So during the pandemic, Colin Marston and Ryan Lipynsky teamed up on a project. Am I the only one thinking it’s about damn time? The former is probably as much known as a producer as a musician at this point, but I’ll always remember seeing Marston wailing away on Warr guitar at CBGB’s in 2005 as Behold… the Arctopus! supported the Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning EP. I think Psyopus was also on that bill? It was quite a day to be alive.

Anyhoozle, dude has gone on to participate in Gorguts, Krallice, the underrated drone outfit Byla, which collaborated with Jarboe, and so on. Lipynsky, meanwhile, has diligently served as frontman of Unearthly Trance since the turn of the century and taken part in an entire spectrum of acts besides, including The Howling Wind, Serpentine Path, Green Dragon, and a ton of others. Both based in Brooklyn, both wildly creative, it seems inevitable that they’d eventually work together.

Oh, hello Arelseum. The new outfit has already issued a bunch of harsh noisy noise noise-type stuff on Bandcamp and Sleeping Giant Glossolalia will present their new album, Arelseum III, on tape, along with their prior, to-date-digital-only works.

The PR wire tells it like this:

ARELSEUM: members of Krallice and Unearthly Trance to release new album “Arelseum III” via Sleeping Giant Glossolalia; new track streaming

Sleeping Giant Glossolalia presents the June 18th release of Arelseum III, the new album by Arelseum.

Arelseum is the new project of Colin Marston (Krallice, Gorguts, Dysrhythmia) and Ryan Lipynsky (Unearthly Trance, The Howling Wind, Reeking Aura).

In addition to a digital release, Sleeping Giant Glossolalia will release the album on cassette as part of a trilogy of cassettes: Arelseum, Arelseum II, Arelseum III.

Stream new track “Woods,” from Arelseum III, here:
https://sleepinggiantglossolalia.bandcamp.com/album/arelseum-iii

Through their many respective projects, Marston and Lipynsky have spent the past two decades prowling the extreme and experimental depths of metal, and have helped move the genre forward. Acquainted since the early 2000s as prolific members of the New York scene, Marston and Lipynsky began Arelseum in 2020 during the pandemic. Arelseum sees the duo combine their talents in an entirely new way: cinematic synth-scapes, for fans of ’70s sci-fi epics, ’80s slasher flicks, and dungeon synth. From suffocating tension to placid tranquility, Arelseum paints vivid scenes using deliciously retro sounds.

Marston, working from his famed Queens, NY studio, Menegroth The Thousand Caves (where he has engineered, mixed and mastered music by all of his own projects as well as such artists as Agalloch, Liturgy, Prurient, and Kelly Moran), states: “It was born out of the remoteness of the pandemic. Ryan starts all the songs and sends me the multitrack with the title. I overdub keys and drums, then edit, arrange and mix. So it’s almost like he’s the singer-songwriter who hands the nice, simple and effective song over to the producer, and I just over-produce the f*ck out of it and accidentally make it LESS commercial. Haha!”

Rather than pinning down any specific musical influences, Lipynsky makes this statement: “The concepts at play are the ideas that go through your head when you are between being barely awake and asleep. Inspiration through exhaustion. The ideas reveal themselves in a unique way that only makes sense when it is complete. This band is about instinctual creativity and the art form of collaboration.”

Arelseum III and the Arelseum cassette trilogy mark another high point for Sleeping Giant Glossolalia, the Brooklyn-based label responsible for an expertly curated slew of releases by artists spanning metal, rock, noise, and electronic genres – Shit and Shine, Couch Slut, Growing, Gnaw, Nastie Band, and Urwelt, to name a few.

Arelseum III tracklist:
1) Owl
2) Below
3) Crux
4) Woods
5) Eleven
6) Meteor

Ryan Lipynsky: contact mics, keyboards, stylophone
Colin Marston: feedback noise, simmons electronic drums, finger drums, keyboards

https://arelseum.bandcamp.com/
http://www.sleepinggiantglossolalia.com/
https://sleepinggiantglossolalia.bandcamp.com/

Arelseum, Arelseum III (2021)

Arseleum, “Swamps”

The Obelisk Questionnaire is a series of open questions intended to give the answerer an opportunity to explore these ideas and stories from their life as deeply as they choose. Answers can be short or long, and that reveals something in itself, but the most important factor is honesty.

Based on the Proust Questionnaire, the goal over time is to show a diverse range of perspectives as those who take part bring their own points of view to answering the same questions. To see all The Obelisk Questionnaire posts, click here.

Thank you for reading and thanks to all who participate.

The Obelisk Questionnaire: Anthony Di Franco of Urwelt, JFK, Ramleh, Skullflower, etc.

—

How do you define what you do and how did you come to do it?

It’s possible that I’m a frustrated science-fiction writer or film maker who makes records. When I was much younger I always thought I’d get into sci-fi writing or film, but I got possessed by the urge to make music in my teens and that became the direction I headed in. A lot of the ideas I invest in the music I make, and the themes I explore in the sounds, artwork, titles and lyrics come from ideas rooted in speculative fiction and hypothetical scenarios that I imagine and then try to frame in a track or an album.

Describe your first musical memory.

Listening to Holst’s “Mars, The Bringer of War” for the first time when I was about six years old and it being the most exciting thing I’d ever heard.

Describe your best musical memory to date.

In all honesty there’s too many to choose from, but I’ve picked one that captures a snapshot in time: In 1991, I was 19 and playing in a band called Skullflower and we were recording an album at a studio in London. We always booked late night sessions, starting at 9PM and finishing around 6AM the following day. I remember the feeling of catharsis after finishing a session and driving back home in the early morning, still buzzing, my ears still ringing and the sun coming up while listening to the session tape on the car stereo. I still get that same feeling travelling home after a good session now.

When was a time when a firmly held belief was tested?

I would say during the recent COVID 19 restrictions and lockdown in the UK.

Where do you feel artistic progression leads?

I would probably go along with the old Albert Camus quote that: “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” That seems to ring true the older I get.

How do you define success?

Realising projects, in whatever form they take. It could be a track, an album or a live show or something else but once one has finished you’re on to the next one, and then the next.

What is something you have seen that you wish you hadn’t?

The first 10 minutes of Battlefield Earth.

Describe something you haven’t created yet that you’d like to create.

I would really like to do a live show with some kind of surround sound system.

What do you believe is the most essential function of art?

Pleasure.

Something non-musical that you’re looking forward to?

Going on holiday with my family and swimming with my daughter.

https://www.facebook.com/Urwelt-111036873606621/
https://twitter.com/jfk_ax
http://www.sleepinggiantglossolalia.com/
https://sleepinggiantglossolalia.bandcamp.com/
https://liesrecords.com/
https://liesrecords.bandcamp.com/

Urwelt, Distant Galaxies Collide (2021)

JFK, Avalanche Zone (2021)

Slow crawling malevolence, rich low end from a standup bass and vicious screams, Bludded Head come across more about the tension than the release, though there’s a fair bit of that as well. Not in the Melvins sense, where a verse riff kicks in and everyone goes, “Oh wow, aren’t the Melvins so weird?,” but in the next round of screaming, or, in the case of “Shitsucker Blues,” from the Denton, Texas, three-piece’s upcoming full-length, Reign in Bludd, in building a wall of noise that directly contrasts the minimalism and somehow ties back into it at the same time. The album, bless its punny heart, will be out in October on Sleeping Giant Glossolalia. It’s their third.

The story, according to the PR wire, goes like this:

BLUDDED HEAD Announce Release of New Album REIGN IN BLUDD

Reign in Bludd is released on 6th October 2014 via Sleeping Giant Glossolalia

Hailing from the North Texan city of Denton, Bludded Head was initially formed out of an appreciation for Henry Cow’s avant-garde leanings, La Monte Young-inspired minimalism and the sheer punishing volume of doom metal.

Yet this past year it has also served as something of a vibratory vessel of discovery for its mercurial founding member Nevada Hill. A vessel that today, from where we stand and Bludded Head perform, continues to turn out some of the loudest, loneliest and most vulnerable noises you’re likely to hear in 2014. A remarkable truth when you consider that Hill was diagnosed with melanoma – a rare form of skin cancer – in August 2013.

While Reign In Bludd, Bludded Head’s third and unquestionably best album to date picks up where Bludded Head (released earlier this year via Sleeping Giant Glossolalia) left off in its anti-commercial sentiment and cathartic bummer jams, never before has their sound felt so sincere or visceral. From the densely weathered riff that lumbers through ‘Shitsucker Blues’, lyrically drifting in and out of abject consciousness but sonically landing a punch somewhere between the The Body, Noothgrush and Corrupted, to the perfectly pitched cover of Codeine’s ‘Pea’ Reign In Bludd is as about as transformative as they come.

Recorded by Matthew Barnhart at Electrical Audio while the band were in tour throughout May of 2014 Reign In Bludd will be released on 6th October 2014 via Sleeping Giant Glossolalia on 180g audiophile and limited to 300 copies.

TRACK LISTING:
1. Shitsucker Blues (8:28)
2. Fuckitdry (4:07)
3. Pouring Rain (10:29)
4. Pea (3:46)

BLUDDED HEAD:
Nevada Hill – Vocals, Guitar
Ryan Williams – Upright Bass
Jon Teague – Drums

http://bluddedhead.com/
http://bluddedhead.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/BLudDedHead
http://instagram.com/the_bludded_head
https://twitter.com/gnarvada
http://www.sleepinggiantglossolalia.com/
http://sleepinggiantglossolalia.bandcamp.com/
https://soundcloud.com/sleepinggiantglossolalia

Bludded Head, “Shitsucker Blues”