Where in the hell did this split come from? I didn't even know that it was in the works until Selfmadegod told us about it at the beginning of November, and
there doesn't appear to be anything on the labels website about it's release. It seems that this hush-hush release was put together for the current
Nyia/Antigama tour. A pleasant surprise to be sure, as I've already been gushing over Antigama and their progressive, futuristic-sounding grindcore for
awhile now, and I can't get enough of their music. For this 9 song, 16 minute EP, Antigama are joined by their Polish tourmates Nyia, a band that I hadn't
heard previous to this, but one that has totally kicked my ass with a mere three tracks on show here. Yeah, Nyia is awesome, a complex, convoluted
kind of industrialized grindcore, with clean harmonized vocals alternating with fierce death metal screams; their riffs are impossibly spastic and angular,
contorting into everchanging forms over rigidly calculated rhythmic pummel and explosive jazzy beats. As crazy as it sounds, they approximate some weird
fusion of Gorguts' Obscura and Godflesh, and the result is a fucking mindblower than any fans of extreme experimental grindcore are going to blow a
fuse over. It's hard to believe that this band is made up of members of Vader, Yattering, and Prophecy, as this is completely and wholly unlike anything that
those bands ever did, but here we have it, an amazingly technical and brutal avant-grind assault, replete with guitars firing off alien dissonance, split
second tempo changes, blazing blastbeats, clean jazz breaks, and Meshuggah-ish mathy pummel. This is a band that I guarentee we'll be keeping an eye on, and
will be working hard to get everything else that they've released in stock here at C-Blast as soon as possible.
And having Antigama follow Nyia with six new tracks of their finely tuned avant-grind dissonance just makes this split an essential. The Polish killsquad
has been blowing my mind since their Discomfort album, blending sharp, angular riffing and cold industrial textures with ferocious grindcore and
detours into strange electronic soundscapes, and armed with the best grindcore drummer since David Witte. For real, Antigama's Krzysztof Bentkowski blows my
mind on a constant basis with his endless flurries of hyperspeed rimshots, bizarre backwards blastbeating and general percussive weirdness that sets Antigama
apart from every other grind outfit out there. Antigama open their half of this split with a sample from A Clockwork Orange and hurtle heafirst into
the churning grind of "Beyond Me", the lightspeed atonality of "Nature", and "Only"'s sheer accusational savagery. But then they drift off into a terrifying
electronic void in "Torture", a whirling nightmare of melted drones, klaxon blasts and tape-manipulated blastbats before coming back to the grind with the
deceptively catchy "ADV". They finally end with "The Trio Infernal", awash in bleeping computer tones and sputtering video game noises over a walking jazz
bassline and free jazz drumming floating in an echo chamber. If any band has channeled the experimental, adventurous spirit that Voivod demonstrated with
their classic Nothingface album, it's Antigama.
Beyond recommended, one of the finest avant-grind releases of the year. And it comes in an equally awesome package, the album art and booklet featuring
weird desert photos overlaid with metallic gold printing.