Sunday, June 5, 2016

Natural Snow Buildings


This might be the worst possible thing that could happen to musical obsessive-compulsives like us.

You mean to tell us that a band we've never before heard of actually exists called Natural Snow Buildings, and they're a duo from France who have been producing post-rock ambient/drone records for nearly 15 years?  And they're incredibly prolific, producing eight separate LPs in 2008 alone?  And most of those recordings were produced in extremely small quantities and are incredibly hard to find?  And their song lengths range anywhere from one or two minutes to 40-minute (or more) marathons, and many of those LPs and two-, three- or more disc sets (The Dance of the Moon and the Sun alone is over 2 1/2 hours long), and one could spend literally years becoming familiar with their body of work, not to mention trying to find copies of that body of work?

Oh and by the way, both members of Natural Snow Buildings also have their own solo bands as well, TwinSisterMoon and Isengrind, with yet more recordings to be tracked down.

We have jobs.  We have other music to listen to.  We've already lost a good four years of our lives hunting down the similarly scarce recordings by the similarly prolific electronic musician Pete Namlook, and we'd probably still be looking today if it weren't for Namlook's tragic and untimely passing. And now we've gone and discovered that Natural Snow Buildings is actually a thing, and that they sound, at various times, like Godspeed and Silver Mt. Zion, at others like the Master Musicians of Bukkake, at still others like Popul Vuh, and sometimes like Dead Can Dance, and all the while still sound like no one else.

So far, we've managed to track down copies of The Dance of the Moon and the Sun (2006), which seems to be their most-popular and most highly-regarded recording, as well as Between the Real and the Shadow (2008),  Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches (2008), The Centauri Agent (2010), Waves Of The Random Sea (2011), Chants of Niflheim (2011), and Beyond the Veil (2012), and we've only scratched the surface.           

We can already tell this is not going to end well for us.

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