Umesh Amtey Re-Presents Erebus Magazine

Umesh Amtey of Brown Jenkins and The Ash Eaters has restarted his blog Erebus Magazine.

http://erebuszine.blogspot.com/
 
You can also find it on Facebook

There's over 300 interviews, reviews and opinions in there to get into. Not only is the man a visionary black metal musician but he writes with laudable impiety on the vastness of all that encompasses the scenes of black and death metal.

The re-introduction to his blog starts HERE


The most recent article up is his full thoughts on the recent Ash Borer casette on Psychic Violence.

"If an artist doesn’t reflect his own life and strive to communicate his own emotions in his music do his creations have “value” in relation to musical tropes that relentlessly seek innovation and new mutations through the eye of novel, personal reflection? I don’t believe so. In relation to other concepts, tastes or desires for pleasure in music these creations of course have a different form of “value.” These concepts and tastes are in themselves entirely personal and subjective. This is why arguments about “value” in art are, at least in my opinion, almost completely superfluous as one tries to hint at or play with the seductive forces of what is, for most people, a concrete clarity and direction in a perceived objectivity. "

DOWNLOAD: The Ash Eaters - Cold Hearts

The Ash Eaters
Cold Hearts
Download from
BANDCAMP
MEDIAFIRE

Continuing these incredible few weeks for metal releases, here are download links for free copies of Umesh Amtey's new project The Ash Eaters' 2010 three-track demo Cold Hearts. Mediafire files includes artwork and lyrics.

Amtey's second Moribund released Brown Jenkins album, Angel Eyes was my album of the year in 2008, and with all his Jenkins' releases he has single-handedly drawn a distinct circle from which his unique recasting of black metal and funeral doom has grown, towering alone unchallenged with a monolithic stature.  The Ash Eaters follows on from where he left off with his mostly solo Brown Jenkins project - nightmarishly blurred fever dreams of howling leviathan stalked voids - Lovecraftian cosmic horror.  This new band is a two-piece including Demiurge who worked on Brown Jenkins final album Death Obsession.

The first striking addition to the sound is the wall of screeching feedback cast over the first past of the opening  Desperate Angels. Where Jenkins worked with dissonance and the manipulative shearing of reality from hallucination, The Ash Eaters use a slightly heavier set brute energy to barge its way into your senses.  All the cascading riffs from before are present, that signature sound boiling with a tar-thick viscosity throughout, a confounding rabid lushness. All Your Stars Will Die drops in deep gothic choral vocal accompaniment to the tremelo waterfall of rushing appegiated chords and the Heavens open to rays of black light, burning through on a guttural chug of bassy riffs contrasting, swirling into a sickly whirlpool of sound as the two tones warp aural perspectives.  This is deliberately overwhelming and all-consuming music that succeeds not through speed and battery but with crushing airless momentum and a euphoric relentlessness that provokes adreneline rushes with changes in density and volume of sound, pressure drops and disorientation.  Night Never Ends throws in a couple of shapes that develop the sound of Brown Jenkins and mark out this project as distinct; two minutes into the enveloping darkness a choppy speeding riff savagely gnaws into the drums thundering at it, it has a looser, wilder, rockier feel, separate to the wildness evident in the rest of the tracks; later on there is a booming yawning feral climax that spirals upwards in appropriate conclusion.

The band have already recorded the first album in full and are in the process of securing a label and distribution for it , so hopefully the full debut should be not too far away.  Umesh is already writing the guitar parts for the 2nd album right now, so The Ash Eaters are a fully active and dangerous concern - not just that, but they plan on moving up to New York at some point too. The Big Apple won't know what's hit it when this Texan dust blown dirt rolls in.

EXCLUSIVE DOWNLOAD!: Brown Jenkins - Death Obsession preview tracks

Umesh Amtey has given us two brand new preview tracks to help spread the cosmic heaviness of his final Brown Jenkins album Death Obsession, due for release on 17th November on Moribund Records.



As a development from last year's Angel Eyes and other previous BJ material, these new tracks feature an element of light and space that was never present before. That's not to say they aren't murky, bleak and harrowing - which they are, as is almost Umesh's trademark sound - being in part, an enormous cosmic horror soundtrack to Lovecraft's whole back catalogue - but the treble-curtain shimmer of lead guitars over the bassier riffs is almost elegant, each cycle building in density until visibility is reduced to nothing and the darkness swallows up the foregound ready to repeat the cycle once more. It's fast too - the gaps opening up in the nimble beats add an illusiory feel of a more graceful momentum; Together they give it a less sludgy feel but it still stomps and shudders like the most monumental leviathan, but that's the dichotomy that make Brown Jenkins special. The shifts in pace, tone and shade of these tracks continue the unique work of this arresting artist. If ever there was a record to signal the death of the first decade of the new millenium, then it will be this.

Here you go:

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