Finnish extreme industrial two-piece Vorare are releasing two albums this month, and the Rope Tower collaboration LP pairing them with Geneva, Switzerland, experimentalist noisemaker Earthflesh is the latter of them, set to issue on May 31. That puts it just one week after the standalone Atelier lands May 24 as the follow-up to 2022’s Voyeur (review here), and that record too is a barrage of death-stench machine cruelty. The concurrent offerings began their respective recording processes about two years ago, but where Atelier was finished in May 2022, the five-track/30-minute so-dark-it’s-like-you-read-the-news Rope Tower started toward the end of that summer and seems to have been longer in its poisonous steeping.

Earthflesh earlier this year released the 39-minute single-tracker Light-Matter-Spirit — also stylized all-caps — and amid the panicked pulsations of “Seepage” premiering in the ropes-and-hoods-themed video below, the effectively noise-on-noise blend feels particularly harsh, even in the context of what Vorare have done before. It all seems to decay in the middle of the six-minute piece, with indecipherable blown-out growling to offer no real comfort and a later drag of beat offset by various electronic hums before it ends with distorted drone. That’s also how “Ovigerous” leads off Rope Tower, but the opener hits less immediately with its beat, instead using that drone and various piercing high frequencies to set the backdrop for the cruelty about to unfold.

I’ll note that “Seepage” isn’t the first reference to bodily discharge from Vorare, whose debut EP was 2022’s The Drainage Rituals (review here), but together with Earthflesh, the foreboding ambience wrought in Rope Tower is its own thing. Listening front-to-back as “Haswell” slowly fades-in its threat with howls like distant mechanized beasts or war horns echoing over devastated landscapes, the feeling is like when you stand somewhere you know that a murder or something else awful happened. That lingering aura of the reality of violent death. Certainly the suicidal/executionary imagery bolsters this impression, but as “Haswell” cymbal-washes out circa 2:50 and everything but the guttural vocals goes away for about 20 seconds before slamming back with a grueling thud, rising to a speaker-blowing (seriously, watch out) low-end static unto its gradual wash of funereal sounds, the confrontation is consuming.

“Sopite” doesn’t blink in staring into this overarching void, evolving its infected cinematic tension with non-beat rhythmic back-and-forth and elements appearing and disappearing as they go. Without the onslaught of the vocals, the penultimate piece of Rope Tower feels like a respite, but the keyboard lines in its second half and the rumble underscoring them are consistent in their horrific manifestations and more than just a setup for the eight-minute finale “Turpentine Falls,” which begins with its own flatline drone and far-back growling over the course of its first two minutes. You could call it minimal in everything but how it makes your skin crawl. It’s not until 3:47 that the beat and harsh screaming kick in, and from there, the next several minutes embark on a vicious build-up so that by the time they hit the six-minute mark, “Turpentine Falls” has grown to the LP’s most ferocious cacophony.

It’s anyone’s guess who’s meting out which aspects of the punishing entirety — most of the vocals seem to come from the Vorare side, so that’s something — but as “Turpentine Falls” shifts from its payoff to the fading residual drone that ends, it underscores the way Rope Tower works on multiple levels at once in a mix that’s deep enough to hold the monsters it does. United perhaps most of all in their readiness to push the limits of extremity in music through their way-gone-and-way-dark approaches, the alignment of Earthflesh and Vorare results in an aurally caustic and immersive nightmare. Words like ‘heavy’ don’t begin to cut it.

Rope Tower is out May 31. “Seepage” premieres below. It’s NSFW unless you never want anyone in your office or other place of employment to talk to you again. Which maybe you do, and fair enough.

Good luck:

Vorare & Earthflesh, “Seepage” video premiere

VORARE, the Finnish avant-garde drone-doom/death industrial duo comes together with the Swiss one-man drone/noise outfit EARTHFLESH to bring you the five-track, 30-minute collaboration album Rope Tower. The albums is the second of the two VORARE albums coming out in May, scheduled to be released on May 31. Pre-orders available here: https://vorare.bandcamp.com/album/rope-tower

Having crossed paths first elsewhere, the idea for the two projects to collaborate came into fruition after each noticed they’re on similar wavelengths when it comes to hallucinatory aesthetics in both aural and visual worlds. The work begun in late summer ’22 and took its own time to morph and refine over the ensuing year and a half, involving multiple recording sessions across countries, and meticulous attention to detail above all. The end result is a perfect amalgamation of the two entities, presenting familiar corners from both worlds yet discovering brand new nooks along the way.

Rope Tower is an immensely dark but pervasive journey throughout various sonic fields ranging from structured bursts of industrial and doom to seeping, slowly evolving droning ambiances, that melt together seamlessly as a single tapestry free of dashed lines and silent spaces. The narratives detail real life events from the personal to the more broad instances, more often than not brushed in monochromatic colours and vile mien. You can only match the abyss by becoming one.

Tracklisting:
1. Ovigerous (4:33)
2. Seepage (5:59)
3. Haswell (7:12)
4. Sopite (5:01)
5. Turpentine Falls (8:02)

Vorare on Facebook

Vorare on Instagram

Vorare on Bandcamp

Earthflesh on Facebook

Earthflesh on Instagram

Earthflesh on Bandcamp

Resoundingly bleak Finnish experimentalists Vorare will release their debut album, Voyeur, on Aug. 30 through Total Dissonance Worship. The eight-song/41-minute here’s-a-carcass-style offering follows behind the Tampere two-piece of EV and EH‘s first EP, The Drainage Rituals (review here), and its willfully dreadful, abrasive sprawl codifies much of what the prior release had to offer, the band creating a sound that is as extreme as any of the most aggro heavy metals, but fits neatly alongside none of them. Crashes and punch of industrial beats meet with piercing high-pitched noise, the is-it-on ambient minimalism in the pre-swell moments of the title-track, the biting insect wash that ensues, and anywhere you try to find safe ground on Voyeur, the floor collapses from underneath. Punishing. At times genuine aural horror. Brutal in its worldmaking.

The video for “Floodmines” asks an important question that applies to the rest of Voyeur around it, which is what do you do when even the light won’t save you? Imagine yourself out for a hike on a gorgeous and sunny day. You come into a clearing from a forest of gorgeous evergreens into some tall grasses, and just as you’re thinking you’re glad you splurged for the good boots, you find two beige-cloaked figures standing completely still, staring directly at you as the wind blows by. There’s going to be a moment of panic and surprise, even before you get to fight or flight, as your brain processes what you’re seeing and interprets the utter terror of the possibilities derived from it. Take that moment, stretch it out across the entire droning four minutes of drum-backed noise and deep, deep-placed creeper keyboard or guitar — I’m not even sure what that is, but it’s there for a while in the middle of the song before it all collapses into the last drones — and then stretch it further across the rest of the record. That’s not to say it all sounds the same — there’s any number of places to start when flaying your listener’s illusions of security in this world — but “Floodmines” represents the ethic that seems to unite the material despite the different angles EV and EH (who between them have a pedigree that includes Mireplaner, Fargue, Fawn Limbs, Positiivinen Ongelma and probably more just in the last few years) use to approach their task.

Their purposeful use of empty space throughout is a strength. Beginning with the immersive two-song salvo of “This Body Aweigh” and the already noted title-track — two of only three songs to top six minutes long; the other is closer “Barren,” which stands testament to intentional sequencing — and across the would-be-primitive-were-it-not-so-progressive dancing-in-water-with-weights-on beat pulsations and various howling musical animalia of “A Mountain Hewed of Light” and the intermittently chaotic “Tarnished Nature,” which, like the subsequent “Floodmines” feels improvised in some of its synth layers, Voyeur might periodically just blank out to silence or near-silence, and the effect can be as jarring as the high-frequency stabs that ensue all the while and seem to come even more forward on “Orifice Carver,” “They Are Here” and “Barren” on side B. It’s one of the ways in which Vorare create this unsettling space, where one never quite understands where they are or what might be coming, but the feeling of threat is the universal, whether it’s the industrial collapse of “They Are Here” or the volume trades of “Tarnished Nature” or the overwhelming feeling of burning in “This Body Aweigh” for about a minute in the first half of the song before that too caves in on itself and moves elsewhere, vocals trading between higher and lower screams and growls in the meantime. These all come together and feed the violence of the atmosphere. Clearly the dead were lucky in whatever apocalypse just took place.

But there’s life in here as well, represented not so much in the vocals that may or may not be included/needed in a given piece — singles are decent for building anticipation and spreading the word about a release, but Voyeur very much deserves to be listened to in its entirety, by those who can make it through front-to-back, anyhow — but in some of the harshest stretches of noise, as beneath the blowout vocal layers on “Voyeur,” where the synth line changes subtly to represent the foundation of craft here. That is, it’s impossible to listen to Voyeur especially after The Drainage Rituals (which was recorded after but released first) earlier this year and call it coincidence or a one-off. There is a plan at work, a style being cultivated as though from the earth and shaped into what Vorare want it to be, these discomfiting sculptures of manipulated sound. EH and EV have already begun to refine — such as the word applies — their take, and I’m not sure there’s anything anyone can do to halt that process. I’d tell you to be forewarned, but if you can dig into it, you won’t need the warning, and if you can’t, you’ve already stopped reading. So there.

Enjoy:

Vorare, “Floodmines” video premiere

“Floodmines” is the second single taken from our upcoming full-length “Voyeur”, out on August 30 in collaboration with Total Dissonance Worship. Preorder here: https://linktr.ee/vorare

CD/digital/merch:
https://vorare.bandcamp.com

Socials:
https://linktr.ee/vorare

VORARE is a fresh entity formed by two individuals destined to mold a spiritual and holistic aural and visual experience out of leanings falling to the spectrum of drone-doom, noise, industrial, and electronic music. The pair’s experimental tendencies first took shape in the form of Voyeur, that’s to be released on August 30 in collaboration with Total Dissonance Worship.

Voyeur was composed and recorded within the span of five days this January, at a snow-barred cabin in the woods, in the middle of nowhere. Due to logistics, VORARE postponed the release of the album, and compensated this delay with the release of The Drainage Rituals this May. While this later-conceived EP was deeply rooted in evolving ambiances and tonal control, Voyeur is a brutally primitive and exceedingly aggressive pathos to the point of surpassing caustic proportions.

VORARE’s leading motif is to enthrall the listener with delicate sound design and shroud them with brute force, keeping the listener’s emotions hostage while engulfing them fully with their abstract and abrasive noisescapes. Stylistically spanning from drone-doom to harsh noise and even industrial-tinged IDM, VORARE always leads with the experimentation and notion of avant-garde firmly on the forefront, from the initial instrumentation and compositions to the ultimate aesthetic.

1. This Body Aweigh
2. Voyeur
3. A Mountain Hewed of Light
4. Tarnished Nature
5. Floodmines
6. Orifice Carver
7. They Are Here
8. Barren

VORARE:
EH – EVERYTHING
EV – EVERYTHING

Vorare on Facebook

Vorare on Instagram

Vorare on Bandcamp

Today marks the release date of Vorare‘s debut EP, The Drainage Rituals, and I assure you, however dark it is out when you’re reading these words, by the time you’re done listening, you’ll wish it was darker. The four-songer composed and executed by the Finnish-based entities known solely as EH and EV isn’t so much an EP in the traditional sense as it is a consuming excursion into experimentalist aural horror. Individual moments in “Neon Womb” or “Pyramidal Impasse” might hit with a vast spacious crawl that reminds of Khanate or might touch on industrialized tribalist beats, echoing out over subtly building currents of synth, not nearly as brutal as the vocal growls to come or the crash that accompanies, but seething, tense, cinematic, just the same.

The title of the release, The Drainage Rituals, may be a reference to self-harming if taken in the context of the cover, but divorced from that, the word ‘drainage’ alone brings to mind some kind of pus-filled infection being split open to spew its contagious nastiness, and yeah, that feels about right for the bombastic harshness of the semi-title-track “Drainage” and the upwardly swelling noise-static rumble of the finale “There is Nothing for Me Here.”

On a sheer listening level, Vorare are well and truly fucked. The Drainage Rituals unfolds its plumage in “Neon Womb” like some kind of emergent Guillermo Del Toro hellbird spreading knife-feathered wings, and the extremity of atmosphere is pervasive to a point of being willfully overwhelming. At 25 minutes, it is a difficult listen, and considering it is the first exploration by EH and EV, its torrential resentments seem to cascade with a depth of purpose beyond simply making the unsuspecting listener shit their pants.

In its most intense stretches — amid the echoing you’re-running-from-something-that’s-going-to-get-you thuds of “Pyramidal Impasse,” for example, or in the nigh-unlistenable culmination of “There is Nothing for Me Here” before the final sample affirms the title — The Drainage Rituals is likewise bitter and forceful, borderline invasive, but it never loses its ambience or its extremity no matter where the volume of an actual piece is at the time. To wit, as “Drainage” moves from its wash in the center into its drone-gurgling second half, the vision of being devoured is no less palpable. Some shit just sounds haunted. Some shit just sounds terrifying. That’s where we’re at.

As noted above, The Drainage Rituals is out today, so I’m not trying to get away with calling this a premiere or anything like that, but I’m happy to host a stream for any work that so boldly declares and manifests its intentions, however perverse those may be in this case.

Behold:

Vorare, The Drainage Rituals (2022)

VORARE is a new entity formed by two individuals destined to mold a spiritual and holistic aural and visual experience out of leanings falling to the spectrum of drone-doom, noise, industrial, and electronic music. The pair’s experimental tendencies first took shape in the form of an album recorded early 2022 that’s to be released on this summer. The Drainage Rituals acts as a later conceived catalyst and a thematic gateway to the act’s infernal and unsettling, noise-laden world, being released on the 20th May on digital and CD formats.

The Drainage Rituals, despite being rooted in the same framework as the upcoming album, differs from it by emphasizing vastly different aspects on the duo’s output. Being an aerial effort focusing on ambiance and atmosphere, spanning four tracks and over 25 minutes in length, The Drainage Rituals showcases VORARE’s boundary-pushing aesthetics in an overwhelming manner. The captivating and enthralling songs demonstrate the notion of man’s innermost void taking a palpable form. Delicate sound-design and brute force collide on the release in a way where it holds its listener’s emotions hostage, offering a wide array of facets to cling onto and lights the way to a plethora of secluded nooks in both musical as well as psychic contexts.

MIXING & MASTERING: SAMUEL VANEY | LEAD & SULFUR STUDIO

VORARE:
EH – EVERYTHING
EV – EVERYTHING

Vorare on Facebook

Vorare on Instagram

Vorare on Bandcamp