New Natural Snow

It's all too rare and it's never not a good time for new music from Natural Snow Buildings, but on this tense, post-election day, this is precisely what I need to hear.

Hatching

The first wave of the pandemic feels like such a long time ago.  Remember when we used to almost exclusively post Natural Snow Buildings here?

Charles Thomas Tester

After 2016's Aldebaran, Natural Snow Buildings went quiet.  The band that formerly put out at least an album a year, - 12 in the case of 2008 alone - suddenly just stopped producing music. Nothing from their side projects Isengrind and TwinSisterMoon, either.  It's as if they had said everything they wanted to say, and left us with the legacy of their extensive back catalog.

Or so we had thought.  On November 17, 2019, their label, Vulpiano Records, issued a 10-Year Anniversary compilation album, and the first track was a song called Charles Thomas Tester by Natural Snow Buildings, their first music in three years.

The 10-Year Anniversary compilation was a limited-release (100 copies) cassette-only album, in keeping  with much of NSB's previous efforts.

Charles Thomas Tester is something of a departure from previous NSB tracks, with more instrumentation  (well, a piano) in addition to washes of electric guitar.  Structurally, it's more of a traditional song than a drone and closer in spirit to their post-rock of 2001-2003 than their folk-drone or noise drone of 2005-2016.

No word yet if this is a preview of a forthcoming album, a one-off song, or something found in the archive. But right now, it's all that we've got.

Aldebaran (Disc 6)

"They say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings; that in those realms where the Pole Star shines high and red Aldebaran crawls low over the horizon, there has been naught but ice and snow for thousands of years." - from Polaris (1920) by H.P. Lovecraft

One of the many astonishing features of Miles Davis' groundbreaking 1972 album On The Corner was that the very first track, appropriately titled On The Corner, begins suddenly with the band already in full groove. It's as if someone just randomly flipped the "On" switch in the studio and began recording in the middle of a jam.  There's no way of telling if the band had been playing for 30 seconds or 30 minutes before the track starts, and it takes a while for the listener to figure out how all of the many parts of the dense groove fit together.  There's a couple of funky electric guitars with wah-wah pedal, all manner of percussion, and eventually you realize that someone's playing a sitar somewhere deep down in the mix. Miles only plays a couple of notes before ceding the lead to a soprano sax, as if he was already near the end of his solo.  It's as if he's showing off how far ahead of you he is - just when you think you've got it figured out, the band's already moved onto something else. Critics initially despised the album, although it's now considered by some to be one of his greatest.

I bring this up because almost every cut on Natural Snow Buildings epic Aldebaran starts with a similar jump-scare, opening with all of the layers that will constitute the drone already going full tilt, and you, the listener, have to catch up.  However, unlike the funk-jazz of Miles, the drone of NSB doesn't really change much, and the marvel isn't that it's already morphed into something else by the time you get it figured out, but that they can maintain that mix for such extended periods.

The main event of the final Disc 6 of Aldebaran is the 32-minute opening track, God's Fossil.  It starts off like any other of the space-noise drones on the album, but eventually the guitar playing starts to evoke some of the post-rock that typified NSB's early output.  A layer introduced late in the drone is a chopped and screwed recording of a voice, a rare recent sample of the field recordings once common in their music.  This is my favorite track on Disc 6, and one of my favorites on this album.

The 19-minute Aldebaran, Cannibal Sun might be the titular tracks of the album, but musically it neither defines the rest of the album nor departs from the norm in any meaningful way.  For the record, Aldebaran is an orange giant star in the constellation Taurus, the "fiery red eye" of Kadja Bassou, the Great Bull God.  The title of the opening and closing tracks of NSB's 2008 Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches are Kadja Bassou and The Great Bull God, respectively.  Given the chance, a star can easily become a cannibal — a bigger star can swallow a smaller one. The star that gets eaten can leave its mark on the surviving star, though, among other things, it can trigger an eruption or change the way the star rotates.

After some 5 hours and 30 minutes, the Albebaran album finally closes with the track The Drowned Church.  The "shortest " track on Disc 6 (17:17), it's a little quieter and slower than most of the tracks, suggesting a sort of fuzzed-out, lo-fi ambient sound.  Some neat guitar work in the second half

rescues the track from ending the album on too passive a note.

And that's it for Aldebaran, all six discs, and that's it for Natural Snow Buildings.  To pass the quarantine time during this coronavirus pandemic, I started a chronological review of their entire discography, going back to 2001's Two Sides of a Horse on through 2016's Aldebaran, some 26 albums, many of which were two-disc or more affairs.  Now, some three months later, I'm finally at the end.

I guess that means I have to crawl out from this pile of bricks on a hill I call my home and reintegrate with society again.  Anything happen since last March I should know about?

Aldebaran (Disc 5)

Dance of the Moon and the Suns?

Okay, I'll admit it - this Aldebaran album is really starting to get to me.  Maybe because I know I'm at the end of the Natural Snow Buildings discography and there isn't another album to explore after this one, but why does Aldebaran need to be six CDs long?  There isn't enough variation between each composition to warrant 25 tracks, and the whole thing was apparently recorded in only one channel, so all of those multiple layers of overdub all sound compressed and indistinct.  I love a lo-fi sound as much as the next guy, but 5¾ hours of this is enough to tax anyone's patience.

Okay, I got that out of my system. Disc 5 of Aldebaran contains three tracks - one a 32-minute opus and two shorter tracks:

1. Cydonia (13:15)
2. Tiny Kings Of Kadath (10:42)
3. Astral Plane Temple (32:14)

Cydonia is apparently named for a region of the planet Mars known for the so-called "Face on Mars."  The name is popular among a certain group of musicians - The Orb titled an album Cydonia and the drone-metal band Sunn O))) titled a song Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia).  NSB's Cydonia sounds like the other drones on Aldebaran and is 13 minutes long.

Tiny Kings of Kadath is probably named for the H.P. Lovecraft novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.   I've never read it so I don't know if it has tiny kings or not, but the middle track of Disc 5 of Aldebaran is 10 minutes long (nothing tiny about it) and sounds pretty much like all the other tracks on the album.

Astral Plane Temple, clocking in at 32:!4, is the main event of this disc and is probably the most listenable.  Sure, it's in the same style of space/noise/horror drone as the rest of the album, but it has some weight and strength to it, it's own field of gravity. Aldebaran might be interesting, enjoyable even, if it were edited down to one or at least no more than two CDs, and if it were, Astral Plane Temple should be one of the cuts.

We're almost through here.  One more disc of the last NSB album left to go, and then we're all done.

Aldebaran (Disc 4)

Abramelin & The Dance of the Moon & The Sun?

Lily Dale was incorporated in 1879 as Cassadaga Lake Free Association, a camp and meeting place for Spiritualists and Freethinkers in upstate New York. Each summer, approximately 22,000 visitors arrive in Lily Dale for classes, workshops, and church services, as well as demonstrations and private appointments with mediums.  The town's name was changed to The City of Light in 1903 and finally to Lily Dale Assembly in 1906. The purpose of Lily Dale is to further the science, philosophy, and religion of Spiritualism.

The Book of Abramelin tells the story of an Egyptian mage named Abra-Melin, who taught a system of magic to Abraham of Worms, presumed to have lived from 1362–1458. The system of magic from this book regained popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries partly due to Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers' The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage and partly to its importance within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and later within the mystical system of Thelema.

What all this has to do with Disc 4 of the Natural Snow Buildings 2016 album Aldebaran is revealed by the disc's track list:

1. Camp Lily Dale (12:25)
2. The Summer Land (15:15)
3. Abramelin (3:46)
4. Burried Circles (11:43)
5. Ectoplasm Rain (2:20)

There's really not much variation among these tracks other than a few distinct layers are added here or dropped there.  It's mostly just more of the standard NSB horror/noise drone attack, in case you didn't get enough of it in CDs 1, 2, and 3.  The only track that sounds audibly different from the rest is the short Ectoplasm Rain at the end of the disc, which consists mainly of layers of wordless voices.

Aldebaran (Disc 3)

Track-length-wise, Disc 3 of the Natural Snow Buildings album Aldebaran is the inverse of Disc 2.  Where Disc 2 had two long-form drone bookending three shorter compositions, Disc 3 has its long-form drone, "Go Kill Because I Told You So," sandwiched between some shorter compositions.

Speaking of "Go Kill," Disc 3 has some of the more, um, interesting track titles of the album.  The first three cuts, 666 Devils Lane, Teen Psychics #2, and "Go Kill" sound like they could be track titles from a punk album.

666 Devil Lane starts the disc off with a jump, coming at you right our of the gate with some aggressive noise drone.

Teen Psychics #2 starts as a lo-fi pastoral drone and evolves into a sustained guitar exercise.  It would fit right in with TDotMatS except it is so radically lo-fi that it crosses at times into distortion. 

"Go Kill Because I Told You So" is the long (23 minutes) drone on this disc and, because of that, the main event here. 

"Go Kill" is a dark, dense composition, one of NSB's horror-drones. Like most tracks on Aldebaran, it piles layers of guitar, some playing sustained if fuzzed-out notes, others squealing with feebdback, on top of each other.  The structure of the composition, such as it is, is created by the different lengths of the loops, so that at any given time, different sounds are heard together.

Stars Grove is basically more of the same as "Go Kill" but a little bit noisier, a little bit faster, and eight minutes shorter.  "Go Kill" on meth if you will.

At 34 seconds, Eusapia, the closing track on Disc 3, is the shortest track in the NSB discography. Blink and you'll miss it, but it sounds like someone yodeling into a steam vent.

On to Disc 4!

Aldebaran (Disc 2)

Disc 2 of Aldebaran consists of five tracks that continue the challenging noise-drone of the last track (The Blind) of Disc 1.  Basically, we have two extended drones here (Horror In Clay and Algaes' Figurines) with some shorter tracks in between.

Horror In Clay lives up to its title.  It's basically 22 minutes of fuzzed out sustained guitar notes, with occasional percussion or other sound effects randomly thrown in, one of those brutal monolithic, drones reminiscent of the hellscape trilogy.

Sandy Cult plays with elements of folk drone, but amplifies and distorts the sounds into something else. Particularly notable are the squeaking sounds of fingers on the guitar strings, which are amplified louder than the sounds of the guitar itself and make the fingerwork sound brutal or even cruel.

Providence's High Priests sounds like a (mercifully) shorter version of Horror In Clay, although at 10 minutes, it's still a long-form drone.

Carreta Del Muerto (Cart of the Dead), the shortest track on Disc 2, opens with some chaotic percussion before settling down into a sustained, one-note drone and ending with what sounds like a pan's flute. 

Algaes' Figurines is to me the most interesting track on Disc 2, in that it seems to abide in a precarious balance somewhere between Natural Snow Bridges' space-drone and noise-drone modes. Anytime you think you've got it pinned to one particular sound or another, something new emerges to change your perception of the track, which helps sustain interest through it's nearly 25-minute length.

It's clear after two discs that with this album, their only release of 2016 and their last album to date, that NSB are not content to settle back exclusively in the folk drone sound of their classic 2005 Dance of the Moon and the Sun, and are revisiting the more challenging, harsher sounds of the 2008-2009 period, the sounds of Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches and Daughters of Darkness. It's clear that the "horror drone" of that period was not just a phase they were going through at that time and have forgotten, but a specific form of drone they cherish and revisit when the mood strikes them.

Here's the track list for Disc 2:

1. Horror In Clay (22:25)
2. Sandy Cult (7:09)
3. Providence’s High Priests (9:48)
4. Carreta Del Muerto (4:55)
5. Algaes’ Figurines (24:48)

Aldebaran (2016)

I warned you that the end was coming, and here we now are at the last album in the Natural Snow Buildings discography.  We're done.  We made it.

The only hitch is 2016's Aldebaran, their last album to date, is a 6-disc, 5¾-hour album, and as I said for the similarly sized Daughters of Darkness, ain't nobody got that much time for one album.

I say "6-disc" but actually Aldebaran never saw physical release as CDs or vinyl LPs.  It was a 2016 Netlabel Day release by Vulpiano Records, and is available as 6 "virtual" discs in digital format only. It's really just 25 tracks that are organized into six suggested discs, but can really be grouped together in any way.  

Also, Vulpiano has the album available on their Bandcamp page for free download and streaming.  I do wonder about Natural Snow Building's business model, as most of their extensive discography is out of print and most of what's still available is available for free.  

In any event, rather than take on the entire mammoth recording in one gulp, we'll do it one virtual disc at a time, like we did for DoD and also to savor the last album in that long queue.  Disc 1 contains four tracks:

1. The Green Monolith (12:40)
2. The Never Dies (17:56)
3. Unknown Tongues (2:04)
4. The Blind (13:59)

Aldebaran was recorded between 2012 and 2014, but unlike the other albums from this period (Beyond the Veil and The Night Country) does not present their signature folk-drone sound but is closer to the industrial drone of DoD (2009) or the space drone of The Centuari Agent (2010).  Listen to opening track The Green Monolith to hear what I mean.

The Green Monolith consists of multiple layers of sustained guitar piled up over one another.  While not as harsh as some of their 2008 recordings, it's still a far cry from the pastoral sound of their folksier recordings.  The Never Dies continues in the same vein, with some of the guitar layers pealing like bells, while a short folk song underlies Unknown Tongues.  The Blind is probably the harshest track on this disc, and at times evokes the noise drone of the hellscape trilogy (Between the Real and the Shadow, The Wheel of Sharp Daggers, and Slayer of the King of Hell) without quite reaching that nails-on-a-blackboard level of intensity.

The question here is what am I going to do with my time after we're through these six discs?  Finally come out of quarantine and become a productive member of society once again?  Or find another prolific but obscure band to follow, like Pete Namlook? Or start on Mehdi and Solange's side projects (Isengrind and TwinSisterMoon)?

The Ladder (2015)

Believe it or not, this pandemic review of Natural Snow Building's discography, which started way back on March 23, is nearing the end.  We might actually finish this thing, which didn't seem like much of a possibility in March or April of this year.

It helps that NSB's infamous prolificity diminished in the 2010s.  2010 saw only one album (The Centauri Agent) and 2011 saw two (Waves of the Random Sea and Chants of Niflhelm).  2012 and 2014 each saw one studio album produced exclusively for sale at shows (Beyond the Veil and The Night Country) and one live album (Live Sheffield & London 2012 and Live at Cragg Vale), and nothing was released in 2013.  

As we noted the other day, 2015 saw the release of their album Terror's Horns.  But they also released 50 hand-numbered copies of a second CD, The Ladder, exclusively for special-edition preorder of Terror's Horns.  And that was it for 2015.  

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying they were slacking.  Most other bands don't produce six albums in six years, much less accompanied by two live albums and a full-length promotional album.  I'm only contrasting it with their previous prodigious output, such as the dozen albums of 2008 alone, many of which were multi-disc releases.

But anyway, yeah, we've got The Ladder.  This was recorded between 2013 and 2014 at Mehdi and Solange's home in Vitre, France, and is very similar in style and content to their other output during this period.  The drones are frequently spacey and ambient (Stellar Pit and Magic Bangles), but there's also their trademark folk songs (Comets Fall, Comets Slide) and some darker passages (Blood Meridian and the title track) to keep it interesting.  There's even a track reminiscent of Ennio Morricone's spaghetti-western soundtracks, 16 Girls In a Hole.   Solomon includes the first use of ambient field recordings in one of their songs that I can think of since the Dance of the Moon and the Sun era.

The Ladder was released by Ba Da Bing! Records, but unlike the other Ba Da Bing! recordings, it's not available on Spotify  I have no idea why not, and even more curious, digital downloads aren't available on Ba Da Bing!'s Bandcamp page.  The album, at only 50 copies, is naturally out of print, but used CDs can still be purchased (buyer beware) at $125 to $175 each.  It has been uploaded to YouTube, which is probably your best bet for hearing it.  I wish I could get my hands on a digital copy.

Here's the track list:

1. Cosmic Rays (4:56)
2. Comets Fall, Comets Slide (5:33)
3. Stellar Pit (12:41)
4. Magic Bangles (4:31)
5. Blood Meridian (1:39)
6. To Break Into Old Houses (And Never Get Caught) (5:10)
7. The Ladder (7:18)
8. Solomon (3:55)
9. Black Lanterns (2:41)
10. 16 Girls In A Hole (3:51)

Terror's Horns (2015)

We're now officially up to the year 2015 in our sheltered-in-place, pandemic review of the Natural Snow Buildings discography.  We might actually finish this little project before everyone in the whole world dies of covid-19!

Terror's Horns was released on September 1, 2015 by Ba Da Bing Records, the same label that re-released Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches.  The unusual thing about Terror's Horns is the brevity of the cuts (by NSB standards).  We've become used to hearing drones like the first two cuts of the album, Dawn On A Buck Skin and Saturna's Black Belt, go on for 15, 20, or more minutes - it seems odd, almost jarring, to hear them abruptly close after about three minutes. 

Even the longer tracks, like the 10-minute King in Yellow and 13-minute The Rising Portal, have enough  structure and changes to their composition that they sound like medleys of longer cuts.  The repeated crashing guitar chords in King in Yellow sounds like a quieter version of the same thing that Swans was doing at the time (cf., the intro to Bring the Sun from To Be Kind).  While I never thought I'd be making a comparison between the two bands, now that I think of it, much of Terror's Horns sound like a quieter, slightly slower, and slightly more organic version of mid-teens Swans.

NSB's fondness for horror imagery continues on Terror's Horns, and the artwork and song titles suggest American slasher films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes.  This,  along with 2008's Laurie Bird, is probably their most American album.  

Unlike most of the many other NSB recordings, Terror's Horns can actually be purchased, either through Ba Da Bing's website or Amazon or however you purchase music these days.  It's also available for streaming on Spotify and has been uploaded several times to YouTube.

Here's the track list:  

1. Dawn On A Buck Skin (3:21)
2. Saturna's Black Belt (2:52)
3. Twilight Bells, Terror's Horns (4:04)
4. King In Yellow (9:48)
5. People In The Hills (3:33)
6. Sun Tower (4:18)
7. The Rising Portal (12:57)
8. Orion Is Dead (4:02)

Live At Cragg Vale (2014)

Just like they did for the 2012 UK tour, Natural Snow Buildings released a live album from their 2014 European tour, but the set they chose to record was in the UK.  Recorded at the Robin Hood Inn in Cragg Vale, a village in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, England, on June 28, 2014, the show was described by the promoter as follows:

The show happened during Midsummer with the band playing in a white-walled room with two windows behind them looking over the valley.I had no lights on in the venue. As they played, the sun slowly set behind the venue so by the end of their set they were but shadows in the twilight. It was no ordinary show, it was something else in every possible meaning of the phrase.

Live at Cragg Vale was made from two separate feeds, a mixing-desk recording and an audience recording, mixed together.  I don't know if the YouTube video is the same recording as used for the album or if it's another fan's bootleg recording.  The album was released on cassette tape in November 2014 as a limited edition of 160 copies.  However, Arizona record label Was Ist Das? ("the best record label from Yorkshire with a German name in all of Arizona") has made the album available for streaming or for free download at Bandcamp.

A tracklist wasn't provided with  the release, but the final, encore song is The Cursed Bell from Dance of the Moon and the Sun, a staple of their live shows.

Here's a Google street-view picture of the Robin Hood Inn.

The Night Country (2014)

After a surprisingly limited number of releases in 2012, Natural Snow Buildings didn't release anything at all in 2013.  

2014 saw a European tour for them, and they self-released a limited edition (50 copies) CDR for sale at the shows.  Titled The Night Country, the album was subsequently uploaded by label Vulpiano Records for free download on Bandcamp.

This isn't a criticism, but there's nothing new here, nothing you haven't heard before from NSB.  The album is not atypical of late-period NSB and contains a few of their standard folk songs and several of their signature drones.  There are no harsh noise drones and no layers of squealing feedback. Sometimes spacey and ethereal, sometimes gently psychedelic, it's one of their more accessible albums and not a bad introduction to someone who wants to know what they're all about.

Here's the track list:

1. No Light Pollution (3:22)
2. Where Your Body Split (2:28)
3. Weird Meetings at the Water Castle (2:25)
4. You'll Become What You Fear the Most (8:51)
5. Eli's Song (1:59)
6. Season of the Slasher (5:21)
7. Rusty Knives Valley (17:38)
8. The Night Country (8:12)
9. Sister Ritual (5:49)
10. Sandman Traps (16:57)
11. Gothic Suburbia (6:48)

Monsters/Depths

2012 was not a particularly productive year for Natural Snow Buildings - a UK tour album (Beyond the Veil) for merch-table sale, a "bootleg" live album from that UK tour, and this short single - a lo-fi folk song, Monsters, on the A-Side and a short drone, Depths, on the B.  It's all over in less than nine minutes - for once, you don't have to open up Google Calendar and reschedule the events of your life to make the time to listen to one of their recordings.

And not only was that was it for 2012, but as far as I can see they didn't release anything in 2013. Quite a contrast with 2008's 12 albums.  

We don't pick this discography back up again until 2014.  

Natural Snow Buildings ‎– Live Sheffield & London 2012

As noted the other day, Natural Snow Buildings toured the UK for the first time in 2012.  They released a limited-edition album (Beyond the Veil) to sell at tour dates, and afterwards they released  a cassette tape recording of two of the performances.  Distribution was limited to only 250 copies and obviously they're all sold by now.

Their label, Blackest Rainbow, assisted with the release under the name "Blackest Bootlegs," claiming the cassette was a bootleg recording.  But how can an album, albeit cassette only, be a bootleg when it's released with the participation of the band and with the assistance of a record label?

According to the info on the cassette inserts, Side A was recorded at The Red House in Sheffield on Monday, March 13th, 2012, and Side B was recorded at The Victoria in Dalston, London, on Saturday, March 20th, 2012.  However, according to Blackest Bootlegs, "In true bootlegger style, we screwed up the dates on the insert, the actual dates of these recordings were 5th March (Sheffield) and 10th March (London)."  

I can't seem to find any track listings anywhere on line, and most of the recordings may very well be improvisations.  However, the first 15 minutes on Side A (Sheffield) are pretty clearly The Cursed Bell from The Dance of the Moon and the Sun.  The second cut is darker and more ominous, but I can't place it.  Judging by the tone, it could well be something off of Daughter of Darkness.

Side B (London) also opens with a version of The Cursed Bell, followed by a darker, more ominous song, and closes with an interesting third piece.  I wish that I could have been at either of those shows.

Beyond The Veil

Of the many odd and unexplainable aspects of the French folk-drone duo Natural Snow Buildings, one we haven't talked about is their inclination toward the English language.

Sure, I understand that all or at least most Europeans are at least bilingual, if not tri- or quad-lingual, and that English is not only effectively the universal language but also the predominant language in pop and rock music.

But Natural Snow Buildings, despite being French, title all of their albums with English names, give all of their tracks English names, wrote all their lyrics in English, and use exclusively English-language samples in the field recordings incorporated in their early work.  Based on accent, many of those recordings are from the American South and Appalachia.  Their album Shadow Kingdom even included a 16-page comic book written entirely in English.  If you didn't know they were French, you'd be forgiven for thinking them English or American (or Canadian or Australian, I guess).  Even the Beatles sang more lyrics in French than NSB.

A reasonable theory is that although they live in France, Brittany in the northern part of France at that, most of their audience and most of their shows are in England.  A reasonable theory, but also completely wrong.  First, NSB don't have an audience (just kidding, but it is a small if devoted audience).  But second, they didn't tour England until 2012, which is the year we are now up to in our covid-19 quarantine retrospective review.

For their first-ever tour of England, NSB produced a limited-release album, Beyond the Veil.  Only 300 copies were printed, and they were sold exclusively at the merch tables on their tour dates. Generally-speaking, one can call Beyond The Veil a folk-drone album, but more than that it's a nice sampler of the various approaches to folk-drone employed during their last several albums, including space-drone and ambient-drone, but without the nails-on-a -chalkboard noise drone of some of their 2008 albums.  At this point in their history (2012), NSB are clearly now in the fourth phase of their artistic trajectory following their post-rock phase (2001-2004), their folk-drone phase (2005-2007), and their noise-drone phase (2008-2009).  For the record, this is my favorite phase (although 2006's TDotMatS is still my favorite album of theirs).

Here's the track list:

1. Invoke / Summon (9:24)
2. Starless (9:41)
3. Bone Diadem (6:44)
4. Spells (5:45)
5. Beyond The Veil (9:52)
6. The Sixth, The Hand (8:51)
7. A Prophecy Fulfilled (8:00)
8. Children Of God (8:04)

Incubate 2011

I hope you're enjoying your Memorial Day weekend (while still being safe and socially distant, of course).  Let's take it easy this weekend and not work our way through another hour-long Natural Snow Bridges album but instead just savor what we've heard so far and enjoy one of the rare videos of them performing live.

Here they are performing in 2011, around the time of Waves of the Random Sea and Chants of Niflheim, at the Incubate Festival in Tilburg in The Netherlands.  We posted Part 2 of this performance a long while back, before we started this pandemic review of their discography, but skipped Part 1 because what did we know back then?

Both Mehdi and Solange are on electric guitar here.  Back during the 2002-2003 Pop In sets, Solange performed on cello.

Your guess is as good as mine what track they're playing here - it sounds like something from Daughter of Darkness to me.

Chants of Niflheim (2011)

Clocking in at a sleek 53:39, Natural Snow Building's second album of 2011, Chants of Niflheim, is the shortest album in their discography if one excludes their EPs.  

Another Blackest Rainbow release, Chants of Niflheim was recorded at home by Mehdi and Solange between January and March 2011.  It was a Record Store Day 2011 release limited to 500 copies and is now out of print and has not been reissued.  However, you can listen to YouTube uploads of Chants of Niflheim and you can still find the occasional used copy for sale.

The album contains two relatively long drones, Templars Ritual and H. Scudder, separated by Chants of Niflheim Parts I and II.  This is another very spacey album, not unlike The Centauri Agent, bordering on the ambient, like Waves of the Random Sea, with none of the noise-drone elements of Night Coercion.  The closing track, H. Scudder, contains some of the vintage folk-drone sound but overall the album is very dreamy, psychedelic stuff, and even if the cover art still depicts nightmare imagery, it's all very gentle and soothing. 

And just like that, snap!, we're through 2011.

Waves of the Random Sea

We're now in the year 2011 of our Natural Snow Buildings pandemic marathon (we started in 2001).  There are only two albums representing 2011 and together they average about an hour each - no 6-CD marathons to slog through this year.

At this point in their career, NSB are very good at doing what they do.  In Waves of the Random Sea, all the usual elements of an NSB drone are present - the repeated guitar loops, the cooing wordless vocals, and tribal percussion - but somehow it results in a slightly different outcome.  While it's basically the same approach and same instruments as in last year's spacey The Centauri Agent, Waves is perhaps their most overtly ambient album yet.  While distinctly NSB, there are passages that could be mistaken for Harold Budd.

The album was released by label Blackest Rainbow, which previously released the 6-CD Daughter of Darkness and the 2-CD Shadow Kingdom.  Waves of the Random Sea was released as a (single!) CD and a two-disc LP.  The vinyl version, which contains one additional song not on the CD, was limited to 750 copies.  I don't know how many copies of the CD version were released, but Blackest Rainbow's Bandcamp page lists the album as "Sold Out" and doesn't have it available for streaming or digital download.  About the only way to listen to it now is to stream the YouTube uploads.

So the take-away here is that NSB, using their standard means and methods, have created in Waves of the Random Sea an ambient album from their sound, as opposed to previous folk-drone versions (although you'll hear some of that) or space-drone versions (ditto) or noise-drone versions or even post-rock versions.

Here are the track list and lengths:

1. The Waves Of The Random Sea (9:56)
2. This Ice Fortress (12:30)
3. Through Breaches In The Layer Of Fog  (18:14)
4. Abduction Dream (3:45)
5. Drift The Water Soul (20:25)
6. Still Desert (13:54)

The song titles, along wit the cover art and of course the music itself, all evoke an ethereal drift ina formless void.  This is music for an opium dream.

The Centauri Agent

Our coronavirus, shelter-in-place, quarantine project has been to explore the entire Natural Snow Buildings discography, and so far we've followed them from their 2001 origins as a sort of post-rock, Godspeed-type ensemble, through their Dance of the Moon and the Sun folk-drone period of 2006, through their 2008 Night Coercion noise-drone phase, and finally to their 2009 return to folk drone with The Shadow Kingdom.  

So it's pretty much anybody's guess what 2010 would bring, and we probably shouldn't be surprised to be surprised.  In 2010, the prolific duo of NSB released but one album (remember, they released 12 in 2008 alone), The Centauri Agent, a sci-fi, outer-space take on their drone sound.

Unlike many of their previous self-released albums, The Centauri Agent was released by Vulpiano Records as a free-for-download album.  Although it's considered a "double LP" with two defined parts, it never saw physical release as a CD or LP, but just as MP3 or FLAC files.  You can download it for free from Vulpiano's Bandcamp page,  although if you want just the 41-minute opening track, Our Man From Centauri, for some reason it will cost you one US dollar.  I mean, a dollar for one song but free for all 11?

According to Vulpiano, 

”Our Man From Centauri sets the stage, a cosmic, sprawling opener with themes that continue on into The Accidental Remote Viewer, before fizzling out into static. Part Two is comprised of nine beautiful and intense tracks (particular stand-outs including The Psychic Circle/Uchronia, The Storm of Resurrection, and Solar Flares). Lovely and intricately woven as ever, while frequently heading off into new and challenging sonic territory, Mehdi and Solange have created yet another very special work of musical art with The Centauri Agent!"

That's not inaccurate, but fails to point out that The Psychic Circle/Uchronia and Black Holes revisit the folk drone sound and are some of NSB's most beautiful tracks in that genre.  While Part One (Our Man From Centauri and The Accidental Remote Viewer) is basically a long cosmic meditation, Part Two more closely follows the TDotMatS format of folk songs and folk drone interspersed with longer drones, albeit of a more spacey variety.  Here is the track list with times:

1. Our Man From Centauri (41:14)
2. The Accidental Remote Viewer (11:30)
3. The Psychic Circle/Uchronia (10:31)
4. Black Holes (4:25)
5. The Storm of Resurrection (10:54)
6. Moscow Signal (2:51)
7. Phantom Twin (2:59)
8. Stuttering Probe (9:16)
9. Solar Flares (2:56)
10. Emergency Network Farewell Broadcast (3:52)
11. Memories Found in a Bill From a Small Animal Vet (6:29)

 And that's it for 2010!  Another year, another masterpiece!  On to 2011!