Back in stock, and now at a much lower price...

I didn't even know that Utech had released this disc until we ordered a bunch of their back catalog titles last month - as it turns out, the Calcination disc has become one of my favorite releases from the label, a time-devouring hybrid of Earth-en dronemetal and glacial free-jazz that pushes all of the same buttons that that killer Klangmutationen album did that Utech put out, while caving my skull in inna whole new way.

Who the hell is this band? I looked around online for information on them, but came up with little. The album was recorded in Berlin and I'm guessing that Calcination is German, and the minimal liner notes on the inside of the sleeve for the disc shows two members, one named Antoine Chessex, the other Ktho Zoid. The instrumentation belies how massive this album is: tenor sax, electronics, and guitar make up the palette for Calcination's sound, which on the surface appears to be another variant on the ever-popular Earth/Sunn brand of abstract droneological ambient sludge. That notion gets obliterated pretty fast once you really dig into this album, though; the three tracks ("Shadows", "Chystka", "Let 100 Flowers Bloom", which may or may not be derived from the Maoist slogan) wash over you in huge black waves of sound, dense swirling tidal waves of droning feedback and howling amplifier buzz, guitars twisted and throttled into shrieking high-end drones that sound alot like Matt Bower's amp-skree in Total, but soaked into goliath slabs of hovering doom-riff that is stretched aout into infinite roaring drones, very much like Earth 2 but even more static and unmoving, and entwined with passages of Lustmordian ambience and weird, squiggly guitar. These guys are crafting some really heavy shit as it is, but once the sax enters in and starts scraping the stratosphere with upper register squeals and heavily delayed bleats like some post-Ayler freakout shot into deep space, this takes on a whole different hue. An immense lightless abyss of crushing formless amp-blast and tortured reeds formed into monstrous drones with an overwhelming gravitational pull. Awesome. One of the best titles that Utech has brought to us, and highly recommended.