Nachtmystium's sixth full-length record, Silencing Machine, feels in many ways like the band are coming home, full circle, completing a circuit of innovation and wildness that began with Instinct: Decay in 2006 when they first started to branch out from their foundation of raw, organic black metal into something stranger. Their last two albums in particular — Assassins: Black Meddle Part 1 and Addicts: Black Meddle Part II — were complex, often experimental explorations of blackened psychedelic rock that led to the band characterizing their sound as "blackadelia." Silencing Machine is something different. The freedom — that fractured and fragmented lack of constraint — they've worked within (or without) most recently has been traded for startling restraint. While the aggression is as acerbic as acid eating into metal and glass, the compositions are tight, almost classically black metal. The distortion is deliberately, artfully mechanical, drawing upon elements of industrial to give a robot's heart and machinist's soul to Silencing Machine. This is less about hearts and guts than it is bleeding circuitry. While Nachtmystium, particularly mastermind Blake Judd, still display a ferocious intellect in their composing process, they're left the ocean of human wreckage in favour of cybernetics. This is a musical cyborg.
Read an interview with Nachtmystium here.
(Century Media)Read an interview with Nachtmystium here.
