Svart Finland レコード& CD

Review: Nature documentary series The Living Planet very much captured the imagination of Raoul Bjorkenheim back in 1986. It featured erupting volcanoes and plumes of molten lava and some of that drama and energy is captured in this fine jazz album which now gets a new extended reissue. Bjorkenheim studied at the Helsinki Conservatory for a year and the Berklee College of Music in Boston for three years and worked with composer and drummer Edward 'Eetu' Vesala. For this album, he played with reed virtuosos Jorma Tapio and Tapani Rinne, bassist Sampo Lassila and drummers Michel Lambert and Heikki 'Lefty' Lehto. It is a hot and raw record that contains an album's worth of previously unheard material.

Review: Dutch gothic doom metal turned shoegazing prog collective The Gathering are one of those artists of two consequential halves. Superheat; their live album released at the dawn of the new millennium and recorded primarily in the classic Amsterdam Paradiso, sonically deposits the group half a year before the release of their seminal sixth full-length If Then Else, by which time they had made the full transition to alternative auteurs. Here the material is a complimentary myriad of cuts from their acclaimed opus How to Measure A Planet?, interspliced with material from their darker, heftier albums such as Mandylion and Nighttime Birds.

Review: Finnish occult folk band Hexvessel once again do well to evoke the richly atmospheric, sublime hinterscapes that are often heard emanating from the Fennoscandian Peninsula. As ever with this lot, doomy, hard-stereo-panned omen-dirges for guitar abound, as encroaching tides of apocalyptic black metallic rock march ever-onward, laying waste to an admittedly already-wasted landscape, one which is nonetheless sparsely populated. The abyssally cavernous vocal treatment of Mat Kvohst McNerney is enough to send chills down the spine, evoking wellsprung feelings of tragedy and catharsis.

Review: .

Review: With its title paying homage to the seminal 1969 King Crimson album In the Court of the Crimson King, the debut full-length from Finnish doom metal maestros Reverend Bizarre has become a quintessential cornerstone of the movement in the two decades since its initial release. Clocking in at a mammoth 74 minutes with epic cuts such as 'Sodoma Sunrise' running over 13 minutes as well as the gargantuan 21 minute closer 'Cirith Ungol', this is Black Sabbath worship interspliced with moments of macabre grandiosity which have become staples of 21st century psychedelic doom revival. While the group would disband after only three LPs before working on a myriad of later projects together, In The Rectory Of The Bizarre Reverend still serves as not only an iconic debut, but a perfect entry point into the doomsphere.

Review: Modern Finnish doom metal legends Reverend Bizarre only released three full-lengths during their tenure which ran for just over a decade from 1995-2007, and how they were full to the brim, often nearly exceeding the runtime of a CD. Following on from 2002's epic debut In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend (yes, that is a King Crimson reference), 2005's II: Crush The Insects boasted a more upbeat approach to their fuzzed-out, psych-tinged doomgazing machinations, with original copies of the album even bearing a sticker that referred to the trio as "The Biggest Sell-Out in True Doom". Known for having its 21 minute lead single 'Slave of Satan' cut down to 13 minutes in order to fit on the LP, this marks one of the rare instances where a band's single version exceeds the length of their album version. Coming courtesy of leading metal label Svart, this translucent red 2xLP reissue offers doomers, new and old, the chance to plumb the depths of one of the most quintessential doom acts to ever rear their sludgy head.

Review: Mikko Mattlar, a walking encyclopaedia of Finnish electronic music, has been responsible for some killer compilations over the years, but 'Black Hole', his latest collection, may be the best yet. It focuses on exceedingly obscure 'culth synth disco music' produced in his home country between 1979 and '91 - mostly in the early-to-mid-80s - with every track either being an unreleased oddity of a genuinely uber-rare private press record. It's both eye-opening and extremely entertaining, with the included tracks doffing a cap to heavy disco-funk, underground gospel disco, bedroom-made late '80s synth-disco and quirky Scandinavian electrofunk.

Review: No Future No Past offers the most detailed deep dive yet into the lesser known realms of early Finnish speed and thrash metal. Ranging from 1986-1992, at a time when US acts like Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer were becoming controversial household names, the wave had insidiously swept across Europe and inspired an entirely new generation of long-haired metalheads to enter the fray. Compiled from a myriad of long-lost demo tapes and rare 7" singles from numerous proto-pioneers who never made it past the demo stage, the collection boasts choice cuts from the likes of Damage, Vendetta, Catalepsy and even Sacred Crucifix, who would break up and reform almost three times before their debut album eventually landed in 2004.