On "So the wind won't blow it all away" blog  (10/10/2007)

waverly hills
the nurse
2007

(française version)
Immobile, j'attends la nuit. J'aimerais qu'une trompette surgisse du nulle part situé, pas si loin, derrière la vitre et les volets et joue une mélodie lente, lourde et sombre. Triste. Que le coeur en soit étreint et la gorge nouée, libérés par la dernière note jouée. C'est la nuit et il n'y a pas de trompette. Juste Waverly Hills. Qu'un album, à l'atmosphère lourde et intitulé "The nurse", aussi sombre soit-il, parvienne à apaiser les tourments, est-ce souhait si étonnant ? J'attends. Dans l'angoisse et l'espoir. La note finale.

(englikhtonian version)
Motionless, I wait the night. I would like that a trumpet emerges from the nowhereland located, not so far, behind the window pane and shutters and plays a slow, dark and heavy melody. Sad. Let the heart be clutched there and throat tied, released by the last played note. It is the night and there is no trumpet. Only Waverly Hills. How an album, with heavy atmosphere and called "The nurse", however dark it is, manages to soothe down torments, is this so amazing wish? I wait. In anxiety and hope. The final note.

waverly hills
écouter/listen
acheter/buy "the nurse"
3 autres titres sont disponibles dans la collection Faunasabbatha : Behemothaur, Sorc'henn et Heads of Pagan

On Foxy Digitalis webzine (10/31/2007)

Sorc'henn "Harmonium Pieces and Dead Reveries"

Faunasabbatha

Some years ago, at my local library, I made a personal musical discovery that still gives me chills. The integrality of Debussy's piano works interpreted by German player Walter Gieseking still hold a very special place in my late night playlists. Gieseking is renowned for the subtlety of his interpretations, but there's one thing seldom underlined, although it's very important to the beauty of these recordings... there's this dated, flat, reverberating sound that gives it a timeless feeling. I believe that no matter what you do what matters is how you do it, and Sorc'henn's experimentations around keyboards have that timelessness created by the quality of the sound more than by what's really played. Voyaging on the same sabbatical imagery that taints all Sorc'henn's recordings, "Harmonium Pieces..." are done with the specific use of keyboards of all kinds, except maybe brand new Yamahas - i.e. harmonium, piano and harpsichord... Decay and darkness are indeed central forces of the boldly repetitive pieces that slowly fade into masses of distortion, taking that usually noble, but so fragile, instrument into far darker territories than usual. Far from sounding cliché, the obstination in these vampirical moods attains a kind of rare and quiet, classical beauty. With these simple processes, Sorc'henn offers up a wonderful record that makes me wish for more more Faunasabbatha records of the same kind! 8/10 -- Constantin Dubois (31 October, 2007)

Reviews by the mighty Overlord at AQ

>>> Aquarius records

----*
----* New Label!! FAUNASABBATHA!! :
----*


BEHEMOTHAUR Necroglacial Enema (Faunasabbatha) cd-r

 
In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
The first in the series comes from the very strangely named Behemothaur, and their even more strangely named record Necroglacial Enema. With a name like Necroglacial Enema, you might expect this to be a joke, some sort of goofy pisstake on black metal, but there's nothing finny about these three songs. All three are dense and heavy and noisy and chaotic. The opener, the shortest of the three, clocking in at 8+ minutes, is the noisiest of the bunch, the drums blown out and in the red like a rehearsal recording, the guitars moaning and keening, lots of crumbling low end and squealing feedback, there might be riffs but if so, they're hard to follow, instead it sounds more like some noise rock blow out. Dead C, Harry Pussy, locking into stumbling jams, hurling cymbals, blowing speakers, all maybe wreathed in just a bit of murky blackness.
The second track, clocking in at a whopping 21 minutes, is a strange looped guitarscape, coruscating angular chiming crunch, looped into grinding arcs of moaning guitar howl, like jagged shards of Keiji Haino blow outs hurled into an expense of noise rock sprawl, a furious roiling concoction of psychedelic skree and smoldering deconstructed riffage, that eventually gives way to a surprisingly serene stretch of murky whir.
The closer is another downtuned noise rock murk fest. This one WAY heavier on the low end sprawl, lots of crashing percussion, splattery snare, cymbal sizzle, all draped over a slow lava-like crawl of doomy riffage, and all of THAT, wrapped in thick swirls of crumbling distortion.
While this is definitely heavy, it seems like this stuff might be a bit abstract for most metalheads, but fans of stuff like Heavy Winged, White Heaven, Fushitsusha, Dead C and the like will most likely dig big time!
SUPER LIMITED. ONLY 73 COPIES!!!! Packaged in a full color, oversized jacket, with a full color insert, housed in a plastic sleeve, with two crossed twigs like nature's crossbones!
MPEG Stream: "Discombulated By Blasphemy"
MPEG Stream: "Necroglacial Enema"

HEADS OF PAGAN Under The Tall And Darkened Arches (Faunasabbatha) 3" cd-r

In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
Heads Of Pagan are a duo, just voice, guitars and effects, but their 21 minute track sounds more like a tangle of crumbling downtuned basses. Low rumbling, thunderous riffs, slowed way down and allowed to pulse and throb, reverberate and whir, slightly percussive, the sound of pick hitting string is quickly swallowed up by black billows of rib cage rattling sound, very abstract and murky, muddy and mysterious, which over the course of the track grow in intensity, becoming thicker, more grinding, more distorted, the notes and melodies becoming less indistinct, transforming into a roiling black bass drone, only occasionally offering up fragments of melody, sharp bolts of feedback entering the fray, eventually building into a full on Merzbow style noise track, but with the basses becoming fuzzy and alien, sounding instead like synths, oh but they're guitars so it's even stranger, buzzing warbly confusional chaos smeared into a dense blackened low end blur. Heavy but not metal, brutal but still sort of ambient. Definitely for fans of the sloooooow and looooooow.
LIMITED TO 66 COPIES. In a mini 3" sleeve with a mini 3" printed insert.
MPEG Stream: "Under The Tall And Darkened Arches (excerpt 1)"

SORC'HENN Harmonium Pieces & Dead Reveries (Faunasabbatha) cd-r

In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
Sorc'Henn are from France, and their particular brand of heaviness, as the title of their disc suggests is all about the harmonium, the piano, and lots and lots of drones. The opening track is a thick cloud of piano overtones, lots of sustain and reverb, a single funereal chord, struck over and over and over, the tones blending into each other, the overtones building up until it's some sort of doomy sonata. The second track, is a bleary buzzy blur, very Tim Hecker-ish or Oval-like, but with vocals that sound like the growls of some wild beast, a gurgling rumbling grrr. A bit like a pride of lions fronting Lustmord, very haunting and very very weird. But at the same time, strangely pretty.
The next two tracks are thick layered drones, the first dreamy and blissy, lots of soft melody and dreamlike drift, the second is a blurred black metal, buzzing riffage doused in effects and overloaded, until the riff melts into its surroundings with the overall effect being a throbbing pulsing blackened swell.
The awesomely titled "Where Does The Breath Of The Dead Pianist Come From ?" ironically enough features no piano at all (as far as we can tell), instead sprawling into some grinding Wolf Eyes-ian industrial plodscape, with plenty of dirge-y whir and distorted crunch. The second to last track "Grand-Harmonium Du Diable" is just that, a creepy lo-fi harmonium drift, the instrument wheezing demonically, haunting minor key melodies escaping like a demon's heavy breathing, an evilized version of the harmonium work of Gurdjieff or Nitsch.
Finally, the disc finishes with "Huelgoat And The Droning Stones", a 10+ minute underwater dirgescape assembled from swooping backwards notes, murky and warbly and hypnotic, that fades to silence, before returning as a minimal muddy grinding low end melody that unfurls until the very end...
SUPER LIMITED!! ONLY 66 COPIES!!!! In a spray painted cardboard sleeve, housed in a printed oversized paper jacket, all in a plastic sleeve with little bits of branches!
MPEG Stream: "Toulgoat"
MPEG Stream: "Took Their Rise In Funerals"

WAVERLY HILLS The Nurse (Faunasabbatha) cd-r

In a world full of tiny labels, it takes a lot to stand out, whether it's some amazing and mysterious sounds or super unique and hand made packaging. And if anything RuralFaune as shined in both respects, a crazy collection of some of the weirdest noisemakers in the world, and some seriously amazing, and in many cases, fragrant, packaging. Hand printed, painted, folded, pasted, held together with string or wire, often filled with branches or flowers, scraps of paper, seeds or bits of plant matter, many of them very strong smelling, all of them amazing.
Well, Bruno, the man behind RuralFaune, was really getting into heavy music, and decided that maybe RuralFaune was not the place for such musics, so he started FaunSabbatha, a new label dedicated to heavy, creepy, dark music, metal, metallic, or just plain evil. Four new releases, each one outrageously limited, gorgeously hand packaged, and gone before you know it.
Any band that thanks funeral doom horde Rigor Sardonicous is alright by us. Especially if RS are one of the only four entities thanked. One being the label, the other being one of the other bands featured amidst this recent spate of Faunasabbatha releases, Sorc'Henn.
So what comes of an unhealthy love/obsession with Rigor Sardonicous, how about a creepy, ultra sick, noise drenched slow motion doom crawl? Downtuned, and lurching, stumbling and heavyheavyheavy. After a brief intro, all mournful windblown twang, a spidery latticework of spare, sorrowful melodies, plucked out over a whirling expanse of emptiness, comes the filthy, crusty, noisy multiple o'd doom. But sonically, Waverly Hills don't so much resemble funereal doom, as they do, modern noise rock, or Japanese ultra psych. The guitars are caustic coruscating streaks of blurred buzz, unleashed in heaving waves, while much of the band's time is spent crawling doomlike through a field of sonic broken glass, the guitars spend most of their time erupting in squalls of near white noise that sound like Keiji Haino fronting the Dead C. Thick clouds of whirling buzz, deconstructed riffage, super abstract percussion, the vocals a subsonic rumble, a blurred low end gurgle (except when it's a haunting ghostlike falsetto!) underpinning the soaring and drifting slabs of buzz overhead. Imagine doom metal being pulled apart, the notes and chords and riffs being rent asunder, the resulting squall still dark and doomy, by way more tripped out and damaged.
So yeah, you doooooooomlords will definitely dig this, especially if you lean toward stuff like Moss and Khanate and Bunkur and of course Rigor Sardonicous, but it might be even more appealing if your cup of tea is abstract psychedelic noise a la Sunroof!, Total, Dead C, White Heaven, etc...
LIMITED TO 74 COPIES, hand numbered on a tattered, torn piece of cloth, with the Faunasabbatha logo stamped on there as well, in a paper sleeve held shut wit a piece of metal wire.
MPEG Stream: "The White Plague"
MPEG Stream: "In The Hallways"

Two awesome reviews by Adam from Crucial Blast records

Crucial Blast webstore

"....murky out-metal CD-R releases from the new Faunsasabbatha imprint"

HEADS OF PAGAN Under The Tall And Darkened Arches 3" CD-R
Faunasabbatha

One of the three new limited editioon CD-Rs that we just got in from Faunasabbatha, the awesome and criminimally limited-edition new sublabel of Rural Faune. Rural Faune is itself an amazing little CD-R label based outta France and which is run by our pal Bruno, who shares my adoration of handmade short-run releases for especially noisy drone bands and abstract psychedelia, and his discs from Robedoor and Wolfskull were big faves of mine last year; but as heavy as some of that stuff on Rural Faune was (and is), Bruno decided to start up this new imprint that focuses exclusively on "doom and black metal". Of course, Bruno's idea of what constitutes doom and black metal is kind of warped, and so we get these amazing discs of WTF heaviness that I guess you could call doom or black metal but which actually exist in their own fucked up, bedroom-crafted outsider metal soundworld: tortured abstract deathdoom haunted by the voices of spirits trapped inside a crumbling sanitorium...blackened guitarnoisescapes....doomed funereal piano pieces...and improvised power sludge. Kind of in the same headspace as Campbell Kneale's Battlecruiser imprint. Obviously this is right up my alley, and I'm hoping that we'll be seeing ALOT more from Faunasabbatha in the near future.
Heads Of Pagan are another French duo, using voice, effects, and guitar to construct the 21 minute deathscape "Under The Tall And Darkened Arches", and this is one nasty skullgrind; the piece starts off as a simple ominous riff that drifts over a rhythmic background loop that sounds like a heavily reverb'd guitar being scraped and pounded, with sparse clean guitar notes and haunting little half-melodies being plucked and layered over top. As the track progresses though, it becomes more and more chaotic as distorted feedback and rumbling guitar noise builds into a heavy free-drone, flanging and other FX appearing in the dense murk of layered guitars, and finally turning into this massive undulating industrial sludgedrone, like one of Total's amp-shattering feedback/noise jams colliding with Wolf Eyes in a satanic industrial ritual. Seriosuly heavy rhythmic psych-filth. The 3" CD-R was released in another micro-pressing of 66 copies, and is already sold out from the label - we've got a mere half-dozen copies, and once they're gone, that's it. Packaged in a 3" sleeve with murky skull-encrusted artwork.

MP3 SAMPLE: " Under The Tall And Darkened Arches " (excerpt)

WAVERLY HILLS The Nurse CD-R
Faunsasabbatha

One of the three new limited editioon CD-Rs that we just got in from Faunasabbatha, the awesome and criminimally limited-edition new sublabel of Rural Faune. Rural Faune is itself an amazing little CD-R label based outta France and which is run by our pal Bruno, who shares my adoration of handmade short-run releases for especially noisy drone bands and abstract psychedelia, and his discs from Robedoor and Wolfskull were big faves of mine last year; but as heavy as some of that stuff on Rural Faune was (and is), Bruno decided to start up this new imprint that focuses exclusively on "doom and black metal". Of course, Bruno's idea of what constitutes doom and black metal is kind of warped, and so we get these amazing discs of WTF heaviness that I guess you could call doom or black metal but which actually exist in their own fucked up, bedroom-crafted outsider metal soundworld, kind of in the same headspace as Campbell Kneale's Battlecruiser imprint. Obviously this is right up my alley, and I'm hoping that we'll be seeing ALOT more from Faunasabbatha in the near future.
Waverly Hills is a notorious abandoned sanitorium in Louisville, Kentucky that was the site of a large number of deaths from tuberculosis in the 19th and early 20th century, and the massive, evil-looking building has served as a location for a handful of horror movies and television shows in the past few years - at this point, it's probably best known outside of the Louisville area for appearing on a recent episode of that goofy Sci-Fi channel show Ghost Hunters. The site is alleged to be one of the most haunted locations in the U.S., and it's easy to see why it's dank, crumbling hallways and towering spires capture people's imagination. This French band is obviously pretty infatuated with the sanitorium, naming themselves after the building and composing an entire hour long album of suffocatingly bleak and abstract doom in ode to Waverly Hills, with song titles like "The White Plague", "In The Hallways", "Room 502", and "Under Quarantine". The duo of vocalist Gwen and guitarist/drum programmer Pierre modeled their sound after the extreme industrialized deathdoom of Rigor Sardonicus, which should give you an idea as to how monstrous the sound is here: huge slabs of evil creeping doom riffage swirling in reverb over super-minimal drum machine rhythms, beats so sparse and stretched out that they are barely even there, the tracks sprawling out sometimes up to 14 minutes long, with ultra deep, monstrous roars and tortured wailing emanating from deep reverb pits. Ridiculously heavy, but also really abstract, almost like they were improvising the songs, with lots of creepy guitar/string noise and feedback crawling between thr riffs, and the glacial drum machine beats sometimes drifting off into silence. Massive, formless, utterly oppressive DOOM, Disembowelment mixed with Abruptum, Rigor Sardonicus fused with recordings of electronic voice phenomena. Released in an absurdly small hand-numbered edition of 74 copies, packaged in a full color paper sleeve printed on heavier stock, the CD splattered with paint and has a piece of silkscreened fabric glued to it, and sealed with a piece of metal wire. As far as I know, totally sold out from the label.

MP3 SAMPLE: " Room 502 " (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: " The White Plague " (excerpt)