Rife with intangible horrors, the three-track self-titled debut from Peruvian blackened noisemakers Quemos seemed to have originally appeared in 2012, but has been picked up for physical issue by Japan’s Golden Procession. Easy to see why, as it’s a cohesive execution of immersive, mood-altering darkness, a grueling stint of bum-out malevolence. Not raging, barely moving, the Lima-based four-piece use spacious minimalism to set the stage for dark arts drama, throat-singing vocals à la Attila Csihar gurgling atop atmospherics bleak enough to absorb the light around them. Quemos make it quickly apparent they hold structure in little regard, as the sprawling 26-minute opener “The Portal Must be Opened with the Blood of Their Throats” gradually unfurls — ancient and dismal — over its first several minutes, drone and ambient cymbal work shifting into the emerging crag and lurching progression. All four members of the band have adopted noms de guerre for the project, and the CD credits High Priest of Moab with “chanting and scriptures” (aka vocals), Harvester of the Dying Sun with “seeds of knowledge and soundscapes of madness” (I’m guessing guitar) the well-hyphenated He-Who-Walks-Among-the-Shadows with “discipline, aural obscurity and beyond” (bass maybe, or noise) and Kenotic Deconsecrator with “unholy blasts of darkness” (drums). Fair enough. A little over the top, maybe, but that’s clearly the point. The mention of Moab is particularly interesting since the band take their name from a Moabite deity, so at least there’s some consistency in the thematics at play.

Whether that’s the god to which the lyrics of “The Portal Must be Opened with the Blood of Their Throats” and its 19-minute follow-up “Light is No Longer with Us” seem to be making offerings, I don’t know, but the two tracks and Quemos‘ much-shorter instrumental finale, “Dawn of Moab,” reside firmly in the cultish sphere of black metal artistry. For having drums credited as “blasts,” there are no blastbeats. Even at its most sonically active, Quemos barely gets above a crawl, tempo-wise. Its brutality derives from the ambience and the harshness of some of its noise, like that in the middle of “Light is No Longer with Us.” That’s the case early in the opener as well, though it’s not particularly slow about arriving at the rumble ‘n’ gurgle that provides its crux. Within two minutes the vocals and drums have arrived. Noise and feedback swells and recedes in the mix around, but basically that’s what carries the track through the bulk of its time. The lyrics are a long sacrificial incantation — largely indecipherable from the audio, but presented in the CD liner — and it’s not so much a march that ensues as an excruciating stumble. Guitar arrives past five minutes in for one of several short-lived stays peppered throughout every couple of minutes, and as “The Portal…” moves toward 17 minutes, the drums cut out completely and the vocals stand alone over raw, droning noise. That’s the beginning of a final build, but even in its payoff, at about the 24-minute mark, the song maintains the tension that has driven it forward all along.

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