On their debut album Apsides, Black Aleph offer what is best termed 'deconstructed doom and post-metal', creating bodily, earthy, heavy music that speaks to deeper layers of the human psyche, and which draws from middle-eastern modal music.
The record features both composed and improvised pieces that involve the players layering live-loops, ritualistic-beats and doom-metal style musical variations that progressively unfold and build in intensity throughout the performance.
Black Aleph’s style has been compared to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Earth and Neurosis - though there is a borderline spiritual quality to the music that comes from the unique instrumentation: guitar, cello, and Iranian daf drum.
The sound is tectonic - apt for a record centred around concepts of orbital mechanics, like the notion of ‘apsis’, which is the points of extreme and least distance between a celestial and a primary body (sun-earth-moon) in an elliptical orbit. A second theme concerns the relationship between light and dark, or more specifically the difference between bodies that emit versus those that merely reflect light - and in-between those that obstruct it.
There are clues littered in the background of each member. Lachlan R. Dale (guitar) has belonged to a string of bands in the Australian underground - Hashshashin, Serious Beak, Adrift For Days - which have explored polyrhythms, drone, and the potentialities of cinematic, instrumental music.
Peter Hollo (cello) performs with ‘post-everything’ quartet Tangents, who collide the improvisational approach of The Necks with electronic music, classical and film music, rock, noise, and whatever else might emerge from the ether. His solo project raven straddles electronic beatmaking, cello sampling, looping and live processing.
And Timothy Johannessen (daf) introduces elements of Dastgāh into his playing, having performed in the traditional Persian group Mehr Ensemble for a number of years. He cites his daf teacher, Arash Zanganeh, as an inspiration alongside names like Azeri spiritual musician Alim Qasimov, Turkish masters Arif Saag and Musa Eroglu, alongside metal, avant-garde and classical influences.
Black Aleph’s debut album represents the potentialities of reconstructed post-metal and doom, drawing from Middle Eastern modal traditions - and proof that heavy, cinematic and hypnotic music still has much to offer as an artform.
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