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Abruptum > Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectère Me > Reviews
Abruptum - Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectère Me

Avant-garde Black Metal Terror - 90%

Slater922, July 6th, 2023

Abruptum is a Swedish metal band that originally began playing death metal, but in the early 90s, would switch their sound to black metal as the genre would began to gain some steam in the underground metal community. It was also during this time that the band would be signed to Euronymous's Deathlike Silence label and would release their first album under the label in 1993 titled "Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectère Me". And unlike most other records from DSP, this one stood out for all the wrong reasons...

The album consists of only one 50 minute track that is split into two parts, though that doesn't matter anyway since both parts are very similar in style. For most of the album, we hear all kinds of instrumentals played. There's a guitar riff that plays slow, droning blackened riffs that sound as though they are playing forever. The drumming is also pretty erratic, playing a variety of tempos and beat patterns that switches on a whim, only adding to the chaos. To top it all off, there's a dark ambient piece and some noise elements thrown into the mix as well, effectively wrapping the whole thing up in a mix of noise and chaos. Even in some of the more "slower" moments on this album, such as the first few minutes of the second part, everything still sounds are erratic and insane. The overall atmosphere is dark, chaotic, and outright disturbing, and the noise and experimental elements help make this atmosphere stronger. Thus, I would actually argue that this DSP release is the most "evil-sounding". Not that the other albums aren't scary or anything, but while they focus on sounding mean and aggressive, this one is evil in a sense as though you're exploring the dark, distressing underbelly of hell. The instrumentals might be over the place, but together, they form one intense atmosphere.

But that's not even half of it. While much of the instrumentals are credited to Morgan Håkansson of Marduk, it's IT's vocals that really bring out the intensity of the album. While most black metal shrieks at this time were pretty intense, IT's vocals went all out on the insane portions on the shrieks. As the track goes on, the vocals utilize a vast amount of echoes and effects, toppled with the use of additional growls and screams. Not only does it increase the psychotic tone of IT's voice, but also adds to the unpredictable nature of the album, as the vocals can sometimes appear out of nowhere, and you don't really know what IT is saying. The vocal performance on this album are incredible, and would go on to set the standard for the vocals on future Abruptum records.

"Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectère Me" is certainly more than an acquired taste. Given the improvisation and avant-garde nature of the album, it could take a while to truly suck yourself into the chaos. But once you do, I can assure you that this album will take you to dark places that most black metal albums of the early 90s don't dare to go near. Though the band has released more albums similar to this, I still consider this debut to be the strongest of this type of black metal.

Darkness wins - 100%

Demiror_Moritur, February 22nd, 2019

I’ve had a hard time deciding to review this masterpiece because I find whatever I say about it won’t match my feelings for it, as it is such a unique and original release for the black metal genre that there’s nothing to compare it to or no guidelines for me to properly value it in context with anything else.

“Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectère Me” is one of the most authentic creations to come from the black metal scene, and nothing before or since can compare. This is, simply put, as dark and as evil as sound can get condensed into over 50 minutes of pure cacophonous chaos. Truly an album worthy of being on Euronymous’ label, as no band I can think of ever reached this level of extremity and occultism in their outings. Frankly, I don’t think it’s even possible to do so. Every single element of this release contributes to the massless, seemingly formless body of chaos that envelops and flows as a spiraling black hole sucking in everything in light.

The never-ending, seemingly random, piercing, anguished screams make for a demented atmosphere throughout the whole album, and I can only imagine this is how it feels like being surrounded by tormented and tortured souls in the pits of the depths of hell, desperately screaming in anger, disgust, and pain. Therefore, you can’t even refer to the vocals as that, since they aren’t. The only “vocals” you get are maniacal, crazy, lamenting utterances. This is noteworthy because it really sets the atmosphere of the whole record. This is not something you can simply leave playing in the background while you do something else or pay no mind to it. This album will inevitably grab and hold on to your mind and punish it with relentless suffering and malicious darkness until you get to understand and comprehend the plane of malice on which these sounds exist and come from. IT, a demonic genius, handled these devilish groans and shrieks, and vocals that evoke this strong of a feeling of misery and despair can only be heard in some Mayhem releases, exclusively. No band took it this far, and that’s one of the multiple reasons why this record is superior.

On to the songwriting itself, also handled by mastermind IT, the record is composed of two tracks, namely “Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectère Me (Part I)” and “Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectère Me (Part II)”, the former being 25 minutes and 31 seconds in length and the latter being 25 minutes and 28 seconds (30 seconds in my version) long. This grants a perpetually exhaustive, grave continuation of the dark satanic atmosphere on the record, and the compositions being this long show the intent to further the dreary feeling of distraught and pained disgrace. Both tracks each feature a similar atmosphere and a continued particular (a)tonality, as random and thoughtless as the inclusion of the instruments and noises seem. Part of the brilliance of this record lies in the ability to make something coherent in its message and intention out of unadulterated, unfiltered chaos. It's important to mention how every time one listens to this record a different experience can come of it, as the compositional elements are so rich in the mix that depending on what strikes a person when being exposed to this, the experience can vary widely. This again proves the compositional mastery that successfully and (dis)gracefully formed this creation.

The guitars on this record, handled by Evil, sound very strident, down-tuned. They take up a huge space in the mix but not in an overpowering manner, but in a brutal, noisy, dissonant way that further the chaos and directionless, dangerous aggression of the album. They have a very menacing, atonal, perilous vibe to them that plagues the soundscape, and the notes seem to strike at times when some either screams or noises are coming in, accentuating them or drowning them in tense reverb that makes the aura of the music seem rough, malignant and constantly keeping up the shameless intensity of the record, never letting up and constantly reinvigorating the evil glow of the messy arrangement of distorted, cursed sounds.

The drums, much like the guitars, seem everything but constant, and show up in the mix to accentuate certain passages or to increase the ugly atonality of some instances. There are actually some patterns to them throughout the album, but they’re irrelevant in the mix overall, as everything is jumbled together in an infernal stream of noise that sets up the malefic aura in an unstoppable hellish orchestral conjunction.

The noises are one of the most chaotic elements, and you can hear a wide variety of them throughout more than 50 minutes of running time. They’re varied, different, weird, strange. They mix a lot of different types of noise that evoke images of everything unholy, primitive, dark, deadly, satanic, and mortal. Playing the album is akin to setting yourself up in the middle of nowhere, sometimes sounding middle-ages-like, at times even further back in time, surrounded by godless creatures that scream and bang things in an almost prehistoric way; the truly dark and almost non-human corners of the human race being presented in what could be defined as a viciously classy exercise in disgust and satanic perversion. There’s a very disturbing choir of what would otherwise seem holy at the end of the second track on the album that closes it on a very classic note, proving classic artistry went into the making of this album, as everything makes sense once it comes to an end and you look back at the end result, realizing what’s been left in your head is darkness translated into sound that, as pointless as it might seem at any given moment, is perfectly and very intentionally composed and orchestrated.

The only thing left to say for this particular review is that with this full-length Abruptum reigns supreme as the darkest, most evil band to have ever existed in the black metal genre, and that was only further evidenced by the following albums. Darkness It’ll Be.

The End of (metal's) history? - 60%

we hope you die, September 19th, 2018

Mischaracterising the Cold War’s end as the end of history has since morphed into an amusing theoretical anecdote; a historical touchstone for our own turbulent age; as if desperately exploring every aspect of the early 1990s will provide clues to our future. For underground metal however, a case can be made for our history’s end lying somewhere between 1990 and the turn of the century. The radical changes brought on by the internet are still chronologically too close to construct a long term historical analysis. One that explores the internet's effects on the natural evolution of musical styles. Or to put it another way; stuff is still happening (new bands forming, new releases, decent music), but the stories we use to understand said stuff have collapsed into analytical irrelevance.Releases like this contributed to this decay. The classic genre demarcations have gradually collapsed around us, so too have the benchmarks we we use to judge music.

Stockholm’s Abruptum started life as what could loosely be described as death metal with their debut EP ‘Evil’ in 1991. But then things took a turn for the freeform with the release of 'Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me'. Originally a duo made up of founding members ‘IT’ and ‘All’, the latter bowed out due to alcoholism. ‘IT’ then recruited ‘Evil’ *sigh* from up and coming black metallers Marduk. By the release of 'Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me' in 1993  Abruptum had devolved into a power noise project with black metal aesthetics. ‘IT’ daubed the obligatory corpse paint for photoshoots, and headed up The Satanic Black Circle, the Swedish equivalent of Norway's Black Circle. This – and the rumour that OAAM featured recordings of the band members self-harming – probably lent undue fame to this work.

'Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me' is made up of two tracks, each around twenty five minutes in length, each feature a distorted, droning guitar, drums heavily laced with reverb, a keyboard locked on a synth/string sound with the pitch-bender stuck in a state of flux, and agonised vocals. They are all playing separate pieces of….sound, and over the course of the fifty minute runtime they sometimes sync up to what could be described as coherent music. Of the actual sound nothing more can be said. So we are left to endlessly debate the legitimacy of this as art, and whether it deserves an audience. This recording was not supposed to be enjoyed, it is not background music even by our standards, nor is it (once the novelty has worn off) engaging enough to sit and follow as one would a well written piece of music. And something tells me its appeal as a late night soundtrack to occult rituals is limited.

So what’s it for? Few metalheads give it much credit in this day and age. However, I am sceptical of dismissing it as worthless noise outright. I have listened to this album a few times now, and each time my expectations are slightly different, and each time this affects the experience I am likely to have. For instance, if I go in expecting free form noise of varying intensity, I am surprised by how many and how long the passages are that could pass as coherent music…of sorts. It set a new precedent for where the boundary between really noisy metal and ‘noise’ proper should sit. Has it revolutionised extreme music? No, but it remains an interesting cultural artefact nonetheless. A reminder that even in the early 1990s metal was flirting with some pretty off the chain ideas long before Brooklyn hipsters shat their art theory all over black metal. Don’t write Abruptum off entirely however, Evil’s later solo ambient work with the name is worth a spin, as is 1995’s compilation of their early material ‘Evil Genius’.

'Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me' struggles to be more than the sum of its parts. The emotional and intellectual range it invokes in the listener does not extend much beyond ‘...urgh’. If extreme art is to make an impact, it has to contextualise itself in the familiar, i.e. the ‘not extreme’. It has to first offer rhythms and melodies that we recognise as such before removing them and delivering unadulterated abrasion.

Abruptum on the other hand, despite playing soft and hard, never vary the atmosphere or intent, whether pummelling or creepy, we are given very little ‘normal’ musical context to understand that what we experiencing is horrible beyond redemption. In short, we are left emotionally numb, and not in a My Dying Bride kinda way, but in a way that leaves no lasting impact on the listener after the album has played itself out. The fact that this goes on for fifty plus minutes adds to the obnoxiousness. It’s the equivalent of placing a 10ft by 15ft green square on a wall in the Tate Modern as opposed to a post-it sized green square. No more or less complex, but more demanding of our attention cos it’s like…made bigger….or like…recorded for longer. Nevertheless, give it a listen, it is an interesting deviation in metal’s history; maybe not the end of it, but certainly a signpost to metal’s post-modernity.

Originally published for hate meditations

Abruptum - Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectére Me - 100%

Avestriel, January 26th, 2013

It takes a lot of talent and a very clear mind to pull off a great joke. And as you might know, often times a truly great trickster holds a very serious, more self-conscious side to their craft which is only visible on fringe and scarce works. Such is, I believe, the case with most of Abruptum. The creators of the unexpectedly flawless tribute to trickery and self-parody that was Vondur's Striðsyfirlýsing (perhaps, and if you can stomach it, you should give my review for that album a light read before continuing reading this) make a case in favour of my aforementioned theory with their earlier and perhaps better known (for better or for worse) project, seemingly directionless and tryhard but undoubtedly experimental project Abruptum.

And what is, more or less precisely, the nature of this project? Well.... Let me put it this way: This is free black metal, or rather, improv black metal. All the elements that make black metal black metal are here, but they'recompletely free and semi-random, both structurally and performance-wise. They managed to distill the essence of the genre without making direct reference to them; without actually including them. I don't think, by my count, that you'll find more than five continuous seconds of blastbeats and/or tremolos. I don't think you'll hear any hint towards the Romantic period that influenced the second wave so much, nor the thrasy/crude death metal aura that defined the first wave.

This album and their subsequent efforts (excluding everything from De Profundis Mors Vas Cousumet onwards) are the only thing I could define as "noise ambient" without joining that awful trend of putting two or more words from different genres/subgenres/styles, both within and without metal together and call it a "new genre". Guitar, bass, drums, keyboards and black metal vocals are all here, performed in a chaotic, skin ripping and soulcrushing fashion; there is no proper rhythm or melody to be found, at least most of the time. To add to the "free black metal" description, I'll say that, If the more accepted definition of post-rock is "music performed with rock instruments that uses rhythms, timbres and structures not associated with rock music", then THIS, this is real post-black metal. Not black metal mixed with post rock nor adherent to second wave post-rock* sound aesthetics, but actual post-black metal. That which comes after it. That which truly offers a new sound to it without drifting away from it enough so as to be considered something else entirely.

But let us now be more specific. First I'd like to say that I picked this album as a representative of the bulk of Abruptum's offerings. Their early EPs and demos are no less radical and experimental**, but they're far from displaying the aspects I'm here to discuss. And I didn't choose any of this album's followups simply because this one came first and established basically all the elements that we'll find on subsequent albums. These reasons lead me to believe that this is their most significant release, even if personally I think their second full-length is their most "successful" (that is to say, accomplished within the mindset of the authors) and cohesive effort.

At first listen, years ago, I disregarded it as random noise, as a joke, product of bad taste and a poor sense of humour. I didn't pay much attention to it, perhaps because I was either expecting romantic and blistering second wave black metal, or a more streamlined, Nortt-esque form of funeral black metal. I was very new to music in general back then; inexperienced and far from knowledgeable regardless of genre, so I wasn't used to the more experimental sides of what I like to call guitar-centered music, but after years of exploring, studying and subsequently becoming enamoured with the more experimental and vanguardist examples of music from the last, uh, two hundred years I think, I came back to this band with fresher eyes and a wider worldview. Almost immediately I realised that these two silly swedes had (quite possibly literally) stumbled their way into a masterpiece of the genre.

The album consists of two side-long, ~25 min. tracks of pure, relentless black metal without actually including any passage, composition or hint that resembles the usual and seemingly non-negotiable elements of the second wave canon. So why call it black metal? Bear with me. Imagine the genre; imagine black metal as a painting or a sport or an architectonic structure or any other work of art for a moment. Imagine all the elements that make it what it is and make it not-something-else. That which both defines and differentiates something. Imagine everything from the foundations to the purely ornamental elements. Now take away everything. Take away the colours, the canvas, take away the foundations, the plumbing, take away the rules and the time, the signs and symbols, the materials and the process, take away the idiosyncratic elements of whatever particular architectonic style or discipline it represents. Leave only the naked skeleton, the ethereal and very much personal and often intransmissible body that occupies whatever work you've just disarmed in your mind right now, as long as you've been following me on this thought experiment. That which remains when the more earthly elements have been done away with, the hunger that preceded the cooking; the dream, the idea, the urge and itch that preceded creation. That is what you'll find here. The very essence of second wave, norse black metal distilled to its basic essence instead of its basic elements. This is Abruptum. The Ghost of Black Metal.

But it does go beyond the limits of the essence of the genre it thoroughly deconstructed back when it was still relatively fresh out of the oven (much like what PiL's First Issue or Wire's Pink Flag did to Punk Rock), because emanating from the bleeding cracks, the damp holes and the variety of festering wounds that this album displays like war trophies comes something else altogether. I hinted at the noise ambient idea earlier on because that's as close as words will get me from this massive gas giant that comes snowballing towards the listened from the first instant the album gives way to its meaty content. I'm talking about the kind of aural avalanche that sweeps both your ears and your perception of time. Something that affects you at a level you don't quite understand, like Coil's Time Machines or Tangerine Dream's Zeit. There is a very real phenomenon of time distortion within works like the ones I've mentioned in this paragraph. Something so massive and seemingly shapeless, endless and drunk on the elusive fruit of the Constant Present that is time, is bound to drag you with it, to the point where you cannot keep track of the passing minutes and everything becomes one huge, boundless Now with no visible horizon. That's possibly the strongest, or at least the more discreetly effective character playing its role on this album.

Quite obviously the final product was the result of a rather uniform mix of chance, hazard and premeditation, as there truly is an art in "organising" chaos (or at least swerving it towards the general area of your chosen path). But it's in that hazard where the final charm of this work lies. The reaction the metal community might have expressed towards this work, especially one as elitist and afraid of change as black metal seems to be most of the time, must not have been unlike the reaction the jazz community had in store for works like Coltrane's Ascension or AMM's AMMMUSIC. Seemingly formless, pointless, random noise performed by a number of musicians with no consideration for tempo, synchrony or their fellow bandmates' performance. Now, in the case of Coltrane, we know that's not the case. In the seminal free jazz album Ascension, we're treated to complexity that borders on ecstatic randomness but never quite crosses the line. In the case of AMM it's a mixture of said disregard for shape and tempo with a very tight and reciprocate performance, with each musician playing along with (and playing off) the other, even during the truly chaotic moments. In the case of Abruptum's Obscuritatem [...], we get a more explicit compromise with hazard. Being a duo, this shows not to be excessively problematic. It is very easy to perform chaotically and still retain some level of cohesiveness when it's just you and some other bloke. Now, whether this was intentional, the product of hidden genius and sudden revelation, or a happy coincidence, a completely unexpected successful byproduct of two men resolved to fuck around is certainly up for debate. But all evidence, both the daring nature, amazing end result and overall complex-in-its-simplicity-ness of Abruptum, and the razor sharp wit and completely self-aware parody of Vondur, all the way to the higher echelon of artistic-minded metal that is home to Ophthalamia, it is hard not to notice (and even harder to outright deny) the talent and potential these two entities that are IT and ALL possess, even if the latter only made it in this band as far as 1991.

Quick summary and conclusion: Within, around and surrounding this seemingly random mix of wailing distorted guitars which present no melody nor sense of continuation (nor solace), everchanging but engaging drumming which can go from a crawling funeral doom tempo to the rare bronze-saturated blastbeating to marching tempos and outbursts of what I hesitate to call "soloing" to the strange and sparsely distributed FX which includes keyboards and vinyl fuckery, to the dually echoing, decently ranged vocals, growls, shrieks, gargles, guttural deathly sounds, lies an essence that cannot be explained nor dissected, but only hinted at or alluded indirectly. This essence is the very extraction of that which most of us understand when we say "black metal". In this album, within this band, this essence is free of any and all restrictions, forms and conventions. This essence is plainly free. That is basically the gist of my fleeting point: This is Free Black Metal.





*Think GY!BE, Mogwai, DSMT and their numerous clones.

**Think funeral doom tempos applied to a mix of black and death metal that manages not to sound like either, nor like a very segmented, heterogeneous mix of both as tends to be the norm. Like a more distorted, heavier and overall darker version of the "dark metal" style pioneered by bands like Bethlehem, only some five years prior and with a more sinister, abysmal effect.

Stahanas Orchestra - 85%

Poe Ohlin, January 10th, 2012

When you think of black metal, the first bands that come to mind are Mayhem, Venom, Bathory, Celtic Frost, Darkthrone, and many others. One band you might hear of is a sort of obscure band named Abruptum. I say obscure because I doubt many people will listen to noise that makes you want to go out and murder. Abruptum is not music one little bit. It may feature instruments, but this is used to heightens the evil in your mind.

This album, titled "Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectére Me", is a very good example of that statement. The album is one 52 minute song, broken into two parts/tracks. Track one is titled Obscuritatem Advoco and track two is tiled Amplectere Me. Both of these songs are, as I said, in no way, shape or form music. You might hear guitars, bass, drums, and the occasional Latin, but the majority of the noise you hear is band members IT and Evil torturing themselves. This is like taking an acid trip on whatever Dante was on.

There really isn't much in this album to review because it is nothing but men being tortured with the background of guitars and drums. This is one of those things to not do alone or in the dark, let alone both as repeated listening can cause seizures, homicidal thoughts, as well as other bad things. On a lighter note, the artwork on the cover is pretty cool.

If you wish to hear what Hell might sound like, this the album to buy. It's fairly cheap and is available at your local Amazon.com, so follow the link on the side to one of the various sites. And once you buy it, listen, listen to the noise of evil.....

Evil Black Noise - 85%

Der_Vergawaltiger, December 11th, 2011

What we have here is the departure of Abruptum part one and with a dirty, bloody fist, Evil and It unleash Abruptum, the second and subsequent chapters. Let us look at what we have here: an album of noise, consisting of sludgy guitars, random screams, groans & yelps, strange sound effects & drums which seem to have no sort of obvious direction.

No one within the black metal circle was making this sort of music (if you can call it that?) and that had to be their unique selling point, for want of a better phrase.

Here is where they left behind the demos of old which were death like in their approach and started this pattern (which ironically, has no pattern) of noise. There isn't much to add that others before me haven't already described, but here, on their first full length, it is just that. Random noises, varied drumming, screams in a raspy or high pitched style. Some death like growls with reverb and added effects, all accompanied with sporadic guitars.

This is their finest moment and in my opinion, this is a fuck off in the face to people who think/say that music should follow certain rules to make it audible and enjoyable. I am not a fan of noise per se, yet I have always liked this album. I think the fact that this seems completely unpalatable to almost everyone makes it even more desirable!

I prefer their debut to the later releases as it's more grungy and filthy in its attack. It is relentlese and ugly and I can see exactly why Øystein Aarseth would've signed them to DSP. It stands for everything he believed in! Non conformist... It's not black metal as such, yet it signifies exactly what black metal used to stand for! An unacceptable form of metal, played for the chosen ears that can decify the beauty within!

To piss off EVERYONE you know, get this and play it loud! It makes no sense, which is why it's so good!

improvisational black/death metal - 88%

stonetotem, May 2nd, 2009

I find that Abruptum are an oft misunderstood band. On the one hand you've got raving fans declaring that they're the epitome of true evil, absolute audial torture and anyone who doesn't like them must fear Satan, and on the other hand you've got naysayers denouncing them as moronic, talentless and horrendously overrated. Well I think both are pretty much wrong. There are some other qualms I have with Abruptum's status in the black metal scene in general, most of all the fact that they get called black metal at all (which I blame primarily on their association with Euronymous and his Deathlike Silence label). Furthermore a lot of the hype surrounding this band is just annoying bullshit, such as the claims that the singer was actually being tortured and his screams are completely genuine, or that putting on an Abruptum album will make you go into a Satanic trance and kill everyone. I mean gimme a fuckin' break.

Anyhow... on their demos and the "Evil" EP (collectively the "Evil Genius" CD) they were essentially death metal, or black/death metal at the most. Their style at that point, while still bizarre and disjointed compared to many bands was still death metal at its core. For their first full-length release they went astray from any basic genre distinction. The only thing you could call it is improvisational black/death metal. And I mean completely improvised, I doubt any of this stuff had been written beforehand. The album is split into two roughly half hour parts rather than songs. Most often the album follows a basic structure in which a drum beat comes in (and I really like the recording on the drums, it's very powerful and primitive) and then a heavy filthy chord rings out over it, sometimes working into sections of basic heavy riffs and pounding drums, but often sinking into disarray. A great deal of the album is sunk into more minimal and purely improvised parts not resembling normal song structures. This is where most of the criticism of the album comes from. In these parts they'll play disjointed notes and chords and drum beats beginning and then falling apart or going into a blasting frenzy at random and stopping abruptly. The vocals are all over the map too, varying between lower death metal grunts, higher screams, and strange off-key chanting and moans. Everyone involved is just going into a frenzy, and it's something you will rarely find in any band associated with black or death metal that isn't emulating Abruptum. The sound production here is actually quite clean, or at least much moreso than one would expect for a cult early 90s "black metal" release. Played at high volumes the drums absolutely pound and in the heavier guitar sections it's quite a sound to be heard. Understandably, the problem many people have with this band is that rather than sticking to the more structured death metal sound of their earliest material they stray off into cacophonous improvisation for the larger part of their first three albums.

Abruptum is quite an interesting band, but fuck the hype and fuck the naysayers. For those who are into sick, heavy, filthy and disgusting mayhem it's just what the doctor ordered. That being said I understand the criticisms and why so many people would stray away from their first three full-length releases and prefer the disgusting death metal found on "Evil Genius". Also I should mention that this stuff being called "dark ambient" is a piss off. Dark ambient has just become a cop-out for anything different that's supposed to be related to black metal. Although admittedly their final album should probably be called dark ambient. But I don't like that shit.

The Audial Presence of Pure Black Tedium - 10%

Frankingsteins, October 1st, 2007

Disbanded Stockholm band Abruptum played a style of free-form black metal that predated later post-metal trends, and as such clearly has no idea how to go about it. One of the smellier releases to come from the respected Deathlike Silence Productions, owned by murdered Mayhem guitarist Euronymous and responsible for launching such notable black metal acts as Enslaved in the early nineties, Abruptum’s first album caters more towards avant-garde noise enthusiasts than black metal fans, entirely lacking the ambience or artistry that would have taken it to a much higher level, or made it anything other than an insult to the eardrum and cochlea.

Contrary to popular opinion, this fifty minute mess-around, split into two tracks for no reason other than to cater for the vinyl market (because, like, this would sound so much better if you bought the authentic 12”), is actually music, performed by the usual black metal instruments of guitar, bass, drums, keyboards and snarling voice, and grounded in regular rhythms and repeated riffs. It takes several minutes of listening to raise suspicion that something is awry, as the instruments slowly form themselves into something resembling the usual introductory song of an album evoking a dark atmosphere, but it’s more a realisation that the song is simply going nowhere than a reaction against an alienating avant-garde sonic extravaganza in the style of John Zorn. ‘Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectére Me’ is a seemingly improvised lengthy recording that goes absolutely nowhere and, despite its obvious intentions, fails to evoke any kind of atmosphere other than disappointed boredom and restlessness.

There are many bands, inside and outside black metal, that concern themselves with creating dark, mournful or hateful atmospheres at the expense of technical accomplishment, and many albums that succeed tremendously. Abruptum have the excuse of forming a relatively new (though inevitable) niche in the burgeoning black metal market, but I find it hard to imagine anyone being truly engrossed in this pointless, amateurish music, or finding it truly evocative of hell, hate and despair, which was clearly the band’s intention. Burzum’s compositions from the same era were long-winded and repetitive, but truly distressing and terrifying, as well as being damn catchy. Later bands such as Black Funeral released albums entirely composed of evil incantations and endlessly cyclical inhuman noises which I find similarly unpalatable, but at least provide something to go to sleep to (especially keeping fingers crossed for a nightmare). Even the most comparably boring and tedious album-length compositions of bands such as Monolithe succeed in dragging the listener into their depressing world for at least twenty minutes or so before ears start to itch, but I got bored of this far sooner, and loaded up a game of ‘Columns’ while the remaining forty minutes or so plodded on to an unsatisfying conclusion. The only real change is that IT’s vocals become more vomit-sounding towards the end, which is just unpleasant. The moans and yells allegedly record the band members cutting and injuring each other, the f***ing idiots.

IT and Evil (real names Tony Särkkä and Morgan Steinmeyer Håkansson, not that they’d want you to know that) mess around on their instruments with no sense of direction whatsoever, resulting in something weakly experimental when compared to things like Naked City, and too distracting to create or maintain any atmosphere or mental image other than two blokes in face-paint wasting time in a studio. Assuming that over-dubbing was necessary to layer all the instruments, it means they actually listened back to this and played along, at no point thinking, “hang on, this is just complete rubbish isn’t it? What the hell are we doing?” The sound quality is very impressive for such an underground release, making this seem like even more of a waste. Nothing is drowned out in the noise, and it accurately captures the changes of intensity as the drums and guitars speed into a brief fast section before getting bored and slowing down again, knowing they’ve got thirty or so minutes more of this crap before they can get back to playing ‘Super Mario World.’ There is one single piece of studio trickery employed in the form of arbitrary fade-out and fade-in sections that serve no purpose whatsoever, other than perhaps to give the musicians an undeserved break, and although this music is particularly suited to loud volume, the risk of anyone catching you listening to it will probably act as a deterrent. Unless of course, you’re seeking to cultivate a false sense of intrigue from your flatmates, hoping that listening to tedious noise makes you seem interesting.

‘Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectére Me’ was obviously intended as a revolutionary and rebellious album from stupid young Satanists that ends up sounding more like the contractually obligated filler churned out by more famous artists, Vangelis’ worthless ‘Beaubourg’ being foremost on my mind. Evil released a remastered version on his own BloodDawn label in 1999, but you shouldn’t by that either. It is rubbish.

unsurpassed evil - 100%

Mortifer_Hellfire, August 6th, 2006

Have you ever felt the compulsive need to slice your wrists or those of all the people around you? Have you ever truly gazed into the Abyss? Have you seen the crimson demon wings demanding utter obedience and urging your pathetic waste of flesh to commit unspeakable atrocities? This album gives me just that. From the very first second you get plunged into the darkest depths of Satan's Hellish empire. Darker than black and infinitly more bloody than all the gore bands combined, this is extremely wicked and unpleasant. The chaos and pain that It and Evil have put to tape is so vile that mere human words fail to describe the sheer evil that drips from my stereoset. All things unpleasant and distasteful suddenly become very rewarding. In this trip of blasphemy and intolerance all that is human gets stripped from your soul until there is a bleeding corpse left. Upon closer viewing you realize that the corpse is you. This album is pain, suicide, rape, torture, violence, intolerance, war, all things evil into one burst of negative emotions. There is no way anyone can review this album with a musical point of view. How can you give a musically based judgement on something that is not, nor tries to be, music? The rating above is simply a matter of taste. Very effective to be played at maximum volume in a completely lightless surrounding. It will truly kill your sanity.