Here's a recent review from the awesome folk at Crucial Blast Records. Aside from the kind words, you can also pick up a reissue of Gyatso by 16-17 which is truly essential: Mixed by Kevin Martin (God/Techno Animal/ICE/The Bug...) and featuring G.C Green of Godflesh. A truly amazing record.

"Man, I love Aurora Borealis. The UK label shares the same love of adventurous music of the dark and heavy variety as we do, and we just got a ton of their older titles in stock, crucial discs from Moss, Wolfmangler, Silvester Anfang, Burial Hex, Dead Raven Choir, and Acephale, all amazing discs and records that I can't get enough of, which will be listed as soon as we can get em added to the store. The one band that I wasn't familiar with in the big box of Aurora Borealis stuff we just received is Knives Ov Resistance, but my faith in AB's aesthetic is such that I'll pick up anything that the label puts out. As soon as I pushed play on this disc though, I was immediately hooked, swept in by Knives Ov Resistance's eerie, hypnotic sound. The band has members from all over Europe apparently, a group of musicians who come together to craft lovely shadowed sounds formed out of manipulated tapes, acoustic guitars whose folky strum is bathed in glowing reverb, field recordings of everyday sounds and layers of swirling noise. Each of these three tracks is densely woven with abstract guitar, melodious strings plucked and strummed and floating languidly through the sounds of water crashing against the shore, children playing, birdsongs echoing through the woods, while ambient rumblings and gritty distortion creeps underneath of KOR's gorgeous shimmer. It reminds me of some of the dark folky music of later Swans albums, shot through with a mysterious occult vibe and visions of biblical Apocalypse. The first track "Rosicrucian" shimmers with cyclical guitar melodies and razor-sharp electronic flutter, and "Sovnig" is filled with rich layers of field recordings and drifting synths that float through the hazy blur of multiple acoustic melodies playing at once and bits of Stockhausen influenced electronics, warbling turntables spinning off deformed chunks of sound, reverb soaked strings, and murky ambience. The last track "Outremer" is a mournful nineteen minute patchwork of sweet soaring strings, doleful operatic female singing, smatterings of acid guitar, writhing looped violins, disintegrating radio transmissions, all mixed together with the abstract, ominous folk guitars and tenebrous electronics and comparable to Popol Vuh's scores for Werner Herzog, but darker and more nebulous. Prisca Sapientia materializes from the malefic side of the "freak folk" sound, inhabiting the same doomy shadows as Wolfmangler and Silvester Anfang, but fans of the abstract psych/folk sound of the Jewelled Antler Collective and Thuja will no doubt love this as well."

I've been suffereing occult fatigue of late, and truth be told, just reading about Knives ov Resistance's end-times cut-up sigil-folk doomscapes prompted a whimper of 'Enoch already!' before even hearing Prisca Sapientia's vague, innocuous, dare I say, 'folktronic', opener. But the the album's terrain grows more ardous and concurrently more pleasurable with close listening, as a deep noise undertow tugs at a chiming acoustic guitar amid the weathery burbles and ghost geese of  'Søvnig'. The progression to more discordant planes is managed with a subtle sense of juxtaposition, the turntable and splicing skills of [Spykidelic] sounding a welcome, jarring note amid the waterlogged guitar n soundscape stuff.

 Knives of Resistance emerge at the album's end in the post-apocalyptic state of terror they presumably intended to create from the project's start, frantically twisting a radio dial while casting the runes in the shadow of London's crumbling monuments and rising waterways.

Frances Morgan

The London/Oslo based occult obsessives deliver haunting pastorals on this, their debut release, that effortlessly combines equal parts acid volk, musique concréte and turntable manipulation without descending into muddled faggotry. A gentle, meandering start slowly builds in tension to a stormy and sinister finale that threatens to explode but instead just leaves you tottering on the edge of the abyss.

TONY MOLESTER (VICE UK)

"Soundscapes are bullshit—white noise to be listened to on an airplane when you want to read in peace but need something to focus on besides the baby crying a few aisles away. Knives, however, does its best to dig fingernails into your brain's outer layers as well as provide a canvas upon which one can vividly depict a screeching child being devoured by worms. Or, you know, whatever else you're into."

SHORT EYES (VICE US)

From Rock-A-Rolla Magazine.

"This pan-European group of tape manipulators and guitar explorers have delivered something peculiarly beautiful to Aurora Borealis, an industrial folk album that harks back to the playful, pastoral era of Cosmic Couriers as well as the more recent Jewelled Antler Collective discography. Opener 'Rosicrucian' swells with spiral-picked melodies and thin electronic tides, evoking the serene cosmic folk of Witthuser and Westrupp. Elsewhere, the synth pulses and samples of 'Søvnig' shimmer amid the heat-haze of interlocked guitar mantras, grazing and unhurried. Knives Ov Resistance's gentle methods are more akin to long-lost troubadours such as Tom Rapp than Boards Of Canada; the mournful closing track 'Outremer' roars with operatic vocal cries and radio dispatches, the tendril-guitars diffused and murmuring. A precious and elegant debut."

From San Francisco's awesome Aquarius Records Website where our CD is now available....

http://www.aquariusrecords.org/

KNIVES OV RESISTANCE Prisca Sapientia (Aurora Borealis)

Latest release from the UK's Aurora Borealis label, responsible for the KTL double lp elsewhere on this list, as well as records from Moss, Ginnungagap, Wolfmangler, Guapo, the Grails, even Crebain!
Knives Ov Resistance are a European ensemble who weave dense soundscapes of blissed out ambience and abstract guitar shimmer, Channeling the spirit of Popol Vuh, Spacemen 3, Godspeed, Jackie O Motherfucker, and other like minded sonic explorationists.
A lush blend of field recordings, glistening guitars, rumbling drones, warbling turntables, all woven into drifting sun dappled sonic tapestries of sound. An ambient post rock drift, that flits and flutters amidst the sounds of children laughing, the lush din of the forest, chittering birds, the sound of leaves and water, a dense and thick backdrop, rife with turntabled fragments of sound, bits of opera, soaring strings, muted squiggles, slowed down ambience, warm whirs, mixed in with simple percussion, everything smeared into fuzzy blurs, all beneath an abstract summery folk, that glimmers and drifts, gradually changing shape and color, texture and timbre. Epic and expansive, yet subtle and simple. Some sort of abstract avant ambient folk perhaps... really really nice.
Fans of the above mentioned bands will definitely dig this, as well as fans of new weird America, modern free folk, and all things Jewelled Antler.

From the excellent Boomkat Records Webstore. The CD is available there from Monday 12th. http://www.boomkat.com

"Oh I love a bit of religious hokum, I really do - ever since I realised at 10 years old that God was a lie and we were put on this earth by Erich Von Daniken I've been interested in all things mystical, and from the sounds of it Knives Ov Reistance are equally as enthralled by the hand of Satan and his mischievous space creatures. 'Prisca Sapientia' (True Wisdom) is the band's debut release and apparently deals with the weighty subject of End Time, you know, just something light hearted to kick off a project with? So while tinkering with Stockhausen influenced electronic decay and free-noise-folk instrumentation, somewhere amongst the abstraction is reference to the Armageddon. It's dark then, we've ascertained that much, but this isn't the dark-for-dummies stuff you'd see on the liner notes of your common-or-garden post rock double album, this is genuinely brain melting stuff punctuated with a sound that is somehow inherently evil. There are without a doubt links to black metal, but this isn't a black metal album, not by sound anyway, rather this deals with similarly haunting subject matter but the band go about it in a totally different way. The press release quote Godspeed You! Black Emperor as a comparison but I don't think that does this record justice, rather than retread old ground this feels as if it's a further step into the realms of the 'acoustic doom' explored by artists such as Wolfmangler and Svarte Greiner. A breathtaking listening experience for the darker moments in life - do you believe in Rapture?"