Artist: Voidwards
Title: Bagulnik
Type: Album
Label: Aesthetic Death
This is actually the debut Voidwards album I believe. I guess you would probably call them ‘extreme doom’ perhaps but Bagulnik is so extreme it borders on ambient. Its… dark. It crawls along at Corrupted pace and it clings. It’s also difficult to review hence the legnth but I feel it deserves it.
What we have here is a journey and a soundscape in just under forty minutes and two passages. It is inspired by the diary of one Ilya Perfiliev from 1900 and the tale of a Russian town whose inhabitants began to experience many mental health issues of insomnia, depression, fear and suicidal actions. They blamed, strangely, ‘the outskirts of the town’. This album includes the odd field recording from the band’s visit to the location.
There is a grit to the slow, dragging sound, the crippled riff that hauls itself through the first passage. Electronics swirl in the background but there is a strange sense of place to the ambience – desolation, the air of a swamp, a true sense of… well I guess unease. If there was a soundtrack to Algernon Blackwood’s classic and still disturbing ‘The Willows’ it might sound something like this. It’s as though I am on an island, surrounded by murky waters and skeletal trees guarding my prison and though there is nothing I can see it still is as though I am surrounded. And what surrounds me is nothing good, nothing that should even be.
The second passage if anything has perhaps a little more direction as though pulling me somewhere, or whispering actions I might commit. More distinct steps maybe suggested by the bass, the more involved drum sounds. The vocals move closer to the forefront. It becomes as though something is coming into being and it is not good. There is nothing good here. Slowly, inevitably, it drags you into its own world and then…
Well.
As I said. Nothing good.
This is a strange, difficult and uneasy work. It is for those times when, for whatever reason the atmosphere needs to hem you in and slowly close off the world. Not for everyone, no, but it is such an good debut and if extreme doom and tar thick ambient are your thing well, here you are. Turn it on, grab a copy of ‘The Willows’ and sink into it.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 