Murmuüre

Murmuüre interested me for a long time for two reasons: its style and its only album’s extremely high rating. The solo project was drenched in mystery for its whole short existence, with the only information about its founder, Felix Naos, being his name. Its only self-titled 2010 album was released under Cold Void Emanations, a minor French label which released several products by underground black metal projects before shutting down in 2014, just after releasing cassette copies of the first album of Fluisteraars’s debut album. Allegedly, the project signed under Paradigms Recordings (more specialized in ambient/drone) for the release of following material, which never came to be. As of today, it’s uncertain whether the project is disbanded or not.

Opening with an orchestral synth recording which sounds coming straight from the 50’s, Primo Vere kicks off with inserts of various sorts, including fuzzy guitar, folk instruments describing grievous A# minor soundscapes, atonal, out-of-tune glissandos over strings and guitar harmonies that maintain order among the arrangements, with occasional interruptions. Around 2:19, the surreal atmosphere suddenly ends with heavily reverberated drum programming, bass and distant, shouted vocals joined the arrangements, all the while maintaining the base chording, but the focus lies not in sledge-hammering (actually, only the first ten seconds), but rather as a sort of jam where various sources of sound are stitched together and jammed upon.

Other tracks feature the same weird writing with specific differences: Reincarnate spends one minute with an intro based on calm, distant space-themed synth pads and electric piano, to whom chiptune-like guitar/synth recording is progressively inserted in a more subdued, slower approach, Torch Bearer is an interlude with obscured string drones and fog-like bass (cut down to 2:16 in the vinyl edition due to length issues), Amethyst starts melancholic with G-minor intervals and is suddenly interrupted by ballad-like distortion around 1:30 and letting go just before its end: the remaining two tracks follow the blueprint of the formers’ formula. Production meshes high-fidelity synths and effect-heavy drumming with crystal-clear, but fundamentally noisy guitar buzz and indecipherable vocals: a bizarre mix that takes out any possible emotion or recognizable cliché.

After all these years of listening, I still don’t know how to categorize this album. Sure, there’s plenty of distortion and loud digital buzz, but the focus is not violent at all, and the music, with its enveloping arrangements and disorganized patterns, sounds closer to a post-hardcore/new age hybrid than mere atmospheric-black. The repetition of A# minor intervals indicates a common thread among the tracks, but the melodies are more distinguishable by the arrangements underneath and not-so-subtle chord changes. There’s plenty of dramatic melody, especially on Amethyst, but the persistent dissonant jamming and treble clashing interludes take of way most of its musicality. Even the presence of background, sparse vocals seem wasted. I swear I can also hear an actual intercom at 5:02 of L’adieu au soleil.

I would give a higher rating due to the soothing harmonies of Amethyst, but overall, this album is penalized by its total lack of mood. In the attempt to make his music both sophisticated and down-to-earth, the founder came up with a short, enigmatic piece of questions that are never solved, but are left in their imperfect state, barely making an impact. I think closest project that attempted to merge such opposites with much better results is Sadness, by Damián Antón Ojeda, and even then, both the projects can be barely compared. Far from an underground classic.

This is what it's all about! The deeply personal ritual of loosing yourself emotionally to music.

The attention to detail here is what really makes one of the most transcendentally explosive metal albums ever crafted. The wide variety of instruments, the incredible sonic layering, delirious time signatures and some of the most incredibly produced drum tones combine into a singular force that's yet to be replicated anywhere else in the entire cannon of metal music.

Some people call this black metal because of the sheer sonic nihilism and gothic album art but when you research this phenomenal one-man-band from France you realize this record is not a mere genre collection of "songs" but a brutal and genuine ode to catharsis, recorded over years of personal experimentation with sound and its effects on human emotions.

I have been listening to this album on repeat since 2010 and while a lifelong metal fan off all styles and sub-genres I've yet to hear anything else quite like it. It's pure, raw, honest and brutal while being incredibly lush and psychedelic at the same time. This incredible sound combined with the added mystery surrounding this albums creation and distribution and "Felix" the musician behind it all makes this work an absolute enigma in the world of underground "black" metal.

This is made further evident by the fact that Murmuüre spent 4 years creating this monolithic self-titled album and then never released any other music, effectively disbanding immediately. The sheer time and effort that when into creating this masterpiece combined with the rarity of its sound and the scarcity of its release and subsequent re-releases only further elevates it to mythical status as music like this so rarely ever finds an audience.

This band has never toured, this music was never intended to be played live, there is no sequel. This is a deeply personal journey best taken with you eyes closed, while meditating on your own inevitable mortality.

Gatekeepers like myself look at artistic ‘extremity’ in context; as a means to an end. The window it opens for sui generis forms of expression; granted meaning in the light of the other key marker of quality; broadly characterised as narrative composition. This explains why black metal fans are drawn more to folk, classical, and select ambient music over noise, industrial, and avant-garde styles. This is because the features black metal shares with the latter genres are surface level; the shell of the car, not the engine. It also explains my in-built suspicion of projects that borrow heavily from the black metal aesthetically whilst playing down the ‘metal’. This can be read as shorthand for ‘removing the story from the music’. It’s often labelled a traditionalist’s argument, but smashing conventions is only meaningful if it leads somewhere. How we decide the value and purpose of this ‘somewhere’ is a discussion for another day perhaps. For now I will admit that I so often frame this point in the negative – calling out artists I believe to be guilty of covert wanton destruction – that it's worth redressing this balance by looking at an artist who represents a tentative step towards furthering black metal’s genre alchemy into a more disciplined beast.

In keeping with France’s habit of producing black metal at the very limits of music, Murmuure were a brief flash in the pan that caught the attention of a few attentive fans. They released one self-titled album back in 2010. It expands on the convention smashing exploits of Abruptum, Havohej, Beherit, and Black Funeral. Although these artists are connected by only the loosest of common threads, the underlying philosophy is markedly similar. By identifying the pursuits shared between black metal and industrial, ambient, and noise, this album works precisely because it is not identifiably one ‘genre’ with multifarious influences subsequently grafted on. Rather it smashes styles, tones, percussive techniques, and moods together and harnesses the resulting alchemy. This inexactness goes some way to explain the huge divergence in quality across artists with a similar approach. But at its core it functions like a testing ground. Leaving others to observe the results, and cherry pick the viable specimens for use in more pedestrian output.

Murmuure push at the very outer edge of this sonic laboratory as far as metal is concerned. Some elements will be familiar; the harsh, tinny guitar tone, the keyboards rooted in dark ambient, the Paul Ledney style of percussive bombast, the screeching vocals. But these are twisted through sequences of static, obscured samples, and minimal synths, which are the real driving force of this album, with whatever spare parts borrowed from black metal existing merely to service an aesthetic need.

So setting aside an analysis of Murmuure’s unorthodox marriage of sounds, the driving artistic force beneath is one of progressive contrast, of conflict; it’s not a piece of music that boldly takes us on a journey, rather we witness it struggle its way out of a hole. And at the end of this ascension, we are merely greeted with further despondency. When the guitars are first introduced for example, they are structureless chaos, before diverging around a short refrain. Once a determination is reached we are given a period of calm, chiefly characterised by dark ambience. This is where gentle string chord progressions take over from the oppressive drums and static. When this gentle mid-section gives way to guitars once again, they are far more restrained, settling on chords that strike a mournful but hopeful tone in contrast to the preceding oppressive qualities. They work with the synths as opposed to directly contrasting them. And despite the attempts to fudge this internal coherence behind yet more discordant static, a melodic progression is clearly discernible beneath the cacophony. Where initially the guitars were antagonists to the melody, in the second half they are its defenders, and eventually concede ground to the synths once again, as the latter takes over to close the album by picking up the same chord progressions in bastardised form; dissonance and major/minor key conflict are dragged into a sonic uncanny valley of sorts.

Ultimately, the point of all this detail is to demonstrate the internal logic and purpose to this piece of music. The alchemy of components is interesting. But it’s a mere fragment of the story. What’s more interesting about Murmuure (and makes them more worthy of attention than many experimental projects that harvest black metal’s organs), is not so much that it borrows from black metal, or even that it does so whilst retaining an internal structure and logic, but rather how each disparate element informs this structure. The competing tones and styles at work here have their own inherent qualities (a distorted guitar’s virtues are very different to a flute’s for instance), and Murmuure seems not only aware of this, but take advantage of these qualities by using them to define how each will inform the progression of the album.

This operates at the very edge of what we would call ‘metal’, but in mashing together metal influences into this mutating cocktail, it is part of metal’s story in virtue of this fusion with other peripheral styles. Because fans of albums like ‘Murmuure’ will praise it for the ingredients in the cocktail alone, and hold it up as ‘music without boundaries’, without realising that its precisely Murmuure’s boundaries that make it an interesting release. To extend the cocktail analogy further, anyone can slap together an unconventional set of ingredients, but it requires a degree of skill and knowledge to give them meaning, to monitor the quantities and processes applied to the ingredients before they are called upon to play their part in forming a greater whole. ‘Music without boundaries’ is a pretty meaningless mantra. What boundaries? Why those boundaries and not others? Set by whom? In what manner are we breaking them? To what extent? To what end? What gives this act meaning? Gatekeepers like myself – who claim that music should have an administrative border – are deeply unsexy. But when you know what that border is, and why you’re crossing it, proper papers in place and all, you end up with an album like ‘Murmuure', a paragon in its field.

Originally published at Hate Meditations<a/.

This album, the one-man project of a Frenchman calling himself "One," came out last year in extremely limited releases on CD and tape. It received some rave reviews, but went relatively unnoticed. This may have something to do with the fact that critics totally misrepresented it, and consequently pushed it to the wrong audience.

Let's start with this gag-inducing excerpt from a review by the tastemakers at Aquarius Records: "One moment it sounds like blackened Cocteau Twins, the next like some post rock band covering Abruptum as covered by Alcest." They also refer to it as an "M83 style retro electronic haze." Oof.

What's going on here? The Aquarians (and their ilk) perceive the album as a "dizzying" array of cool influences grafted onto a black metal sound, with the end result being "some sort of twisted abstract avant black metal." Their understanding of the album, and maybe even their enjoyment of it, revolves around the seeming diversity of its style. It impresses them because it enables critical namedropping on an epic scale.

Now let's pull the rug out from under them. This isn't black metal. Murmuure is ritual industrial, no bones about it. It's clear that One really likes black metal and has made an effort to incorporate black metal sounds in the guitars and vocals, but the pervasive influence here is Coil. Indeed, One hasn't made any effort to hide this. The ominous synth lines and crushing bass synth? The keening Japanese flute, the swelling strings, the primal horns? The heavy use of cymbals and other percussion to create textures? This is all very much in line with the sounds Coil explored on How To Destroy Angels and Scatology, and especially on the second half of Horse Rotorvator. Even more important, Murmuure evokes that feel of esoteric paganism. Once you realize that Murmuure is an industrial band, all the seemingly disparate "things that are not black metal" come together. On an industrial album, it's not weird to obscure everything behind waves of warm distortion. It's not weird to cut up guitar parts. It's not weird to use dozens of tracks to sculpt dense, overpowering layers of sound.

So, if this album isn't some bizarre cocktail of black metal and really hip reference points, why should we like it? Because it's insanely creative, well-written music. One has totally taken apart an original guitar improvisation, turning it into a series of painstakingly crafted compositions, but he has preserved the feeling of spontaneity. The album is filled with beautiful moments that rarely if ever repeat themselves, though they always seem to echo something that came before. Murmuure's melodies--if you can call them that--move with a logic that is totally their own, pulling the drums far beyond conventional time and rhythm. This band gives us no "sections" or "riffs," just the immanent process of music coming into being. With its emphasis on the act of creation (or emergence), the album completely transcends formula.

If that isn't enough, One succeeds in channeling the spirit of Coil while remaining wholly his own artist. He has arrived at an equilibrium, a productive dialogue with the voices of Balance and Christopherson. With these powerful allies, he has quite literally created a potent work of magick.

(Slightly adapted from my original review at www.trialbyordeal666.blogspot.com)

This is one amazing black metal recording in which a one-hour guitar improvisation is layered over and edited with various strata of sound textures, field recordings and effects, to which a rhythmic structure consisting of preprogrammed drum rhythms and live drumming recordings is attached, resulting in what sounds like a compressed 30-minute excerpt of a soundtrack to a crazed film extravaganza! This self-titled debut comes modestly wrapped in a brown cover with two cheesy illustrations - it doesn't even have the benefit of a jewel case to house the packaging - but within the cover and the other fold-outs lurks a mighty hydra beast with each head steeped in a different musical genre, and all heads co-existing rather uneasily on the one body, all wanting to go in their separate ways at once.

At under half an hour, this album should pose no problem being taken in by listeners in one hit, provided they are well warned of what they'll be exposed to. Each of the six tracks describes an aspect of a universe completely unrelated to any of the other worlds the other tracks delineate. Intro track "Primo Vere" must have sprung out of one of famous Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa's old 1950s samurai flicks with its piercing flute and vague exotic Oriental music ambience. Conch shells blare and lutes flutter like butterflies before being king-hit by a tsunami of thundering drums, high-pitched silver-toned guitar wails and bellowing, raging vocals. Now that was just the first track! "Reincarnate" is a slightly more peaceful if demented track of heaving vibrato guitar lines; drums soon kick in though and the music builds steadily towards a juggernaut climax that, uh, is never reached.

A different, more murky underwater derangement is present in "Torch Bearer" which passes into another plane of existence, one filled with crystal beauty under which lurk strange unknowable phantoms that threaten to break through the silver barriers. Come "Amethyst" and the landscape is a mix of fairyland and dark sinister Gothika that explodes into mad chiming guitars, hard-thumping drums and rich, spiky-toned string and keyboard melodies.

"L'Adieu au Soleil" is fairly straightforward bombastic black metal put under an alkaline filter that gives the music a burnt, bleached-out effect with lots of background sizzle and submerged vocals fighting against being buried under so many treated layers of texture. "Disincarnate", the outro track and the nearest Murmuure get to the obligatory all-ambient piece that most BM albums seem to have these days, combines spacey tone effects with a hellish if rather static church-organ drone. On its own this track isn't bad but after everything else that's come, seen and conquered (clobbered more like) the brain cells, the closing track is disappointing. An album such as this should have dunked itself in a pool of gasoline, set itself alight and insisted on going down screaming in a fiery holocaust of blazing guitar strings and sticks and skins beating themselves senseless into a pile of electrified smoking ash.

A stupendous if short debut that really could have continued for another 10 - 15 minutes at least. There's a cramped feel to some tracks as though squeezing the music into a 30-minute package has somehow increased its intensity and bombast. The whole album has an insane quality with ridiculously shrill flutes, lunatic melodies and quicksilver guitar sounds animated by excessive electricity surges. The percussion can be over-heavy and stompy at times and more variation in pace, maybe even some death metal thrashing, would have enlivened the album more. Though it hardly needs to be more demented than it is. A highly recommended work that needs the grotesque surreal horror flick to suit.