Megaptera - Extended Chaos
Yup... It´s warm outside and it´s time for Kalteldur to subzero/cold-it-down it to the classics, to get back to those groundbreaking philosopher-stones which gave birth to whatever is happening today. As you all probably know, people are still creating independent releases. People are still doing death-industrial, dungeon synth, drone, dark ambient and still using those tags to whatever they are doing. It´s not that people are re-creating/repeating whatever they were doing in the old days, I see it more like a wild stream which (still) floats in all sorts of directions. In other words; Different styles and different people mingle more with each other than what they did in the older days. So let´s get back to those older days and check up... if they still are sounding good!. After exposing myself to the daily car drive in the morning (45 minutes) while listening to Eno/Byrne´s ´My Life In the Bush of Ghosts´, Megaptera would pop up into my mind along with my favorite with them. If you would ever ask me how the connection between the exotic, funky and sunbaked tribal elements of Eno/Byrne´s release and the horror/gothic-soundtrack ambiance of Megaptera came to be... I am not exactly sure. All I can say is that they both are timeless classics, which you can hear (nearly) every day for the rest of your life! So why is Megaptera such an evergreen? And why this release?...
Extended chaos works like a best-of compilation, but is, in fact, a re-release of their 1991 debut Near Death plus the mini-album/EP called Beautiful Chaos from 1998. On top of that, you get rare tracks which were featured on cult compilations like Death Odors and In The Butchers Backyard, not-released older material + 2 additional remixes. All this had been compressed down to a double-cd release from the label Autarkeia, hand-numbered and limited to 500 copies. Maintaining a good price on Discogs, but not all that pricey (25 euros excl. postage, worth every penny!). But available to all for 8 euros on Megaptera´s Bandcamp site.
For those who have missed-out on Megaptera (Or haven´t heard it before), I can then reveal to you that the band works/worked within the perimeter of heavy industrial/ambient-soundtrack-ritualism with borrowed sound-sources/samples from classic 70s and 80s horror-satanic movies (Exorcist, Warlock, Omen etc). Pioneered the modern sound of dark ambient and death-industrial, it is still being regarded as being one of the best post-industrial bands of the 90s.
The sky-high atmospheric dark-ambiance, perfectly executed martial/ritualistic and thumbing drum patterns, sacred and angelic funeral moods all submerged into lovely subversive apocalyptic undertones. Early esoteric-ritual music like Korpses Katonik meet up with a slowed down version of the metal bangings of Test Dept and Laibach (kind of).
People with different backgrounds in experimental music would and should love it. Fans of dungeon synth, dark-ambient, death-industrial, drone, martial, neo-classical you name it. All of these greats elements are there! So that would be my conclusion/reason as to why this remains a genius of a classic. It unites of all these styles/elements into one (un)holy matrimony of sound!. Do yourself a favor and hear it over and over again!.
Bandcamp: (official)
Discogs: (release)
Facebook: (official)