sounds of the underground, to meet dark spirits, to breathe in time with rhythmic pulses sent from the skies, the stars and the very dirt around. On its face, the band emits the blackest of psychedelia; deep down, theirs are sounds forged in the blue fires of the ancients—exhalations of gods, goddesses and demons alike. Of this new offering, V. Ajomo says: “To drain our sonic temple, we wanted to record the new material which was made for 2016 shows in order to proceed towards the unknown with open minds and hearts. After the cleansing, we initiated our chamber with ambient meditation and opened the portals of inspiration for our future work.” This EP sees the band returning to its purest incarnation: a three-piece rhythm section—J.Rämänen on drums, P. Rämänen on bass and V. Ajomo on guitar—and with J. Saarivuori on synths and M. Neuman on main vocals. “We have done a full cycle of the orbit and now is the time for gravitational slingshot towards the new dimensions in sound, deliverance and vision,” Ajomo adds.

Amenra

Mass VI

Neurot Recordings

***BACK IN PRINT ON VINYL!!!  Contrasts have always been deep and at the very heart of Amenra, who have been uttering prayers and holding masses for eighteen years. Tormented darkness has always coexisted alongside luminous beauty, and thunderous impacts instantly follow frail, delicate subtleties. Songs that engulf everyone in the world suddenly feel whispered inside a solitary womb. Mass VI is here, and more than any other album in the band’s past, it highlights those contrasts.   The eerie quiet of the first couple minutes of “Children Of The Eye” announces the coming storm, and the nine explosive, cathartic minutes that follow hold all the striking disparate emotions one expects from the band. This album is an emotional rollercoaster until its very last second, when “Diaken” abruptly ends at its very climax. Every band member is stretched to their physical limits throughout: Colin H. Vaneeckhout (vocals) puts in the performance of a lifetime, but he is inextricably intertwined to the guitar-work of Mathieu J. Vandekerckhove; Lennart Bossu expresses unimaginable weight, both physical and spiritual, as well as weaving melodies of the utmost delicacy; the rhythm section of Levy Seynaeve and Bjorn J. Lebon rumbles like a consuming thunderstorm or retreat to the shadows with flowing spontaneity. No love without pain. No life without death. No light without darkness. That is the conflict at the heart of the album and at the heart of what it means to be human, and this music wrenches that ambivalence out.  ...

Deafkids

Configuração Do Lamento

Neurot Recordings

Configuração Do Lamento is a sound riot, a trance-inducing cacophony, a body-shaking mix of percussive rhythms and bending guitars. The seventh album by São Paulo, Brazil’s Deaf Kids is harmful for the weak-minded. An experimental mile marker on the band’s journey, it is as treacherous on the ears as hypnotic to the mind. Expanding the band’s D-beat origins, these eight tracks vacillate between demonic fever dreams, orgies of acidic guitars and percussive taunting. Sometimes songs are not songs anymore, but assaults which clatter and hum like rough metallic windchimes in gale force winds.  The band was formed in 2010 in the industrial city of Volta Redonda / Rio de Janeiro as a solo fuzz-soaked blend of crust / D-beat before bass and drums were added. Seven years, seven releases, two European tours, gigs across Brazil and more than one hundred shows later, the band remains steadfast on a path of sonic mind control. Their releases explore different takes on the hypnotic rhythms that comprise D-beat. When the band moved together to São Paulo, they began to blend each member’s musical and aesthetic taste with a common interest in mesmerizing grooves and psychedelic rhythms from around the globe. They now produce overwhelming, sensory-driven dirges that carry a Brazilian (and Latin American) imprint. Deaf Kids is the legitimate bastard child of colonial chaos—trapped here and there, between both complementary and opposing worldviews, trying to balance the intensity and conflicted human condition.

Ufomammut

8

Neurot Recordings

8 is UFOmammut’s eighth album, comprised of eight tracks that flow into each other without interruption. This flow can also be seen when you tip 8 horizontally, thus it morphs into the lemniscate from algebraic geometry—∞—a plane curve that meets at central point, or more commonly known as the infinity symbol. A continuous stream of movement reflective of the uninterrupted nature of the album but also the continued togetherness of the essential elements of the band —Urlo, Poia and Vita— since the beginning of the band’s history in 1999. It must be stressed there is no singular pronunciation of the title, 8 is “eight” in English, “otto” in Italian, “acht” in German, “huit” in French, and so on. It is a continuous flux of music, a singular entity, which can be defined in micro-measurements by its eight satellite songs. Each song expands upon the one preceding it, unfolding into an exceedingly dense and malevolent journey, resulting in this being the band’s most extreme venture yet, with no permittance for breathing space in those forty-eight minutes.

Neurosis

The Word As Law

Neurot Recordings

On limited clear vinyl!!! “I still remember the first time I heard The Word As Law, shortly after it was released in 1990. From the first chords of “Double-Edged Sword” I was hooked—the sounds seemed to send some sort of powerful electrical current coursing through my body—and by the time the feedback faded out at the end of “Blisters” I was emotionally spent. I had never heard anything like it: it completely changed my understanding of three different musical genres—punk, hardcore, and metal. “The record blends elements of all three. There is the raw moodiness of punk. The ferocity and anger of hardcore. The musicianship and dynamics of metal. But the album transcends all those labels, in the process creating something utterly unique. “It hit me on so many levels. It spoke to the anger I had as a young punk, my sense that I was trapped in a dog-eat-dog world of relentless capitalist competition, my alienation from the broader society. But it also resonated on a deeper level. My father killed himself when I was a teenager, leaving me mourning, feeling as if I were surrounded by a thick fog of despair. This is not a happy collection of songs, but it played this incredibly positive and cathartic role in my life. Listening to it over and over, gave me an odd sense of comfort. I realized that I wasn’t the only person struggling with deep emotional turmoil and found myself slowly working through the anger and...

Harvestman

Music For Megaliths

Neurot Recordings

“Ruins, monuments, and ancient sites of worship are multi-sensory experiences—at once residues of the sacred, the parchment on which the passage of time has been inscribed and templates for imaginative reconstruction—spaces in which to invest and immerse, to trade your bearings for an inexhaustible state of transition. “Over the course of three albums, Steve Von Till has, under the guise of Harvestman, provided the sonic analogue, casting his net for what might have been and yet still be. Both a personal meditation and a tuning fork for the most ancient and enduring of resonances, his latest album, Music For Megaliths, further expands his journeys along the sonic ley lines that run between folk, drone, psychedelia, the ‘kosmische’ outposts of krautrock and noise: not as an act of eclecticism, but of divination, giving voice to an underlying continuity that binds them all. “Recorded over a period of several years in the dawn hours of creation, this album is an aggregation of moments and recordings that have allowed themselves to spell out a greater whole. Utilizing repetition, manipulation and modulation, it’s a hallowed frequency dial that ranges across the pulse-regulated drone of “The Forest Is Our Temple,” revving up like a generator powered by arcane currents, the blissful gaze of “Ring Of Sentinels,” the ominous waves of interference on “Sundown,” and “White Horse,” with its rite of dissolution and regeneration, nomadic and devout. Music For Megaliths is a crossing over, whose multiple routes are testament to a singular and sensuously dilated vision.”...

Neurosis

Fires Within Fires

Neurot Recordings

Of all that humankind has inherited through our ancestry, no single language has transcended every age as powerfully as music. For those few who channel that inheritance of sound today, none wield its command and authority like Neurosis. Showing their discontent with convention from the very beginning, Neurosis revealed what would become an instinct for transformation in sound and scope. With each release, the sound became interchangeable with vision. A vision of the conscious and unconscious coexisting in an audial spectrum that challenged not only the constraints of what listeners expected but of the listeners themselves as beings. Over the collective’s past ten albums, Neurosis have invited listeners to join them on the path their music carved. Going beyond the remarkable, they became unforgettable. Throughout the last 30 years, the band has relished the unpredictable and embraced the unknown possibility of where the music was capable of taking them. Neurosis takes their most dominant step yet with their eleventh full-length, Fires Within Fires. Three decades in the making, striking their signature balance between light and dark, beauty and repulsion, this latest album gives due to its predecessors while progressing forward into the unfamiliar and formidable. Featuring exquisite album artwork from the renowned Thomas Hooper and the stellar recording work of the group’s longstanding engineer Steve Albini, Fires Within Fires is at once a beautiful and forbidding work of mastery. For members Scott Kelly, Steve Von Till, Jason Roeder, Noah Landis, and Dave Edwardson, the album is a welcome companion to...

Alaric

End Of Mirrors

Neurot Recordings

End of Mirrors is the new album from Oakland’s Alaric. Operating at height of their powers, the quartet delivers a claustrophobic, gloomy, epically grandiose work. Shane Baker’s lyrics are deeply personal and universal in scope. They reflect hard times in a fallen world at a time of monumental change in the lives of the band members. These are emotional and deeply physical journeys; inky, blackened stuff, but not without a glint of hope. It could be moonlight shining through a crack in the wall or maybe just a sickly glow visible out of the corner of one’s eye. Jason Willer pummels the drums, driving forward with power and finesse, and then dropping down into a roiling boil of tribal toms. Bassist Rick Jacobus’s woozy but solid lines carry the melody while filling out the sonic space with riding drone notes. “I am going for a ‘sheets of electric rain’ guitar sound,” says guitarist Russ Kent, a master of his craft. He creates scintillating, cascading moments of beauty that open into crushing and aggressive distortion.  As with their previous efforts, the new LP was recorded and mixed by Skot Brown at his Kempton House studios. Brown’s contributions have been crucial to realizing the vision of the band, expanding on its creepy and complex soundscapes while giving the songs a chance to breathe and shine with exceptional clarity. The band also enlisted the sound artist and experimental electronic musician Thomas Dimuzio to contribute his unique atmospheric investigations to End of Mirrors. Dimuzio...

Mirrors For Psychic Warfare

S/t

Neurot Recordings

Scott Kelly (Neurosis) and producer / engineer / sonic warlord Sanford Parker are restless. While the two already work together in Corrections House, a project that also features the talents of Mike IX Williams of Eyehategod and Bruce Lamont of Yakuza, this inquietude has culminated in another collaboration.  Where Corrections House is hell-bent on impersonal bludgeon and unfettered terror, Mirrors for Psychic Warfare are far more restrained. The band’s haunting self-titled debut is the sonic manifestation of insomnia, complete with the tossing, turning and perennial dread that comes with facing another shabby daylight. These five pieces lurch and pulsate across a desolate landscape with a curious obsessiveness. Mirrors for Psychic Warfare may remind some of the best releases on the classic Cold Meat Industry label, but the familiar Kelly- / Parker-isms scattered throughout give the album its own identity. The work has more in common with a fever or a fitful wraith than a simple record. Mirrors for Psychic Warfare was realized and recorded by both Kelly and Parker at Actual 13 Studio and Hypercube over the course of 2015. The record was mixed and mastered by Parker.

Body, The & Full Of Hell

One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache

Neurot Recordings

Since their inception in 1999, massively prolific Arkansas band The Body has refined an uncategorized and unmatched sound. The duo writes and acts as one—a deafening wail against a failing species. Full of Hell was formed in 2009 in Ocean City, Maryland. With a similar ethos, the band is prolific and relentless, ever challenging themselves, channeling influences from across the spectrum of extreme music into a nihilistic wall of oppressive sound. Both acts are unstoppable tour machines, and in 2015 joined forces for a massive North American campaign. Recorded amidst the chaos at Machines With Magnets in Providence, Rhode Island, One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache is the debut collaborative work by the two likeminded artists.

Corrections House

Know How To Carry A Whip

Neurot Recordings

The long-anticipated sophomore full-length from Corrections House is darker, denser, and more despairing than its predecessor Last City Zero. This 45-minute audio apocalypse was captured by the band’s own Sanford Parker (Minsk) and recently institutionalized minister of propaganda, Seward Fairbury, in Vietnam. Boasting a guest appearance by Negative Soldier, Know How to Carry a Whip finds features the fiery lineup of Parker, Fairbury, Scott Kelly (Neurosis), Bruce Lamont (Yakuza) and Mike IX Williams (Eyehategod) at their most punishing, painting electronic mosaics of deviance and decadence with brushes made from bristles of the damned. Immersed in experiences of longing and loneliness from the depths of their creators’ collectively decaying hearts, each of the nine movements reveals a new, unsettling sentiment of danger, paranoia and looming defeat. An underlying theme of confinement and release bridges each track. Distorted, static-sodden and tribal, entwined around Williams’ unassailable manic street preacher prose and intermittently juxtaposed by the smooth, cradling sounds of Lamont’s lingering saxophone, Know How to Carry a Whip is at once glacially devastating and metaphysically cathartic. “The music is simultaneously suffocating and freeing,” expounds Kelly, “but it also has the energy of a whirling dervish.” In a rare, lucid transmission from the mental facility in which he currently resides, Fairbury further elaborates on the production. “The songs typically originate from the loops and beats generated from Sanford, then the skeletons of riffs are built by Scott and Bruce. Mike IX adds his profound observations and I do the final production. These new songs...

Kowloon Walled City

Grievances

Neurot Recordings

“All your grand plans and gritted teeth / All your pride / They’ll cut you down to count the rings / Measure out your worst years.” The strings rattle. The guitars crackle and blister. The notes ring out, at turns bleak and beautiful—sometimes both at once. Grievances, the third album from Kowloon Walled City and their first for Neurot Recordings, finds the San Francisco band at its artistic peak, having moved even further from its sludgy, post-hardcore origins toward a sparser, sadder yet still de-tuned heaviness. This shift began with 2012’s critically successful Container Ships, which Lambgoat described as “spacious” and “mildly hypnotic,” with a “Shellac-like use of dead time and instrumentation,” and The Obelisk called “cerebral in approach.” On Grievances, the band takes these elements to even greater extremes. Guitarist Jon Howell’s unusual chord changes and discordant aesthetic channel Unwound and Slint. Bassist Ian Miller’s gritty bass adds a surprising layer of depth and melody, while drummer Jeff Fagundes’s drums resonate in what sounds like an impossibly large room. Vocalist and guitarist Scott Evans’s shouted vocals are raw with frustration and disappointment, but without the typical veneer of macho aggression. The concept of work forms the thematic foundation of the entire record, from the cover art to the title and the lyrics. Whereas previous Kowloon Walled City releases were largely inspired by the band’s hometown of San Francisco, Grievances focuses its attention on the complex relationships with work and the power one’s employment—and employers—has over us.

Dark Buddha Rising

Inversum

Neurot Recordings

Since their 2008 debut Ritual IX, the ensemble known as Dark Buddha Rising has mastered its craft album by album, show by show. Ominous riffing, colossal doom, swirling psychedelia, repetition, repetition, repetition. The recipe is carved in stone, yet it leads to different endings—or bottomless shafts. Tension, tension, tension, lunacy. Inversum, their fifth studio full-length, is the opening of the Third Cycle of Dark Buddha Rising. It acts as an initiation for the new members V. Vatanen (guitar, vocals) and J. Saarivuori (keyboards), and is the first release through Neurot Recordings. Most of all, Inversum is the first album recorded, produced and mixed by the band themselves in the depths of the Wastement, the asylum of eternal feedback.  The process that led to the manifestation of the Inversum, heavily guided by both intuition and determination, takes the band’s musick further down its chosen path. Inversum is a monument built upon the foundation of their past work and is sculpted with the initial principles of Dark Buddha Rising to celebrate the Black Arts of Psychedelia. Hold tight. The winds are gathering.

Von Till, Steve

A Life Unto Itself

Neurot Recordings

LP REPRESSED!    A Life Unto Itself is as much the name of Steve Von Till’s fourth solo album as it is a perfect description for the 25-plus years he’s spent forging, with his brothers, the incomparable musical force that is Neurosis—not to mention the numerous sonic tapestries he’s woven with Tribes of Neurot and under his alter ego Harvestman. One can hear that deep musical history, and all the life experience that goes with it, on A Life Unto Itself.  As with his previous solo works, Von Till’s weathered, distinctive voice and sparse acoustic guitar provides the foundation. Quiet and subdued for the most part, these songs still evoke vast emotional power as Von Till’s raspy whisper dives deeply inward and speaks of visions, memories and self-reflection in a way both seasoned and exposed. While his last couple albums took on a more traditional approach with respectful nods toward Americana and Celtic ballads, A Life Unto Itself ventures into a wider variety of sonic landscapes, often borrowing from the rural psychedelia of Harvestman, weaving in strains of vintage synth and electric guitars.  Von Till was assisted in creating the album’s myriad textures by viola master Eyvind Kang, pedal steel wizard J. Kardong and percussionist Pat Schowe, all under the supervision of engineer and producer Randall Dunn, with whom he recorded and mixed the album at Avast! Recording Co. in...

Ufomammut

Ecate

Neurot Recordings

Ecate is the seventh album from Italian power trio Ufomammut and is named after the ancient Greek goddess of the three worlds: The World of Humans, The World of the Gods and The World of the Dead. Throughout the centuries, her powerful figure has transformed in shape and meaning. As were many pagan deities, Ecate came to be viewed as a negative entity associated with witchcraft and black magic by the Christian church.  Ecate is composed of six separate tracks, each one a representation of the deity’s many manifestations. An evolution in terms of its composition and song structure, the album takes the epic nature of the trio’s last Neurot release, ORO, and distills it into something more concise and aggressive. The band continues to expand upon their previous works by infusing them into Ecate, giving the past a new form. One of the most potent and powerful doom artists in existence, Ufomammut continues to captivate the masses, and the band’s worldwide grasp grows wider with each release.

Brothers Of The Sonic Cloth

Brothers Of The Sonic Cloth

Neurot Recordings

***REPRESS ON ORANGE RED AND BLACK SPLATTER COLORED VINYL*** With a long-held reputation for some of the heaviest music from the the Pacific Northwest, Seattle’s legendary Tad Doyle (formerly of Tad, Hog Molly) delivers his strongest songwriting and playing to date with his newest band Brothers of the Sonic Cloth. This powerful trio of musicians—Tad on guitar / vocals, veteran bass player Peggy Doyle and drummer Dave French (the Annunaki)—present their long-awaited debut album on Neurosis’s own Neurot Recordings. Brothers of the Sonic Cloth bring together the collective and extensive musical histories and experience of the three members in the worlds of punk, hard rock and metal. Recorded at Robert Lang Studios and Doyle’s own Witch Ape Studios in Seattle and mixed by Billy Anderson, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth’s self-titled full-length consists of five immense songs, with two bonus tracks on the CD. The record opens with “Lava,” an ominous eruption of riffs forged from deep within the Earth, and continues on this path throughout; a mammoth, relentless spirit on a timeless journey. This album is as much a persistent, thudding body-punch of sonic destructive force as it is a thoughtful statement of awareness of the inescapable raw condition of life.

Ides Of Gemini

Old World New Wave

Neurot Recordings

In May of 2012, Ides of Gemini unveiled their debut full-length, Constantinople. Its mere existence was a triumph for the three band members—Sera Timms (vocals / bass), Kelly Johnston-Gibson (drums / backing vocals), and Jason Bennett (guitar / backing vocals)—but other folks had some nice things to say about it as well. Spin called Constantinople “Processional doom, [with] ethereal female harmonies and high-strung riffs [that] incite head-bowing, not -banging.” The learned scholars at MetalSucks chimed in with, “Their accretion of small musical gestures inverts metal’s normal use of space. They imply terror without ever exposing it. Each song is an accumulation of outlines, a sort of sonic daguerreotype.” In the fall of 2012, Ides of Gemini played a pair of shows with Old Man Gloom before embarking upon a European/UK tour that kicked off at Germany’s South of Mainstream Festival and saw the band play direct support to Saturday night headliners The Obsessed—and later to a full house at Holland’s Incubate Festival. In January of 2013, Ides of Gemini had the honor of opening for their labelmates (and label bosses) Neurosis at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles. A month-long North American tour as sole support for the anonymous Swedes of Ghost B.C. followed in the spring. This incredibly successful journey across the continent coincided with two new Ides of Gemini songs on Hexagram 45, a special Record Store Day 7-inch released via Magic Bullet Records that had to be repressed before it even came out due to overwhelming...

Yob

Clearing The Path To Ascend

Neurot Recordings

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Received an 8.2 rating from Pitchfork.  Two years after leveling the expectations of critics and listeners alike with Atma, doom powerhouse YOB unleashes Clearing the Path to Ascend, an aptly titled album for what will undoubtedly be the trio’s crowning achievement. As is the YOB way, the tracks here don’t simply offer a vacuous glimpse into the already riff-soaked doom genre—they demand the tandem attention of mind, body, and soul. True ascension requires a destruction of the barriers that prevent movement onward. Unsurprisingly, YOB pummels any and all obstacles with absolute authority, clearing the way for a genuinely visceral listening experience, the culmination of a musical journey approching two decades in length. YOB’s music is not unlike the path that’s led them to their current place among heavy metal’s elite: slowly building from a hushed ethereal vapor into the thunderous and masterful tumult of sonic domination. The ethereal mists of Eugene, Oregon, no doubt provided the perfect catalyst for founding member and vocalist Mike Scheidt to call up the signature of surging doom that has earned YOB its current position as one of the most respected and revered bands in all of heavy metal. While giving due credit to cornerstone influences such as Cathedral, Sleep, Electric Wizard and Black Sabbath, YOB defines a sound wholly singular and utterly devastating in its cathartic enormity.  The echoes of progressive rock and drone that have underscored YOB’s music on past releases are fully realized on Clearing the...