The vinyl version of Asva's latest album is now in stock, presented in a gorgeous heavyweight package that unfolds into a six-panel gatefold, the jacket printed on heavy matte stock with spot varnish printing, and pressed on thick colored vinyl.

The second album from the avant-doom ensemble Asva (which features members of Goatsnake, Sunn, Burning Witch, Faith No More, and Mr. Bungle) is a moving piece of work on a couple of different levels. This follow-up to their stunning debut Futurist's Against the Ocean is even more abstract and arty, as much an experimental drone album as it is a monument to gravity-expanding doom metal, but more notably, What You Don't Know Is Frontier follows in the wake of the tragc 2005 death of Michael Dahlquist, a member of the Chicago band Silkworm and brother of Asva leader Stuart Dahlquist. That actuality imbues Asva's music with a new level of power and depth, as it states on the inside of the jacket for Frontier, this is "because of Michael". The four tracks presented here explore the band's brooding, droning art-doom with extended time-stretched riffscapes that, at their shortest, clock in at more than thirteen minutes, and each of these pieces feels like a meditation, the sound forming into densely blanketed expanses of rumbling, droning heaviness and epic buzzscapes. The band employs a variety of synths, wind instruments, percussion, vocals, and electronics alongside the immense downtuned riffage, but where you'd expect groove, or propulsion, there is instead a weird sort of stasis as each riff and carefully scored section feels pregnant with tension, moving through a intensely detailed terrain of percussive texture and finely sculpted low-end. While the music here is most defintiely crushing, this feels more cinematic than visceral, an epic doomscape formed from dramatic riffage, minimal droning organs, swirling clouds of metallic cymbal shimmer, flashes of Earth-like twang, densely layered feedback, haunting female vocals, chimes, more like an apocalyptic modern music piece than "metal", abstract, grandiose, and almost devoid of light. Heavy stuff in more ways than one.