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That Australian black metal/industrial artist Nekrasov incorporates the aesthetics of harsh noise into his miniature holocausts of hellish speakershred isn't news to anyone who has been following his body of work over the past few years. From the beginning, Nekrasov's mechanized black blasts and sprawling abyssal soundscapes have been infested with the most caustic forms of electronic abuse and frequency terror. But starting with the extremely limited disc In Solitude And Darkness, The Last Step Is Made that came out on Void Séance last year, Nekrasov has now also started to work with the rigid aesthetic of the "wall", sculpting brutal, immersive infernos of extreme static noise that are reminiscent of Vomir. The mindset is certainly similar; going for extremely long unbroken tracks of churning high density distortion that remains unrelenting and unchanging, Nekrasov's efforts in HNW drag me down into the same sort of depressed, lightless Zen state that the French master is so adept at invoking. This is no small feat.
In Solitude was a successful first effort in the field of HNW from the artist, and now follows that with a new two-disc set called The Ever-Present that we have issued on our Crucial Blaze sub-label. This set offers more massive black walls of rushing static noise, with two half hour long pieces on the first disc, and a single monolithic track on the second disc that stretches out for over an hour. Each of these tracks is formed from varied frequency levels and different approaches to texture, shifting in tone and extremity as the listener moves from one track to the next, but it all flows together rather seamlessly as an exercise in intense, super heavy trance-blast. In addition, deep listening reveals myriad sonic events and nuked drones that swarm deep within the maelstrom of The Ever-Present, and the monolithic "III" in particular ventures into more detailed regions of noise where fragments of grinding rhythmic clank, smoldering static riffs, and howling blackened melodies can be heard buried underneath the roaring inferno.
It's the the heaviest slab of "pure" noise work that we've heard from Nekrasov so far, that's for sure. Fans of the band's more "black metal" centric work are warned that when we describe this as a noise album, we're not kidding. But for fans of HNW and Nekrasov's more abstract industrial side, The Ever-Present is a crushing experience. The two discs are packaged inside of the clear dvd-style case like all Crucial Blaze titles, and include a sticker, 1" pin, and a twenty-eight page zine filled with black and white collage art, with murky, inky visions of all-devouring blackness, carcinogenic landscapes, cathedral-like tumor masses, amoebic growths, and Watchers from behind the shadows. Hand-numbered and limited to two hundred copies.
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