Country: France
Genre: Funeral doom, dark ambient
Full length: Antiphona
Format: Digital, CD
Label: Bitume Prods
Release date: April 11, 2025
Disjecta Membrae, the latest project of the French musician Asmael Lebouc, and French multi-instrumentalist/composer, Guillaume Tiger, collaborate on an album that may turn out to be a landmark in extreme metal, another creative step forward. Some might think they made the most egregious blasphemy ever, going by the bio Bandcamp provides for "Antiphona" at. The album is described as "the chiral image of the crucifixion shattering and collapsing onto itself, dragging mankind into a black pit of despair."
Rather than taking offense and just writing it off as heresy, I see the imagination behind this recording as similar to that behind avant-garde horror like "Begotten" and "At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul," from E. Elias Merhige and José Mojica Marins, filmmakers unafraid to try new, novel ways of interpreting religion and humanity. Their work is not quite like anythitng else.
The same can be said about these two musicians who participate in forming the most bizarre, unhinged, disturbing soundscapes to come from crossing over funeral doom, dark ambient music and black metal. It’s possible to compare the arrangement and performance to the dismantling of customary religious dogma. Though this duo isn't exactly Abruptum, the songs they compose for "Antiphona" are structured cacophony, tiered with increasing degrees of ferocity.
Occultic on a cinematic level from the layers of drone, noise and ambiance, it expresses pure grief and distress on a mental and aesthetical level. While Abruptum’s concept is clear and purposeful, you have to give "Antiphona" some thought. It seems it challenges you to reconsider your conceptions of life and the universe, light and darkness, and does so in an exceedingly abrupt way.
If you pay close attention to the musicianship, right down to the creative force fueling it, you can feel it erode your perception of the concrete and physical, shattering your perspective of reality, replacing substance with nothingness. The only tangible sensations are agony and loss at the location of the crucifixion; there are no gods to provide relief or prophecies to fulfill, only eternal pitch-dark.
Through meticulously crafted and ritualized music, "Antiphona" transports you to an unfathomable abyss that defies the conventions of extreme music and even assumes substantive qualities. -Dave Wolff
Track list:
1. Disjecta Membrae - Guttae Sanguinis Decurrentis In Terram
2. Guillaume Tiger – Deiclast
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