Pyramids with Nadja – “Into the Silent Waves” (remixes by Lustmord + Ulver) 12″ – Hydra Head Records [Daily MP3 #123/Lucky 7-inch #44]

Pyramids with Nadja – “Another War” MP3/download

See, this sucker got #139/300, whereas I, out in Denver, got #44/300. "SEE THAT?" HUH? "DO YOU SEE THAT?" HUH? Well hey, I didn't COME here to make friends ...

I picked this 12-inch up the other day because it was limited (I got #44 out of 300) and, mainly, because Pyramids were involved. I haven’t even heard anything Pyramids have done since their self-titled full length (which I reviewed HERE and love-loved) but man, I was eating that stuff up like carnival turkey-leg when it was fresh, their dream-y brand of black metal something I’d envisioned as an inevitability but hadn’t yet plugged into my skull.

In fact, the review I wrote of Pyramids was constructed around a lucid dream I’d had years before; I couldn’t figure out any other way to express how desert-trippy their twisted haze-metal is when you let it fill a room/skull/crawlspace.

I’m less of a Nadja fanatic than many — eBayers seem to make a fortune on every Nad-jah record I see — but don’t think I can afford to let them drift too far from my sight. I have the Atavist/Nadja split, for instance. HAH!

The “Another War” 12-inch proffers two sidelong seances, during which “Another War” is channeled and then rendered even more ghostly than before, hovering in the air like a translucent snake and spiraling like smoke rings, care of Lustmord and Ulver.

Let’s start with Ulver — his contribution is the closest thing I’ve heard to that music playing in the background when the kid from Never Ending Story meets the princess at the end — but skewed horribly — and it’s one of the best things I’ve heard this year. This stuff ‘ll have you howling at the moon with a dilated stare if you’re not careful, the drone hypnotizing enough to snap your neck around in a traffic jam.

There’s this strange little flutter of smoke hovering over it all, causing your ears to distort what you’re actually hearing much like how your vision bends and twists when you gaze over a desert horizon. Need … water …

I realize this is simply a re-warping of an original that was probably fairly zapped to begin with, but Ulver … Ulver, Ulver. That’s a name I’ll have to remember; sweet zone-drone, brohaigen.

Lustmord is a name that pops up everywhere once you hear it once — I do believe they did an album with The Melvins, no? — much like, say, that lass from Juno. Right? Anyway, Lustmord lust after the kinds of sounds you never used to hear outside of small pockets of dedicated — god bless ‘em — fanatics, but here I’m gleaning more of a soft, velvet-cushioned ride with bass like fondu nights and effects like those night where you just wanna say, “fondon’t.”

Holy GOD what am I doing here? Sometimes I really have to play games with myself to keep up the motivation to write this blog. “Hey, Grant,” my intellect will say, “What … ummmm, what’s the POINT of this-here venture?”

And I can’t really etch out the details for him; what can I say, it just makes sense to me right now.

Back to Lustmord: This is a damp, head-dousing way to enter the afterlife. Why do I mention the afterlife? Because I’m almost positive Lustmord’s interpretation of “Another War” is what you’d hear if the powers-that-be decided to dump you onto hell’s gates.

There’s be a super-huge demon playing that leopard-lipped bass line, another, slightly smaller, demon tapping out the hammer-hits and a black knight-wizard conjuring forth a tornado and zip-zip-ZAPPing you with it just for his own teeth-grinding amusement.

There are voices to be heard, but they’re of course obscured by effects I can’t rightly describe to you in a technical sense — aka what he’s employing to warp the voices so — in a less-technical sense, you might say that, if you heard voices like this one the street while walking in the park one night, it would make sense to cock your shotgun back and blow some heads off, as there are obviously some satanists on a gun-prowl in shai-town. hee hee

I used to collect GI Joe’s like I was collecting souls. I owned these men, and they did my bidding. Lustmord’s tools are a little more complicated than GI Joe’s, but his wares definitely do his bidding, and more so, the bidding of several piercing, undead spirits as well.

As flattered as my ears were when Ulver’s side rocked my turntable, Lustmord has subtly done just as much to spread “Another War” ‘s ashes around as the original did, emblazoning a darkness onto the track with a vague sense of evil-didgeridoo madness and a pounding drum that screams every time you club it with a stick.

NEED I SAY MORE, people? This is a good one, and 300 copies-young, it is. Might be time to birth one of these bad boys …