Just found a handful of copies of this out-of-print vinyl version of Gammelsaeter's stunning solo album Amplicon. released on clear vinyl in an edition of one hundred copies, with different artwork than the Cd version, this time prpduced by Gammelsaeter herself...

I'm sure Runhild Gammelsaeter needs no introduction to any of you hardcore doomfreaks. Singer for the short-lived but deeply influential doom metal band Thorrs Hammer (which also featured the pre-Sunn duo of Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson). One half of the mindblowing avant-improv-sludge duo Khlyst with James Plotkin. Cell biologist. Nordic chanteuse. And on her first ever solo album Amplicon, a purveyor of surreal electronic hallucinations, deconstructionist ambient sludge and avant-garde vocalizations that comes across like a mix of the abstract ambience of O'Malley's recent outings with Aethenor and KTL, and a freakish death-metal take on Diamanda Gal�s/Jarboe style vocal shapeshifting. I've listened to this disc at least half a dozen times already, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. Definitely some very challenging listening, but absolutely fascinating and immersive, too, in it's own bizarre way. The eleven tracks on Amplicon are more fragments of a larger whole, with recurring themes and sounds appearing throughout the album. The sound is centered around her voice as it gets contorted into all kinds of different forms, from monstrous death metal roars to gentle breathy folk melodies, deep liturgical chants to seriously fucked-up vocal processing, and set against a backdrop of damaged folk guitar, dark swirling drones, blasts of massive Sunn-esque ambient doom and deformed sludge-metal riffage, flutes, formless electronic blurt, airy music-box melodies, Rhodes piano, digital noise, elegiac pipe organs, and amplified recordings of a human heartbeat that's used as a percussive device in several tracks. All of this stuff is brought together (often in the same track) and creates a very bizarre, dreamlike atmosphere of random noises and damaged blackened heaviness...none of this sounds anything like a traditional "song", even when the rare musical element makes an appearance, instead this is an intense, highly detailed sound collage with Runhild's arresting voice always at the center of the proceedings.