Melancholy Death

The Sablé festival, held annually in Sablé-sur-Sarthe in France, has its own recording concern that it uses primarily to expose young early music artists and to support the most interesting of their projects; the Zig-Zag Territoires label provides an outlet for this endeavor. Here is a wholly worthy enterprise: the group Gli Incogniti – led by the fabulous young violinist Amandine Beyer – in a program drawn from various works of mysterious late seventeenth-century violinist Nicola Matteis, its title, False Consonances of Melancholy, fashioned after one of his publications, but not limited to its contents. As Matteis is not a household name, some summary of his place in the scheme of things is not out of order here: born in Naples, possibly contemporary to Heinrich von Biber, Matteis was an itinerant musician in Germany before making his way to London about 1670.

A retrospective album in both theme and style, Robin Armstrong’s 6th album harks back to the sound and feel of the classic prog era fused with the raw energy and darkness of a rock behemoth. The 6 track album is measured at a single LP length and instrumentally delivers the vintage sound of guitar, bass and drums with a sprinkling of classic keyboards.

In the depths of winter in 2017, Liz Harris—better known as the ambient folk musician Grouper—traveled to Murmansk, a post-industrial city in the Russian Arctic, for an artistic residency. After its own death is based on recordings created there and in another stint in the Azores, Portugal, and it’s the Arctic atmospheres that prevail. In these slow, lonely tracks—12, 16, even 21 minutes long—Harris’ multitracked vocal harmonies dissipate like foggy breath over drones so minimalist they evoke whiteout conditions. Gone are the acoustic guitar and piano of Grouper albums like Ruins; instead, overdriven synths buzz like flickering fluorescent bulbs at an abandoned border crossing. “After its own death: Side A” presents the core themes that will recur again and again—ethereal bell tones, growling bass, sounds of nature, and echoing footsteps—and the remainder of the album proceeds like a succession of half-forgotten memories, elements jumbling together and peeling away until all that’s left is a fuzzy outline of the deepest melancholy imaginable.

On October 4th 2019, Insomnium are going to release their new album “Heart Like a Grave”. ” The concept of the album is to delve deep into the heart of the Finnish melancholy. We’ve been inspired by some of the bleakest and saddest songs, poems and tales that truly capture the essence of northern gloom. Land where the frost ravages the harvest and creeps inside the souls, summer ends before it even starts, wife leaves, little brother dies in snow on a Christmas morning, and the golden days of youth are forever gone. So there are echoes of Harmaja, Rautavaara, Vainio, Peltoniemen Hintriikka and of course our own petty, miserable lives.” Consisting of ten songs and over an hour of music "Heart Like a Grave" evolved to be an epic tour de force of Finnish melancholy. With four composers in the band the sound of Insomnium is now richer and more versatile than ever before. In the name of Nordic collaboration the Swedish wizard Jens Bogren has been doing the mixing and mastering and made "Heart Like a Grave" the best sounding Insomnium album ever.