Hidden Rooms Sessions I

‘Hidden Rooms Sessions I’ is the first instalment of a new trilogy from this Tunisian outfit, consisting of obscurantist, atmospheric black metal of a decidedly drab aesthetic. But given the sheer quantity of artists and releases that fall under these banners the descriptors seem almost superfluous. Once one gets past the rather understated opening number ‘They Learned to Suffer in Silence’ with its stilted, reverb driven clean guitar, the wider textural package of this music manages to be almost unbearably sparse, yet fraught with a tension and poise rarely seen within modern black metal.

This is largely down to two elements that Ayyur manipulate that few others seem willing to delve into: frustrated momentum, and silence. ‘An Empty Hand has Nothing to Give’ opens with a galloping tempo and a driving black metal riff reminiscent of the Ukrainian style, but this pleasing framework dissolves away almost immediately after it is established. It’s as if Ayyur wish to comment on the triumphalist aspects of this music, only to have it slowly melt away into air, leaving nothing but an overwhelming perception of emptiness.

They use elements of doom metal to emphasise these expanses of silence. But again, there is no wash of droning chords filling out the sound withn sustained distortion, but rather achingly lengthy pauses stretched between reverb driven clean guitar, a sudden crash of drums which disappear just as quickly into void, with nothing but ghostly fragile visages of clean melody left to stitch together the empty expanses of sound.

This frustrated momentum stretches across the entire EP, to the point where any transition between tracks is all but indiscernible, and entirely redundant. We are instead given a series of recognisable signifiers from drab black metal, depressive doom metal, post metal, and ambient, and left to slowly witness their decay into near total non-existence, as each olive branch of familiarity that Ayyur offer to the listener melts into the overwhelming backdrop of silence that pervades this EP.

Even the vocals indulge in this teasing push and pull of expectation vs. payoff, with nothing but a monotonous spoken word narration occupying the space where strained howls of distorted morass should sit. It may sound awfully cliché, but ‘Hidden Rooms Sessions I’ is one of those releases that makes one stop and take stock. Not of one’s life necessarily, or meaning thereof, but more a commentary on the music it mirrors. All of the fanfare, the bombast, the clutter of information that haunts extreme metal, all dissolves away on this EP, forcing is to reconsider its purpose, its goal, and ultimately its appeal. Ayyur strip away this ancillary furniture, leaving us only the sparsest of musical landscapes to inhabit, existing in perpetual confrontation with the lurking chasm behind it all, a patient force awaiting its final and inevitable triumph over the superfluous activity of extreme metal as a collective endeavour.

Originally published at Hate Meditations