Along with that terrific new Attestupa album Musik F�r Tomma Rum, I also picked up one of the bands older records 1867 for the shop, which also features more of the Swedish band's mysterious mix of clanking ramshackle noise rock dirge, wintry blackened fuzz, and dread-filled atmosphere that feels as if it might have drained into the grooves of this record from some obscure 70's horror movie soundtrack. Featuring members of experimental noise outfits Sewer Election and Blodvite and taking its name from a mythical mountaintop in Nordic folklore from which the old and infirm would throw themselves to their deaths in an act of ritualized suicide, Attestupa's music manages to combine murky industrial creepiness and traces of black metal influence with their desolate, evil-tinged slowcore sound, which I described in my review of Musik as a cross between the gnarled necro-prog of German Oak, the low-fi melodies found on early Ulver records, and the cracked, gargling electronics of Throbbing Gristle. And let me tell ya, I've really been getting into this band's stuff as the season has been winding down into Autumn; everything surrounding Attestupa's music seems to evoke the approach of long, pitiless winters, the sounds filled with a sense of abject hopelessness, evoking visions of failed crops and the famine that follows. The title of this 12" EP is another reference to a period of frost-covered hopelessness, 1867 being the year that a punishing winter swept across Northern Europe and brought with it mass starvation that killed hundreds of thousands, and which hit Sweden in especially brutal fashion.
1867 opens with the song "Missv�xt", a clanking clusterfuck of screeching guitar noise and discordant power-chords being banged out in semi-slow-motion over a lurching backbeat, while a mountain of scrap metal and feedback and malfunctioning amplifiers crash down around the band. As with their other recordings, this has a weird, shambolic feel that in some ways reminds me of the demented sludge-rock of fellow Swedes Brainbombs, but all washed out and muted, the aggression almost totally diffused, the sound utterly and totally dejected. This particular record also shares some of the similar blackened misery found with some of those noise rock outfits on the Legion Blotan label like Lost Flood, blending together a similar fractured vision of low-fi scum-rock and raw, muffled black metal recording aesthetics. At the end of the a-side, the band wanders off into one of their creepy soundscapes of warbling tape-loops and nauseating locked grooves and squealing feedback, groaning voices circling in eternity, everything drenched in sweat and amp-filth. That leads into "Halshuggarnatten", another eerie industrial soundscape where ancient horror-movie organs creep beneath sheets of murky static, and ominous bass notes drift up out of the depths. After awhile, this too transforms into another murky, mangled dirge, the drums slowly emerging from behind that wall of static and hiss, a simple percussive pounding buried beneath waves of creepy blown-out melody that carry faint echoes of early Ulver in their utterly mournful murkiness.
The b-side is made up of the thirteen-minute "Storsvag�ret", a delirium of seasick synth and ghastly drones that waver over the sound of distant creaking, clanking metal, another amazing, ghoulish industrial soundscape that sprawls out for several minutes before erupting into one final blasted dirge, the whole band dropping in with another ramshackle noise rock anti-groove, the muffled fuzz-drenched guitar carving out doom-laden riffs beneath those moaning, incomprehensible vocals and haunted-house organs, like some bizarre cross between a Brainbombs jam and a fifth-generation cassette dub of an Hammer horror movie score that finally collapses into a heap of smoking, screeching mechanical loops and monstrous noise at the end.
As with everything else this band has recorded, this comes highly recommended. Limited to three hundred thirty copies, 1867 comes in a plain black DJ style jacket and includes a simple xeroxed insert.