Tenho a certeza que o Zyklon tinha criado um tópico na secção de Críticas e Comentários sobre o último output dos (V.E.G.A.), sob a forma do escabroso Alienforest - A Sick Mind's Hologram (que possuo em tape e CD). Anyway, deste modo decidi criar então um tópico novo dado que o único existente agora sobre a banda está na secção Foreign Affairs.
(V.E.G.A.) é um trio italiano que pratica um black metal verdadeiramente insano, com momentos de pura alucinação a tender para o disco dos anos 70/80 e mais umas ligeiras reminiscências de Europop, ou lá como se chamava aquela treta. Apesar de o resultado poder aparentar tornar-se numa mixórdia desmedida, a verdade é que os (V.E.G.A.) acabam por conseguir equilibrar bastante bem as várias sonoridades presentes e construir um registo muitíssimo coerente ainda que por vezes atinja níveis de intensidade absurdos.
Só conheço mesmo o Alienforest - A Sick Mind's Hologram, mas consta que o lançamento anterior de nome "Cocaine" está ao nível, senão melhor mesmo que este sucessor. Acontece que neste mês de Março vamos ter então a continuação de A - ASMH cujo nome será Far From You. Num primeiro vislumbre às samples do MySpace poder-se-á antever uma sonoridade mais polida e se calhar mais focada, com alguns cheirinhos a avant garde/post-black (?), provavelmente uma viragem de sonoridade bem ao estilo dos Ossein, mas aconselho-vos a ouvir pelos vossos próprios ouvidos de modo a tecer considerações mais correctas. De qualquer maneira espera-se uma nova bomba, por isso estejam atentos.
Vejam o depoimento revelador no MySpace:
In 2009 the band finally gives birth to their own digital distributed net label "VEGA-KORPORATION" which has been created with the sole purpose of putting on the market all the hours of music (V.E.G.A.) managed to compose in the last 10 years and in the future as well, without having to deal with finding a proper label which fits the always harder to define genre of this unearthly project. The first official release by VEGA-KORPORATION will be the third album of (V.E.G.A.) named "Far From You" to be released worldwide on iTunes and Amazon MP3. It will be probably ready for download in March 2009. The tracks are available on this page in their entirety, 5 tracks for about one hour of music diving into avant-garde sick music. With this album the band intentionally left beind their blackmetal influences to focus on a more unpredictable experimental research in the deep mind's abyss to bring the listeners basically to lose themselves into a world of unknown obscurity. This is a tragic and beautiful experience for the fans of the "vacuum era gelid atmosphere". An attempt to compose another metal related album was done in 2008. The album named "Klinik" is kind of a ghost, never died, never born, we just have a couple of new tracks, one of them is on this page as a preview. Since our loss of interest for the blackmetal genre and most of all lack of time Klinik is far from its release. Only time will tell if we'll be back with this other piece of sickness. We all live in different countries, moving almost every year somewhere else, almost never in the same country together, so composing takes not months but years.
MySpace:
http://www.myspace.com/vacuumera
Há pouco tempo fui escrevendo uma review acerca do A - ASMH em papel que ontem tive a oportunidade de passar para papel, quem estiver interessado que leia:
As I start this text, one question rises immediately, above all: Have you ever been on drugs? I mean, serious drugs, like cocaine or heroine, those kinds of substances that actually grab people and turn them into morbid addicts that can only think about getting more Money for the next dose, whenever they aren’t high, making their conscience evolve into an amorphous dead mass with a single objective and turning people into dangerous, fearless and cold automatons, as their sanity rapidly decay. The person’s psyche grows weaker and thinner, revealing its frailties and most inner thoughts. Even a person who has never been on these types of drugs, after listening carefully Cocaine’s successor, called Alienforest – A Sick Mind’s Hologram (A-ASMH), will feel in its body and soul the trials that one must suffer along the tortuous path of drug consumption. After experiencing what (V.E.G.A.) has to show us in this debut, one should obviously feel like it has lived that past hour in the body and mind of a junkie, on fast-forward motion, through all its key moments of its miserable life, thanks to an evocative soundtrack, capable of making people question what its wrong or right and what are the limits of the human psyche.
Please, before embracing yourselves into the world of (V.E.G.A.), make sure that you are ready to take this step, for this record is not for faint-hearted and easily impressed people. Therefore, I must advise you to think twice before entering this dark and menacing realm, that has insanity and reality in equal shares. Continuous listening sessions may induce paranoia, hysteria, hallucinations and full amnesia. Now seriously, this album is one of the most disturbing I’ve ever heard and I’ve heard a lot of creepy and distorted stuff.
To give you a glimpse of what to expect, I’ll start with a brief description of the first tracks:
A-ASMH presents itself with a fairly disturbing synth intro accompanied by haunting alien moans but building a strong suspense that is rare to witness these days both musically and cinematographically, much thanks to the increasingly foreboding keys that set the stage remarkably, inducing a feeling of discovery about to happen, turning “Wilkommen” into a particularly well named track. Even though “Cocaine” (the second track, not the previous work) represents the first explosion of pleasure delivered by the substance, it doesn’t continue that way for too long, speeding up more and more before finally giving place to “Kill Me”, which I like to view as the first hangover image portrayed by a song in here. The insane screaming at the start, matched up by the raging and highly distorted guitars, followed closely by fierce drum work, blasts mercilessly taking you by surprise giving you a sense of total screw up: You have just done something very wrong, you’re coughing, puking and your head aches severely. From now on (V.E.G.A.) will take you on a journey that is sure that you won’t easily forget, a sonic landscape viewed from the eyes of a drug addict. It will reach and explore many distinct emotional states, touching almost every thought and emotion felt by the poor individual, the vehicle of your trip. A-ASMH is quite spontaneous and impossible to expect, since it can be frightening in a moment, dead calm in the next, just to become savagely crazy in another second. This is indeed one of its greatest qualities and attractions and while possessing a vast array of different sections and styles, (V.E.G.A.) actually manage to pull it off nicely, effectively creating multiple tensions and uneasy moments (with its fair share of resting in between), but remarkably creating a rather cohesive tale, susceptible of various interpretations, but which I found to make a lot of sense when interpreted as a testimony from a sick guy’s mind.
It is incredible how this Italian trio from Turin has the capacity of becoming magnificent storytellers in selective turf, as black metal is. Besides the first drug consumption scene and the first hangover, you will be able to visualize the whole picture easily that consists in an awkwardly vicious and dramatic change of the feelings felt on those two states of pleasure and pain. Basically, you will notice how the ferocity of the hangovers will jump into sessions of drug consumption and how the apparent calm and peace from the former drug effects will carve even bigger chasms on the subjects personality while he isn’t under the effects of substances. This tragic emotion exchange between these two conditions is quite compelling to assimilate and may be initially reckoned on track 4, “Neongraphite”, due to its explosive mixture of disco sound, guitar distortion and damaged screams. From that moment, roles get inverted and whereas the emotions got swapped, next cacophony sessions will belong to the state of “highness”, becoming even more callous black metal dissertations. These dissertations showcase the undeniable talent of the band when it comes to craft a grimy primitivism present on the individual’s conscience and evidenced on the actions taken in order to have another dose. I firmly believe that in here lies another great aspect of this album, an idea that allows the listener to reflect a little about the ridiculous human condition and all its weaknesses. In here, the anti-Aristotelic philosophy present on the usual human brain is dissected and strongly questioned about its aim. The Aristotelic Philosophy proclaims that cautious moderation is the greatest virtue and to achieve that virtue, reason should always prevail against passions (passions corrupt the reason, nothing new here). Telling this story of drug excesses that leads to very unpleasant results and ultimately leads to the end of the individual as a sane person, (V.E.G.A.) manage to exhibit the stupidity inherent to the human psyche, without falling into too much detail and without discussing it extensively, so they are just simply pointing it out, something that curiously I’ve found to be rather paradoxal, given the excessive intensity present on the tracks.
More than thinking and before thinking, this record makes the listener do something else: feel. Indeed, these aren’t emotions that you would wish to feel on a regular basis, but on the other hand, this is what makes this record so special, the capacity of putting you in the middle of a filthy netherworld that you never wanted to witness neither to live. To experience such decaying vision is what makes not only a good record, but also a good movie for example. That adrenaline mixed with fear and astonishment you get when you watch a great film for the first time is exactly the same as when you listen to A-ASMH.
Now that I’ve talked a bit about the concepts behind this second album, I believe I should reveal some pieces of the music itself, instrumentally speaking. By now, you already know that this album comprised of black metal tracks, some dance stuff resembling 70’s/80’s disco and Europop stuff with some more bizarre electronic infusions. The album’s structure is quite simple as the BM/Disco/BM/Instrumental sequence will attest but this repetitive succession is both important and necessary to establish that line of thought that allows the previously mentioned concepts to make sense due to the ever-increasing intensity of the tracks.
The instrumental and disco parts oscillate between the “spooky” and the “unnerving”, due to the stellar use of synthesizers both in a traditional variant and in the form of piano bits. Honestly, these are moments where the bass is really important, audible and its job is put into better use of. Other than that, there aren’t a lot of moments where you can clearly discern the bass from the rest of the pandemonium, which is a bit unfortunate. Nevertheless, the vocal department deserves praises due to its versatility, better exemplified by the howling rasps, tired spoken passages and indecipherable screeches. Yes, you will different vocal styles in A-ASMH, for this ain’t no ordinary black metal album, with the same vocal patterns and guitar riffs played over and over again. However, the guitars have almost no use at all on these moments and the drum work is easy at best, becoming almost irrelevant, so these aren’t particularly good choices to analyze their importance in the overall sound. It is on the baleful black metal parts that these two instruments demonstrate their full power, while the guitars play frostbitten riffs and the drums gobble ferocious blast beats. The glacial riffs from the guitars aren’t all that original and innovative, but even though they’re bathed in a pool of reverb, they still sound rather incisive and unrestrained, much like a maniac on the loose. They also don’t repeat themselves exaggeratedly since the songs carry a very interesting non-linear structure, evolving freely into undetermined territory. If they are so simple, they obviously far from anything technical so there is no-nonsense fretboard abuse and the horribly lumpy production only helps them to become even more powerful, therefore making the band sound refreshingly unpretentious. And as if that wasn’t enough, the drumming is highly adequate, with continuous dirty and evil blast beats, plus the occasional clashing rolls that will make the listener rejoice and rapidly convince him to accompany the sound with some air drumming.
While I still haven’t gathered the time to listen and focus on (V.E.G.A.)’s previous output, I had plenty of time to completely suck this album, something that could be very hard to do when you have only heard it a couple of times. There are those albums that you listen and from the moment it starts, you exactly what you into, pleasant or not. Then there are those that just grab you by the balls, with such strength that makes it pretty hard to come back to reality and concentrate on life again. A-ASMH hits you with a punch strong enough to make you puke all your entire dinner in a row, leaving you completely baffled and breathless and there aren’t a lot of albums out there that have the same effect on people. With a curious and somewhat sick breed of black metal fused with psychedelic dark ambient, (V.E.G.A.) created an unclassifiable monster of biblical proportions that is sure to leave your perceptions forever changed. I’m once again surprised for having found another Italian gem (my last one was Janvs’ latest effort, curiously called Vega) that once again changes my Top 10 of 2008. This ain’t no nice record, this isn’t beautiful nor innocent, on A-ASMH you will only find decay, death, ugliness and whether you’re looking for a complex and original black metal album, a tortuous journey across a twisted mind or simply up for a mental challenge, this is the right choice for you. Simply put, this is a modern classic and an essential buy for the collection of any BM fan.
wow 
