Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches (Natural Snow Buildings)

To recapitulate for a moment, so far in 2008, Natural Snow Buildings have released a two-CD album (Sunlit Stone) and two EPs; The Moonraiser and The Sundowner, of music from the 2006 Dance of the Moon and the Sun.  This was followed by the LP Laurie Bird, the compilation album The Snowbringer Cult, and the Sung to the North CD.  That's more albums than many bands  produce in their career, but that was just one year for NSB and they were only just getting warmed up.

Their next 2008 album was no less than a three-disc set titled Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches, originally self-released in 2008 in a limited edition of only 22 copies.    According to one reviewer, it represents "Natural Snow Buildings at their most difficult. None of the simple folksy beauty of other releases, just literal hours of raga-influenced, droning noise. It sounds like you're stumbled upon some kind of ritual late at night, witches summoning something very large and very nasty from the depths of hell." 

According to one review on RateYourMusic.com, "A serial killer's soul sounds like this. Barely folk, mostly drone and noise. You could gouge your eyes out while listening and the pain would be consumed by raw noise. I don't recommend this idea."  

You've been warned.

Somewhat surprisingly, this challenging release was picked up by label Bada Bing Records (Sharon Van Etten, Lady Lamb, Noveller, and more) and re-released in 2012 as a three-CD set.  They even made a vinyl version with the tracks edited to fit onto four LPs.  Which means you can actually purchase this one, unlike most of the previous NSB recordings so far (with the notable exceptions of 2003's Ghost Folks and 2008's The Snowbringer Cult).  It's going for only $5 for a digital download of the whole 3-disc set; the four-LP vinyl edition is retailing for $40.  Here's the track list: 

Disc 1 

1. Kadja Bosou (18:01)
2. Night Coercion (21:07)
3. Brooms, Trapdoors, Keyholes (29:45)

Disc 2

1. Gorgons (30:30)
2. Mirror Shield (21:06)

Disc 3

1. The Great Bull God (57:47)

Kadja Bosou starts off the first disc with a relatively straightforward NSB drone but soon finds itself drowned in its own reverb.  There's a major shift about halfway through the track as the cacophony subsides into a quiet and strangely serene harmonium drone with some electric guitar toward the end.  Enjoy the calm - this is as  peaceful as this record gets.  The Village Voice ranked the song as No. 6 in their "Ten Best Noise Tracks of 2012," writing "There are covens’ caldrons in Transylvania that are less haunted and forbidding than Kadja Bosou is. All amorphous tendrils, bad ju-ju, Thinsulated synthesizers, and wayward woodwinds, it’s the sound of this French duo communing with one of the natural world’s seamier side and – just maybe – crossing over altogether."

Kadja (King) Bosou is the Haitian name for King Agaja of Dahomey, a former West African kingdom.  Bosou ruled Dahomey from 1708 to 1740, and among other deeds, invaded the adjacent Kingdom of Allada.  In three days, he slaughtered thousands of warriors and took more than 8.000 prisoners that he sold as slaves to the New World, allegedly including the son of the King of Allada; it is said that the son, while a slave in Haiti, fathered the great Haitian liberator Toussaint Louverture. Bosou also created the Dahomey Amazons, a military unit composed entirely of women, and had armed female bodyguards in his palace.

Dahomey Amazons in 1890

In West African and Haitian voodoo traditions, Bosou has been mythologized into a mighty bull spirit usually depicted with two horns. He is considered an unpredictable spirit, and, like his bestial counterpart, has a fiery and torrid temper - figuratively, a bull in a china shop. Bosou is associated with the fecundity of the soil - he is the earth, the fruit, and the seed - and is also associated with male virility.  

The title track, Night Coercion, is next and jumps right out of the speakers with a shrieking attack of confrontational harsh noise. This is not for the faint of heart.  Mercifully, a guitar solo emerges above the din after about four minutes and carries the listener along until a major transition around the 8:00-minute mark. An echo-laden guitar briefly plays over percussion for a relatively calm stretch, the eye of the storm, until the noisy background from earlier returns and takes the track back to the same hellish soundscape before.  Good times.

The first disc closes with Brooms, Trapdoors, Keyholes, a half-hour of harsh noise and punishing dissonance.  The track begins with harmonium and wordless vocals and slowly becomes progressively noisier as it continues, eventually becoming a full-on feedback and noise fest. Occasionally, you can hear someone trying to play something on guitar underneath all of the noise. It's hard to imagine anybody not feeling relieved when it's finally over.

Gorgons provides some blessed relief as it opens the second disc with wordless vocals over a simple drumbeat and shaker; there's even a flute solo.  But the flute becomes increasingly dissonant and unruly as it progresses and is soon looped with other flutes and tribal drumming.   The jam eventually dissolves as the layers collapse in on themselves and the tape is manipulated into an interesting, almost Steve Reich-ian  loop experiment. 

Mirror-Shield subjects some of NSB's earlier, post-rock style guitar work to the same manipulated tape-loop experimentation as heard on Gorgons to complete Disc 2.

The Great Bull God - obviously Kadja Bosou now fully in his mythological form - fills the entirety of Disc 3 with nearly an hour of distorted electric guitar, static, tape loops, white noise, and feedback.  The musical metaphor for the entire three-CD set is that Kadja Basou, summoned in the first track, is finally made manifest in the last, where the awesome power of the Great Bull God is fully on display.  And then suddenly, 32½ minutes in, just as the whole thing is verging on the unbearable, the tape suddenly stops and cuts to an eastern-sounding raga without all the layers of noise and hiss so prevalent throughout the rest of the album.

Okay, I'll grant you that listening to this album can be a challenging and exhausting experience.  I can't and won't recommend it for everyone, although for the adventurous and open-minded, there are a lot of rewards for the effort.  For what it's worth, I like it, but can't say that it's exactly going to be on heavy rotation in my playlist.

I would recommend that you give at least track one, Kadja Bosou, a listen just so if nothing else you know what the album is about, and as much of the last track, The Great Bull God, as you can take.  If you don't like it, fine, move on to something else, or give The Dance of the Moon and the Sun another listen. If you do like it, take in the other tracks and be glad to know that there is more music in this vein coming up in the NSB discography.