Church Burner ‎– 金閣

Church Burner is another project Lee Stokoe is involved in, here with Victor Janos, but I'm not sure if he's present on this recording. The concept of this release is a Buddhist temple in Japan called The Temple Of the Golden Pavillion (is there a connection with Yukio Mishima's novel?) and the music is blackened drone, not unlike Sunn O)))'s Black One, complete with black metal rasps and noise hiss, but there's also a narrative quality in the riff progressions. 2018 cdr on White Noise Words.

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Equimanthorn - Lectionum Antiquarum

Extremely busy these days with my PhD, baby and work so I'm just going to make a rudimentary post without trying to describe music I've only recently heard, but something you will have probably listened to already. Equimanthorn is a side project of ex-members of Absu (usually boring US pagan black metal) playing ritual black ambient. Their first album (Nindinuga whatever) had a Sumerian approach and was mainly boring and I've also heard the 2004 Second Sephira Cella which was absolute shit. But this demo compilation rocks. I first heard it when I was 16 or something, just discovering noise/ambient/drone and kind of getting over aspirations to make Satanic rituals myself and fortunately becoming a rational atheist; I got this cd from a stupid far-right black metal magazine that offered it for free. At that time I was studying too hard for school and for eventual access to university plus I had a very demanding girlfriend, which means I was usually exhausted and sleepy. So listening to these dark, ominous, subdued sounds was kinda calming. But oh dear, one afternoon I was sleeping to it, and I had a sleeping paralysis combined with Lovecraftian nightmares while track 3 ("Black Mountain of the North" - great percussive loop and threatening reemerging sounds for 15 minutes) was playing and it scared the shit out of me. On the whole it's fun; there's some stupid very "live ritual" moments (track 4 in particular), but the first two tracks have a cool guitar-bass drone approach, and tracks 6-10 are from a unified session with more elaborate ritual ambient orchestration that is totally Abdul Alhazred-worthy. "The 131st Spell of Ninazu", with its pulsating loop and Azathothian flutes still makes my hair stand up. 1999 cd on Unisound Records.

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Church Burner - Satan's Ritual - Under A Full Moon cdr

Yet another project boasting Lee Stokoe is Church Burner, also including another noise musician Victor Janos who records solo and as The Dead End Street Band. Not too much unlike Culver, this is black-hole drone that sounds like an outtake from Sunn O)))'s Black One, so you understand you're in for suffocating harsh terror drone here. 2015 cdr on Shadow Of Venom.

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Spill That Blood For Satan: Dapnom ‎– Regwoisvokwos Gwhenmi Welminti tape

As a complete antipode to yesterday's Christian soul upload, let's get into some satanic ritual black/dark ambient by this French guy using that invented language employed by all those weirdo black metal bands from France in the mid-90s like Moevot. A descent to the depths of inferno. 2005 tape on Necrocosm coming with an inlay claimed to have been drenched in human blood, that smells awful.

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