Roman Numeral / Machine Tribe Recordings – 24th January 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
Having premiered ‘Opilione’ just over a week ago as a taster for this blackest of black sonic expulsions, I’ve now had some time to digest the album in its entirety. And it’s an acrid, acidic tang of bile which burns the throat and scorches the trachea, and a bilious discomfort which emanates from every noxious moment of this absolutely hellish effort.
The Finnish duo’s Bandcamp simply describes them as ‘BLACK VOID NOISE’, and it’s hard to better that, really. Black Abyss Invocation, which essentially launches Vomitriste phase two, having drawn the curtain on phase one with the Droneworks (2022-2024) compilation.
Black Abyss Invocation is relentlessly dark. In fact, it goes beyond being merely ‘dark’: darkness connotes an absence of light. Here, Vomitriste create a negative balance, subtracting, subtracting, endlessly subtracting, sucking out both light and air, like a black hole which drags the listener into a vortex of perpetual purgatory, while hanging over the smouldering pits of hell.
‘Opilione’ is entirely representative: each of the album’s six compositions last between five and eight minutes, providing ample time for the agonizing atmospherics to wrack every one of the senses in the most torturous fashion, and seeming to manifest in physical ways as you find your skin crawling and your muscles tense.
The album opens with ‘Void Sermon’ – a rumbling blanket of sound that’s between dark ambience and harsh noise wall at first, before vocals – rasping, demonic screams, shit-your-pants inhuman – roar in before the very bowels of hell open wide and drag you down, down, down. Void Sermon? Void bowels would be equally apt.
From here, it’s less about progression, as slow subtraction. Listening to Black Abyss Invocation, I find myself reflecting on various methods of punishment and torture from throughout the ages – rat torture, for instance, or coffin torture, or the breaking wheel. The slow, agonising tortures which almost invariably resulted in a protracted and extremely painful death. Or perhaps, one I discovered on a visit to York dungeons, the ‘blood eagle’, referenced in Norse literature. Certainly, by the arrival of ‘Fleshwards’, on feels as if one’s ribs are being severed from the spine with a sharp tool, and the lungs pulled through the opening to create a pair of “wings” – because this is brutal, cacophonous noise and howls of anguish echo from subterranean caverns without mercy. To survive to the end of the album is to still be awake and alive in the hell that is life on earth in 2025.
Black Abyss Invocation is truly the stuff of nightmares: there is no escape from the abyss, and there is none more black.
AA